by kevin, on November 10th, 2009
Now in it’s third year, Opportunity Green is a two day inspirational conference focused on green business held in Los Angeles. This past weekend was the second year I’ve attended. Last year was a bit of a lark. Several friends had recommended it and I had met founders Karen Solomon and Mike Flynn at a lecture I had done earlier that year. But indecision by the company I was with at the time had me registering at the last minute. But I was blown away and left the event incredibly inspired. And this year I almost missed the event. It was scheduled just before the Greenbuild Expo (occurring in Phoenix next week) and I didn’t think I could manage two big conferences in the same week. So again, I registered at the last minute. I was able to work it out. With this post I can’t possibly cover every aspect of the two days, but I’ll give a few brief highlights.
I attend more than two dozen conferences a year and at each I’m offered a bag of supposedly green products supplied by the event sponsors and collected in a reusable bag. I have more canvas bags with corporate logos than I will ever be able to use. By and large, the junk in those bags is the same no matter the event and usually a waste of material. But Opportunity Green sought to rethink everything about the swag bag, starting with the bag itself – provided by AdVinylize, a company that crafts repurposed billboard vinyl into beautiful carry bags. I arrived early on day one and was lucky enough to pick out the exact bag I wanted from a large pile ready to be given away. I’m very pleased with the pattern and color of my bag. Some of the contents are also worth mentioning. First, is a KOR bottle. I can’t tell you how many junky branded plastic bottles I recieve at conferences. I’ve also recieved an aluminum bottle and a stainless one. Of them all, I prefer the stainless bottle, but I’ve never been totally happy with it. Metal bottles have a strange smell and taint the flavor. What I’ve been wanting is a KOR bottle, so I was please right away. Add to that a set of reuseable bamboo utensils in a recycled PET holster and belt clip. What a fantastic idea. I go to so many conferences where my only choice are plastic knives, forks, and spoons. Sometimes they end up in a recycling bin, but most often they go to a landfill. This set by To-Go Ware was perfect for this event and I’m already imagining all the places where they will come in handy. They are perfect for someone who travels frequently. Another great add was a reusable hand towel from People Towels. For the first time, I’ve received a great swag bag with useful sustainable products.
Chris Jordan kicked off day one as a keynote speaker. I’ve been a fan of photography for a while, and I’ve seen video of his presentations, but I’ve never seen him live. His latest series focusing on bird carcasses of Midway Island are horrifying. When I first saw a few of the series on the web a week ago, I thought they were staggering, but to hear him present the back story makes them almost too difficult to view. For anyone not familiar, he photographed decomposing bodies of baby albatross. The images are haunting, especially when you see that their stomach’s were packed full of plastic. Even worse is the knowledge that the contents were fed to them by their parents. These poor young birds must have suffered terrible short lives. I recommend everyone check out his photography. Mr. Jordan is trying to make big numbers and big environmental issues tangible to audiences. Can you imagine or visualize twenty million tons of anything? How about forty million? Eighty million? Each step is a two-fold increase, but can you really experience the difference? People cannot easily experience big numbers viscerally. He’s is trying to do that with his photographic experiments.
By far the best session of day one was delivered by Annie Leonard and Jonah Sachs, the people behind the amazing web video Story of Stuff. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading this post and go watch it now. It’s so well done. The two of them told behind the scenes stories which made the video possible. In doing this, they also laid out a structure we should all consider for engaging audiences. For more than twenty years, Annie Leonard has been researching waste and consumption behavior. She had been presenting her findings through lectures, but didn’t feel she was reaching the audience. Changing her approach by making her story more approachable and more connected to human interest changed everything. Doing so eventually led to the film project that’s been viewed more than seven million times. It’s two years old, but still gets ten thousand hits a day. Annie and Jonah are about to release a book version and follow up video. Both are due out soon, so keep your eyes open.
Joe Laur, VP of Content for Greenopolis and co-author of the Necessary Revolution (reviewed here) kicked off the second day. His presentation focused on systems thinking. In his view, environmental issues are not caused so much by bad people, but flawed systems. We frame our world view by the stories and myths we tell ourselves. He showed a simple crudely drawn line drawing that looked like an adult with child standing below a window near the corner of a room. In most industrialized countries, that’s what people see in that drawing. But in agrarian cultures, they see an adult and child carrying a package on their head to market and have stopped to take shelter under a tree in the middle of a hot day. The drawing isn’t different, our perception is, and it’s based on our world view. So how do we change the stories? We have to change our systems.
Mr. Laur was followed by Beth Springer of Clorox. Unfortunately, she presented a disappointing show that felt like a company pitch. Rather than showing products and sustainable initiatives as a way to inspire the audience, it seemed more like a defense of company and process – a very strange approach. Something on one of her slides caught my eye. She was talking about how Clorox has been measuring their total environmental impact. With one bar chart, she showed how the company identified fifteen percent of their total impact as consumer based – meaning impact occurring after the product is purchased and used by the consumer. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a company do this, but it was the first time it struck me as odd. During day one of the conference, someone from P&G showed a similar graph. And at another conference earlier this year someone from Levi & Strauss talked about how half the total impact of blue jeans is customer cleaning. Doesn’t it seem odd that adding consumer impact to the total reduces their part of the equation? In my opinion, unless some aspect of your corporate sustainability strategy is specifically targeted to the consumer side and designed specifically for helping them make change, those numbers should be removed from the chart. To do otherwise seems like an attempt by large corporations to spin the their impact and divert attention away from them.
