Selling Your Ideas: Part 2

Last time I wrote about some social change insights from a book called Diffusion of Innovations. Innovations tend to succeed or fail based on six factors: (1) Relative advantage, (2) Compatibility, (3) Observability, (4) Trialability, (5) Complexity, (6) support by influential change agents. Last time I made some remarks on how those characteristics can be applied to selling social innovations. This time I want to offer a concrete example.

The subject.of the day is sustainable development (economic development built on principles of ecological protection and social justice). That short definition covers lots of territory! Sustainable development has to include public policy, buying habits, marketing, construction, energy production, waste disposal, mining, manufacturing, transportation, and urban planning.

For the sake of illustration lets just focus our attention on "green" buildings. A "green" building could literally be green, but it would be more useful to create a building that uses as little energy as possible and that generates as little waste as possible.  It would also be desirable to use recycled and salvaged materials where possible. There's much more to green building than I can cover here, and this web site does a wonderful job of explaining things anyway. So, we want to sell people (what people?) on the application of green building principles. How do we do it?

Well, first make a couple of decisions that narrow our scope of activities. "Selling" the implementation of green building principles isn't really something anyone can do. They have to sell particular ideas to particular audiences that can reasonably be expected to act on the ideas in question. You may also need to narrow your focus to a certain geographic area. No, cyberspace is not a geographic area!

(some boring details omitted)

Let's go right to work selling people in the Washington, DC area on buying and building "green" condos. Condos are hot in the DC area, as are condo conversions of old buildings. Let us further focus our attention on condo builders. What can we do to sell them on the idea of going green? Well, it may help to have a specific set of building principles that we want them to follow.

You can learn more about green building standards in this Wikipedia entry. The exact set of standards we use here isn't really important so I'll jump right into making some recommendations, organized according to the six factors I listed in my opening paragraph:

1. Relative Advantage - Gather statistics on the selling prices of "green" condos to show that they command a premium above any additional construction costs. The greener condos may not always sell for more, but being able to offer up numbers showing that extra profits are possible will help.

2. Compatibility - Condo owners love to save money, one thinks. Provide energy-savings estimates based on the type of energy to be used (probably electric power, plus gas for hot water) and estimates of water savings. This will help builders to sell units: "Cut your energy bills by 40% by moving to Green Dream I, the Districts Hippest and Greenest Condo Development." (If the condo fee includes utilities, lower water and energy costs can be converted into lower condo fees too!")

3. Observability - Provide several case studies of companies that have built "green" condo buildings and made extra money, so builders in the area know it can really be done with a variety of property types (gedern, mid-rise, high-rise, whatever)

4. Trialability - Offer suggestions for integrating some inexpensive "green" features and an incremental plan for doing more.

5. Complexity - Simpler plans are better! Offer something that is easy to integrate into current building and landscaping methods.

6. Change agents - Network and find one or two builders/developers/designers who are interested and have connections. Help them help others' see how those green building principles are good for business. Incidentally, you could also talk up the "soft" side of being a green builder, specfically the real contribution it makes to environmental protection.

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