Encouraging Restaurants to become Green
At SpaceShare, we believe environmental projects should support each other, and we're looking for ways that green events have leverage to greatly help other environmental projects. SpaceShare is not playing a lead role in making restaurants green. Instead, we - and hopefully others involved with greening events - are playing a supporting role for groups like Thimmakka.
Broad Goals of this project:
- Encourage more restaurants to work with Thimmakka and others to green their restaurant.
- Encourage people to take their money to those green restaurants.
- Broad: encourage people to start speaking up for green causes as consumers, rather than waiting for the businesses to provide.
Strategies:
- Get major restaurant search engines to put a little symbol indicating that a restaurant is green near the symbols for price and so on, and make green restaurants searchable.
- Call restaurants on behalf of large events, as a representative of hundreds or thousands of customers, asking them if they are green certified. (Do not just look at a list to find the green restaurants, the point is to call and ask. The goal is to have the person on the phone say "I don't know" and have to ask around -- as a customer, we event-greeners have an opportunity to really grab the attention of the restaurant and get them to pay attention.) If the primary restaurant-greening folks are interested, pass our data on to them, so they can follow up two weeks after our ice-breaking call. Anyone involved in greening events (SpaceShare, Green Alliance, etc) could make these calls.
- Encourage event attendees to support green restaurants.
Tactics:
- Initial efforts to search engines have been made. Another round of this, more formal, should be made later if someone has time and once we have more events in line.
- We need a list of restaurants that are green for City Search.
- Get good press to any search engine that does this.
- We need a volunteer to call many restaurants near events, as SpaceShare or other event greeners have the chance to encourage folks to go to green restaurants near those events. This is beyond SpaceShare's capacity, unless someone like Thimmakka gives us a very, very short list of priorities.
Needs:
- Find more events that can be used as the source of customers.
- Find a lead for this project.
- Find someone to call restaurants. I think 20 hours total as a volunteer could have a major impact on the primary activist's recruitment efforts.
|