During the second day, event organizers presented thirteen sustainability start-up companies edited from more than five hundred applications. Each was allowed one minute to deliver their best pitch. Mobilcause then set up a live poll. The audience was given a code for each start-up and asked to vote using twitter or text message. A bar chart appeared on the main stage screen showing live voting results. It was great. Go to the Opportunity Green site for more information on the OG25.
The conference closed with a session on social media that turned into a Q&A on the marketing value of Twitter. As I’ve seen many times before, a panelist told the audience that social media is all about engaging customers in a conversation. And that’s true, but I’ve yet to attend a session about the topic that actually gives useful info about how to find the most valuable audience. Since this was a conference about sustainability, why didn’t the panel talk about where that audience lives? Instead, the discussion revolved around general Twitter issues and did little more than scratch the surface. I was hoping for something a bit deeper to close out two pretty good days.
Overall it was a good event, but I do have a few sour grapes I hope they fix for next year. Please, get the tech issues worked out. Each day we were told how the founders were seeking to create a completely different conference experience, but you can’t do that if you don’t manage the routine stuff – microphones would cut out, slides wouldn’t advance, videos wouldn’t play, and in one session the computer had to be restarted while we waited. With all the conferences I attend, I rarely see significant tech issues any more. At a base level, tech shouldn’t be obvious to the audience, it should be invisible. Food provided on day one was pretty meager. I was starving long before the day had finished. And on day two, food ran out completely. Luckily I brought supplemental food in preparation. One of the reasons I decided to attend this year was speaker Chris Hacker from Johnson and Johnson. According to the agenda he was supposed to close out day one, but his time slot came and went without a mention. I never heard anyone announce or explain his absence. He’s a big name, a big draw, and his picture was front and center on the web site. I understand why pay-to-play speakers are often vital to a conference – sponsors, partners, board members, investors, or others who support the event and receive a session slot on the agenda in return. But those people have deliver the goods, offer some unique insight that only they can, and they better not pitch their company or product. I encourage Opportunity Green to be careful. Some presentations this year were a little too much sales pitch and not enough content. No audience wants to pay good money to be pitched. I also think the overall conference content is a little too product and automobile centric. I admit it’s my own area of interest and bias, but buildings have an equal or greater impact on the environment and only one session marginally addressed that issue. Attendees may never buy a Mini E, but I guarantee they live, work, and play in environments with significant ecological impact. Where we use products is equally important as which ones we purchase. Please consider adding meaningful content to future events that looks beyond green objects to include spaces where they are sold, and where we all live. If you need help finding important new voices in that space, let me know and I’ll send you a list of good candidates.
I look forward to seeing what Karen and Mike put together in the coming year. I know they have much more planned for Opportunity Green. Check them out. Did you attend? Let me know what you thought.
Hi Kevin, Thanks for the update. I attended the first year, and it was sorely lacking. The presenters were good, but they had no framework to work in, and the panel discussions were completely superficial. Glad I didn’t put almost $1000 to attend this year. You should get more out of a conference than you get from a good magazine article. (Magazine – $8)
Thanks for the comment. You raise an issue that I was going to mention but pulled at the last minute – price. I thought last year’s price was a little steep, but a good value in retrospect. This year was thirty percent more expensive than last year with a similar format and a comparable speaker line up. There were a number of added features and some really good conversation this year, but was it thirty percent better? Several attendees I spoke with over the weekend thought not. It’ll be interesting to see next year’s line up and format.
That is a comprehensive review. I agree with many of your constructive criticisms. I would also add that this conference has no true focus or niche. It tries to connect with too many different industries, age groups, experience levels without having one significant tie-in. All in all, I found the audience too young or novice. Not the appropriate demographic for me or my work. I found the panels did not address a single topic but rather each panelist spoke about what he or she was doing. I can read their bio to learn that.
There were more than just the one panelist you mentioned who was a no show – all over the website and emails blasts it stated the mayor of LA would speak. He did not.
Would I pay $1k next year – definitely not.
Hi, thanks for the comment. You raise a good point with the issue of focus. It does seem like the event is trying to be all things to all people. I don’t mind when a guest or speaker can’t show, but so little or no mention or explanation is a lack of transparency. There was no way in the limited time I had to write the post to cover every aspect of the show. There were many good features, but also a few shortcomings. I hope Karen and Mike can make improvements for next year.
I had such an amazing experience this year and made so many awesome business connections! What a great conference. The food on the first day was great but you’re right about it lacking on the second day, however that slight issue was overshadowed by the substance of the conference and I left fully satiated with knowledge and inspiration!! Thanks Opportunity Green, can’t wait for next year!! OG25 was so cool – heading out to eat with my to-go ware and my Core water bottle
Hi Kelly,
Thanks for your comment. I too look forward to seeing what Karen and Mike cook up next year. I may meet with Mike in the next few weeks to give him some feedback. I’ll follow up if I learn anything interesting.
[...] Project FROG Modular Classrooms – an alternative to other modular classroom systems (I had just recently learned about them at Opportunity Green in Los Angeles, where Project FROG participated as a contestant in the OG25 contest, which Kevin briefly reviewed here). [...]