Weeknotes

We had a shortened week with Thanksgiving, but it was nonetheless productive. 

Lydia set up an interview for me with WEMU to talk about holiday gift giving. The framing we went with was “it’s great that people are willing to spend so much money on each other, but a lot of people go into debt and it has a huge environmental costs so here are some alternatives that accomplish the goal of connecting without the financial and environmental costs” I thought it went ok. 

We used the same messaging in our Black Friday email with the addition of the three main levers based on a new framework that’s emerging for us: the waste equation. 

(Amount x Resources)/Frequency = Impact 

which points to 3 broad strategies:

• Use less stuff

• Use stuff that take fewer resources to make

• Use stuff for longer

We got a 43% open rate which is ok for an email to the whole list, though not stellar.

Big travel week for me, but the work keeps on trucking!

The Washtenaw Zero Waste Coalition hosted guests from the Conservancy Initiative who are  organizing against a new landfill in Washtenaw County. Michigan has a huge excess of landfill capacity which keeps trash prices low and encourages out of state and international dumping in our landfills. This landfill will need an approval next year from the county. 

We finished the second draft of our business plan and got great feedback from the reviewers. There's something special about having words on paper for people to review.

We're gearing up for the beginning of our work with the City of Ann Arbor on a monthly swap day. Can't wait! And our partnership with Scio Township is on the brink of starting as well. Exciting times.

Samuel

This week we were buttoning up the last logistics for the Trash Talk Tour. We'll have more stops this year than last, including some stops in Ypsi thanks to the coalition built around the Ypsi Plastic Free Challenge.

The Trash Talk Tour is a great way to celebrate with people, get folks out having fun and experiencing zero waste community. It's also a huge opportunity to collaborate with likeminded orgs like Recycle Ann Arbor, Kiwanis, the University of Michigan, and so many more.  

This week we focused on building out a reporting infrastructure that will help us open and close projects better, more decisively, and be able to report progress out. 

We're building it in Coda, and it should enable publishing a database of all our programs and their outcomes to the website along with beautiful reports for people to peruse.

My big learning on that project was trying to integrate our marketing funnel type tracking (visits -> sign ups -> actions) with the broader "logic model" type organization of inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. I think we've got a system that captures both pretty well. Next step is to make some design templates so we can share programs with the world better. Something we are generally very bad at right now.

We also re-adopted a system we had during our last big push where Lydia and I prioritize the months and then the week live together and assign hours to different priorities and set time bound goals for ourselves. It's awesome, makes for much more clarity.

We moved the ball forward on Trash Talk Tour logistics, we figured out volunteer slots and published the signup form, solidified the budget, kickstarted our outreach push, and got Gemini as our musical act!