DMA ECHO Green Marketing Award Entry Form: Consumers Union

a)  Innovative Green Tactics & Strategies Employed throughout the Direct Marketing Process. 

We produced the Winter 2010/11 direct marketing campaign with the goal of strategically supporting the sustainability objectives of meeting our acquisition targets, serving the ongoing needs of consumers, and of being good stewards of the resources we use.  Direct Marketing and Publishing Operations departments worked collaboratively guided by our internal Environmental Policy & Vision Statement to identify, implement, and track meaningful environmental choices made throughout the life cycle of the campaign season. 

The overall environmental benefits of the choices we made included less energy and materials consumption, more benign manufacturing, and reduced emissions.  Additionally, we promoted recycling of direct marketing packages that are recyclable, saved money, upheld response rates, and met our objectives.

b)  Inspired Action & Making a Difference to the Planet.

We began by meeting with our creative agency, list broker, merge/purge shop, paper vendors, printers, letter shops, and logistics partner to share our objectives and engage the entire supply chain in this process.  The vendors made presentations about their own environmental programs covering a broad range of initiatives that help to cut emission, consume less energy, water, chemicals, paper and other materials, and that included comprehensive recycling and even green power offset programs.  Some of the items our vendors reported on as examples of environmental sustainability in print production and fulfillment that helped us to meet our goals included:

• aqueous-based plate making chemistry
• reverse osmosis systems for mixing fountain solutions
• super bins for ink storage that cut down on ink tote deliveries
• third-party audited SFI and FSC plant certification
• Six Sigma and G7 certified master printer process improvements
• thermo electron air purification systems
• high-efficiency lighting and motion-sensor activated light switches in plants, warehouses, and offices
• electric-powered and low-emission material handling equipment
• refurbished and recycled toner cartridges

c)  Measurable Environmental Impact of Your Campaign. 

In the area of List Hygiene & Data Management, in addition to following the tenets of the Green 15 we integrated a Data Quality Enhancer (DQE) program into the merge/purge for the Consumer Reports (CR) "Lessons" package, a program that looks at more complex information to determine the value of a mailing piece.  Using DQE we impacted 900,000 records with the following results: