EVENT: GOVgreen Confer- ence and Exposition, a new meeting for federal employ- ees who are responsible for greening their agencies’ programs and operations, produced by the Center for Environmental Innovation and Leadership (CEIL) 2010 MEETING (NOV. 9–10): The inaugural GOVgreen, held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., offered 30 educational sessions in four programming tracks: energy, transportation, conservation, and facilities. About 1,300 government professionals attended — 60 percent of them from the big-budgeted General Services Administra- tion, Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Health and Human Services, and Dept. of Veterans Affairs. CHALLENGES: CEIL itself was only launched last April,
by National Trade Productions, to capitalize on a green mandate established for all federal agencies in October 2009. After meeting with sustainability managers at nearly a dozen different agencies, CEIL President Ann Seltz and her team decided in late May that the best way to give them what they said they needed — information about what other agencies were doing, and a neutral place to talk to vendors — was by creating an annual confer- ence. Which gave CEIL about five months to get GOVgreen 2010 off the ground. Within the overarching challenge of the compressed time frame, there were a number of other challenges. This brand-new event would be taking place at the end of a budget year, in a sluggish economy, in a climate where federal employees could be
tough to reach. Seltz said: “Everybody’s very conscious of not being involved in anything commercial that they could be criticized for.” INITIATIVES: As befits its subject matter, GOVgreen was given a near-paperless launch. CEIL relied heavily on promotional e-mails and its own weekly e-newsletter, and also reached out to 675 bloggers and 334 Twitter users specializing in govern- ment or green topics. And the organization committed to making GOVgreen itself a net-zero-energy and carbon- neutral event — requiring vendors to meet certain sustainability standards, offsetting its own carbon footprint, and helping attendees calculate and offset theirs. CEIL also made extensive
FROM THE TOP: The first-ever GOVgreen conference drew more than 100 speakers — many of them from the federal gov- ernment. Said CEIL’s Ann Seltz: “That was a coup.”
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use of Twitter feeds, video blogs, and other technology during the show. Roving reporters interviewed vendors, attendees, and speakers in the exhibit hall, and broadcast the clips on GOVgreen TV both at the meeting and on the conference’s website. All told, GOVgreen 2010 nabbed more than 100 speakers — mostly from the federal government. “That was a coup,” Seltz said, “in that we’re starting from zero and getting people from the government — pretty high- up people — to come and be involved.” n — Christopher Durso