Data is a Beautiful Thing...so is Water

Data is a beautiful thing.  It helps you tell a story, understand the significance and ultimately, demonstrate you are doing the right thing.  The right thing, like conserving water.  In today's "radical transparency" world of social media, your personal, professional or organization's reputation may depend on it. Just a few tweets by watchful participants at a conference can significantly impact your reputation in either a positive or negative manner.

Initial data from the Living Future unConference 2014 helps tell the story of a sustainable meeting.  The conference organizers made informed choices and the data makes it real.  For instance, they...

• Chose chicken instead of beef for the dinner event saving 257,750 gallons of water.
• Chose apples instead of tropical fruit such as bananas saving 9,536.75 gallons of water.
• Chose a hotel with a linen-reuse program saving 1,340 gallons of water, thanks to attendee participation.
• Provided tap water for attendees to refill their reusable water bottles saving enough energy to run an average American household for 2,062 hours.  Note: changed from tap to a filtered water system after Portland announced a Contaminated Water Alert during the conference.  Even with this alert, no individual bottles of water were consumed (a blog post unto itself).

These are in addition to other policies we posted about earlier such as serving 100% either local or organic food or verifying recycling during the event.

If you haven't already, start today collecting data, measuring, reporting and sharing your story.  Let them catch you doing something right, it's a beautiful thing

Source: Fun facts generated by  "If One Attendee" tool.