Monday, January 5, 2009

How to lose an account with green initiatives


Want to lose an account quick? Suggest to your client that they can make a significant environmental impact by combining all of their edits into a single round before sending them to you and limiting the number of overall revisions they make.

After they're done screaming at you through your funky triangular conference phone about being "non-responsive" and "inflexible," give them some numbers on exactly how much paper they could save, both on their end and yours. Honestly, if you could genuinely push the above policies though, you could probably cut paper usage by 70-80%. After all, most printing I see is a result of small changes that usually come in a few at a time- a comma here, a sentence reworded there.

I'm not even saying this is your client contact's fault- he or she is probably dealing with many bosses even busier than they and are lucky to get anything looked at before deadline. But, if there were a way to streamline the whole process, we could all save quite a few trees.

With newspapers in their current state, I guess we'll all be able to save quite a few more trees in the near future anyway, albeit perhaps not by choice. I'm just waiting for the day when most everything has gone paperless and we start considering the natural resources we're using to build and power all the servers that hold all of our paperless information. Maybe rich text editing and flash will be the next newspaper and plain text will be the new green.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Some trees, not all of them, deserve to be cut down. ;-)

Spork in the Road said...

Yeah, mesquite trees can go. They're a pain when they're standing and delicious to grill and smoke with.