By Jack Cutts

A Seed of an Idea

Nearly three years ago, Boingo Wireless CEO Dave Hagan issued a call for volunteers to all employees who wished to join the “Green Boingo” employee committee. With a mission to become “a good citizen in the world in which we live,” the committee set out to generate ideas and plans for how Boingo might leave a lighter environmental footprint. For Hagan and Boingo, going green is really all about “incrementally doing the right things”.

The committee started by implementing a few simple wins – quick changes that yielded real results. Among the first was removing old lighting and replacing it with light emitting diode (LED) light bulbs which both consume less energy and last longer than traditional light bulbs. Another was the elimination of plastic water bottles in favor of the office water cooler and the substitution of coffee mugs for paper cups.

 

As momentum for the initiative picked up, Boingo Wireless found still more ways to make its day-to-day operations more environmentally sustainable. Timers for overhead lights were installed in offices so that less energy was wasted. Marketing materials were printed on recycled paper to help reduce landfill waste. And the company launched an “Alternative Transportation” program, which incentivizes employees not to drive their cars to work — not an easy feat in car-centric Los Angeles — in return for a monthly cash stipend.

Taking It to the Street

For all of the great things that Boingo did inside its own four walls, it was equally committed to showing the community and its customers what it means to be green. The company teamed up with California Recycles in 2009 and was able to recycle hundreds of pounds of electronic waste including items like batteries, cell phones, keyboards and mice, old computers and computer monitors.

On the customer side, Boingo created a unique promotion for Earth Day 2009 where they offered to donate 10 percent of a customer’s purchase of a Boingo Unlimited pass to Earth Day Network – a non-profit devoted to a healthy and sustainable environment. Interestingly, Boingo found that sales of its subscription product increased as a direct result of the promotion, revealing that consumers care about environmental causes and are willing to trade up to purchase products that support them. The company did a similar campaign in 2010 with Global Green USA and achieved similar success. Hagan believes these results show that being an environmentally-aware company has moved from being appealing not only to early adopters, but also to the mass market. Ultimately not doing these types of things will mean peril for your brand as well as our planet.

Boingo’s employees getting green.

Boingo employees were encouraged to get in on the Earth Day act as well. For a two-week period, Boingo employees earned one raffle ticket for each environmentally conscious decision they made. Employees met the challenge in a number of creative ways including walking or biking to work or attending an Earth Day festival. The promotion garnered a high level of employee participation and helped increase the employee awareness and commitment to green causes throughout the rest of the year.

Bigger Tools for a Bigger Job

Fresh off of a few simple wins and a successful Earth Day, Boingo wasn’t ready to rest on its laurels. Fortunately for the company, Hagan (through his Vice Chairmanship on CEA’s Wireless Division Board and involvement in CEA’s green initiatives) came armed with a tool to help the Green Boingo team take a deeper dive into environmentally sustainable business practices. CEA worked with renowned consulting firm Booz & Co. to develop a set of assessment tools that companies in the consumer electronics industry could use to determine how green their current business practices are and how to drive improvements at every point in the value chain to create a more sustainable company. (To view the assessment tools that Boingo used, click here. These tools are available to CEA Member Companies only.)

Hagan ultimately challenged the group to establish Boingo’s level of sustainability in each of the applicable categories and to improve each metric by one level. In fact, Boingo’s team was able to use the tool to identify specific tasks it could undertake to improve its sustainability. For example, insights garnered from the green assessment tools led Boingo to evaluate its data center suppliers partially on the basis of efficient energy management. Boingo plans to not only include certain green criteria in ongoing negotiations with prospective suppliers, but also to include environmental sustainability as a core part of its annual planning process.

Heal the Bay

Coming Full Circle

What started as a quest for small, simple wins has turned into a virtuous cycle at Boingo that is gaining momentum within the company. Hagan and Boingo have laid the groundwork among employees and suppliers to continue to drive improvements in its commitment to environmental sustainability. A skillful combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives among employees and customers alike has helped the company find ways to move the needle. Boingo has clearly moved beyond those early, simple wins. “We’ve accomplished a lot, but like most companies, we still have a lot of work to do. The good news is, with CEA’s help, we now have a professional roadmap to guide us,” says Hagan.

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