Buckeye Footprint: A venue for conservation

Have you heard of Buckeye Footprint? Probably not, and unfortunately, you’re not alone. Buckeye Footprint (http://footprint.osu.edu/), a website with cool graphs and data about Ohio State’s energy use and real-time energy feeds from metered buildings, has largely not met its potential as a means to reduce energy consumption and develop environmental awareness on campus. In addition to flying under the school’s radar, Buckeye Footprint alone does not provide incentives for campus community members to conserve energy, and let’s face it, most of us would rather spend our free time looking at sports scores and Facebook than huge numbers that we can’t comprehend.

Our class group worked with the Office of Sustainability and Energy Services to address these issues so that Buckeye Footprint can be an engine for campus sustainability. Our plan was three-fold: marketing through social media, personalization through energy competitions and increased metering, and improved accessibility of information.

We propose that the office develop a fun, catchy Youtube video advertising the site — one that will both pique curiosity about Buckeye Footprint and also make people want to send the video to their friends. Also, the website needs to go where students, staff, and faculty go, so instead of expecting people to constantly visit the site, it should instead be in widget form on the OSU homepage and in application form on Facebook. In addition, the glue that holds our recommendations together is the incentives: We suggest there be multi-week dorm and academic building energy conservation competitions, and daily results should be posted on Buckeye Footprint. Finally, the website itself could use some tweaks — more environmentally-related photographs, more visually appealing and relatable data, and tweets from site users. By implementing these changes, we believe Buckeye Footprint can be an effective tool for improving campus sustainability.

A screen shot from footprint.osu.edu

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