Reduce Your Event’s Environmental Impact: Go Virtual

Your enterprise could be cutting thousands, or even tens of thousands, of metric tons from its CO2 footprint every year. All it takes is minimizing your event’s environmental impact. You can achieve this by maintaining the shift from in-person seminars and conferences to the virtual space.

For the past year and a half, the global business world has been forced to do just that, thanks to the effects of the pandemic. Out were the glossy productions in far-flung hotel conference rooms and event centers. Gone were the days of glitzy corporate seminars, complete with branded signs and swag.

Instead, organizations have adopted new digital technologies that have allowed them to reach employees in their homes across the world.

It’s not all smooth sailing, of course. Video calls bring their own share of stressors and distractions. Plus, a purely digital all-hands impersonal nature means that employee engagement sometimes is very hard to achieve.

However, production, IT and event teams are growing more sophisticated and employing different tools to create more cohesive and interactive events. These teams are even beginning to resemble broadcast media outfits. All while the barriers of interactive experiences (once ubiquitous across all virtual events) are beginning to fade.

Smart organizations discovered that it’s actually possible to successfully hold large company events in a purely virtual realm.

They’ve also discovered something else: the potential CO2 emissions savings were huge.

How to Calculate Your Event Carbon Footprint

Take a minute to think of a traditional enterprise-level company event. There’s typically a massive banquet hall, lighting, air conditioning or heating, PA systems, catering, branded collateral, goodie bags. The list goes on. Plus, people have to use transportation to attend the actual event.

That’s a lot of different factors, each of which contributes to the overall event carbon footprint.

But what does that mean in practice? Let’s plan our own event to find out.

We’ll be planning a year-end company party. We will invite 1,000 top-performing employees from across North America to attend. The event space itself will have tables with seating, along with space for a dance floor. According to event planning experts, we should estimate about 9 square feet (about 0.83 square meters) per person in floor space.

That means our ballroom should be about 9,000 square feet or about 836 square meters.

While the event is located near the company headquarters in a major American city, the top performers are spread out across the continent. About 80 percent of them will need to fly into town to attend, and they will need to stay at a hotel overnight.

One Event’s Environmental Impact, By the Numbers

According to German energy research consultants EnergieAgentur.NRW, this one-day event will generate 1,566.191 tonnes of CO2. If we compare that to the footprint of the average American’s annual commute, it would take just over 489 years for an individual to equal the CO2 output.

If we want to space out the event and turn it into a 3-day seminar, the footprint increases to just over 1,700 tonnes.

However, if we transform this event into a virtual one, the event’s environmental impact drastically drops. According to recent reporting by the Sustainable Conferencing Initiative, an organization could potentially reduce their CO2 emissions by 91 percent, just by replacing the in-person event with a virtual streaming one. In addition, their estimates didn’t even factor in the large impact of air travel.

The message is clear, digital events are much more environmentally sustainable.

More Benefits of Virtual Events

It doesn’t stop there, though. Virtual events have the potential to reach a much larger audience – in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of employees. That means you don’t need to limit your event to only the top 1,000 performers. You can engage all of your employees and include them in the celebration.

Additionally, a virtual event means employees don’t need to spend time traveling or commuting to the venue.

There are serious cost savings at play, too. Large venues can cost up to $20,000 per day depending on the location. Then, catering costs for a dinner event can run about $150 per person. You also need to consider onsite costs like décor, entertainment, photography and swag. We haven’t even talked about the creative services and production management costs to create and run the event itself either.

So, how can a company reduce their carbon footprint? It all adds up to some serious considerations for enterprises thinking of utilizing more digital events.

Would you like a real-life example of how this can be done? Read about adidas journey to the digital sphere.

What we want to leave you with, however, is that we shouldn’t do away with in-person events entirely – and the shift to virtual represents just one way of how a company can reduce its carbon footprint.

In-person seminars and galas do have their uses, from being a critical tool in building team comradery, to driving company culture and employee satisfaction. What enterprises should keep in mind, though, is that there should be a wider cost/benefit analysis done beforehand – a calculation that takes into account the people, the company, and the planet.