Organizational Change
Practically Green Becomes WeSpire, Debuts Sustainability ROI Calculator

Practically Green, the engagement platform for sustainability and responsibility programs, this week announced it is rebranding as WeSpire. The company also debuted its proprietary ROI calculator, which will allow customers to more accurately measure the impact and savings of each individual project deployed.

WeSpire helps companies engage people in sustainability and responsibility initiatives with persuasive technology that builds awareness, drives behavior change and now more accurately measures business results. Practically Green’s evolution to WeSpire reflects the growing scope of sustainability and as a result, the growing scope of its technology.

The platform, built on the research of persuasive tech pioneer BJ Fogg of Stanford Persuasive Labs and the behavioral science established by Robert Cialdini, inspires and supports meaningful change at scale. WeSpire says it has seen high levels of adoption across corporations and campaigns, and has customers with over 80 percent of their team voluntarily engaged, and over $1M in savings across campaigns in the nine months since the enterprise platform was launched.

Equally important is the environmental impact: WeSpire says its customers have collectively realized reductions in water (3.6 million gallons), energy (3.15 million kWh), and C02 emissions (2167 metric tons).

“Positive actions in sustainability and social responsibility engage people where their passions lie – where they can feel great and proud of themselves, their work, and their company. Those positive actions are different for each company and individual, and we have grown and evolved our brand and platform to support those unique initiatives,” said WeSpire founder and CEO Susan Hunt Stevens. “This is technology that hooks people, gets them excited, and inspires them to think and act innovatively even outside of business hours.”

WeSpire’s platform uses social actions, gamification and achievements to help participants complete projects and hit goals. These goals involve positive actions at work, at home, and in the community that help people live more healthy and sustainable lives, from carpooling to saving energy at work to volunteering with colleagues.

WeSpire is also debuting a new ROI calculator, which gauges the impact of individual actions and campaigns, both on cost and resource savings. With this calculator, the efficacy of each campaign run on WeSpire can be accurately measured, as well as the combined impact that these initiatives have had on their business. It is based on a proprietary model that has been tested in real-world use cases, and is based on industry best practices and benchmarks that have been widely adopted across the globe.

“It is crucial that we provide a way to quantify the impact of these actions and programs,” Stevens said. “They are the collective step towards meaningful change, and with the introduction of our calculator, companies are armed with more substantive proof. Companies can easily see which actions have demonstrated and will result in the most cost and resource savings.”

WeSpire powers employee engagement programs at over 20 global corporations including eBay, Unilever, MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment and EMC. WeSpire also recently launched a partnership with Sony Pictures A Greener World powering “Eco Spidey,” an online game involving sharing photos and videos of environmentally friendly actions for the partnership between Earth Hour and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Another sustainability-engagement tool, myActions, designs online communities and social tools that track the digital sharing of real-world actions – for every action taken, a donation is made to the cause of the user's choice. The company partners with organizations from municipalities (Ohio Valley) to nonprofits (Net Impact) to brands (EKOCYCLE) that provide the greatest opportunity for impact through their networks.