A young entrepreneur who came up with the novel idea to get former fellow students to cut the energy they use in their halls of residence through simple incentive schemes is seeing his business take off.
Neil Jennings, a former PHD student of social science at East Anglia University, launched his not-for-profit enterprise
Student Switch Off while still finishing off his studies in 2007. Three years on, business is thriving, with 33 English universities now signed up and Government backing for his campaign.
"We’ve seen a big jump this year in revenue, from £67,000 in our first year to £190,000," said Jennings. Some of that revenue has come from Government grants – both Defra and the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills have put money into Student Switch Off this year – but most of the income has come from universities themselves, which put £1.50 into the initiative for every student they have in halls of residence.
And it’s proving money well spent for the universities. According to Jennings, for every £1.50 spent by universities that have signed up they are getting a saving of £7 in return through energy savings.
"So far this year, we’ve saved 2.25 million kilowatt hours of carbon dioxide – that’s equivalent to boiling 70 million cups of tea in this academic year alone," explained Jennings.
The idea for Student Switch Off is a simple one. "It’s based on the premise that students pay a set fee for utilities when they stay in halls of residence so there is no incentive for them to reduce their usage. We try to encourage students to adopt actions that will reduce
carbon emissions by getting them to compete with each other to cut their emissions and offer them incentives to do it," said Jennings.
Prizes are provided by sponsors and range from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (which has sponsored the scheme since the year it began) to Odeon Cinema passes and tickets to club nights.
'Eco power rangers' act as advocates for Student Switch OffAdvocates – called 'eco power rangers’ – who are recruited mainly during Fresher’s Week at the start of each academic year, are the main drivers of the scheme. Social networking sites, particularly Facebook, are used to market Student Switch Off.
"We’ve got 10,000 advocates this year across 33 universities and we run Facebook groups for each one. It’s marketed mainly through peer to peer communication," said Jennings.
A competition currently being run via Facebook encourages students to take a photo of themselves saving energy at the flick of a (light) switch. Another invites university students to pit themselves against their friends in a mini climate change quiz. Over 3,000 students have so far taken part in the quiz and have been entered into prize draws with the chance of winning solar-powered chargers and water-powered alarm clocks.
Free business advice for low carbon enterprise
For Jennings, who has no previous experience of business, the past three years have been challenging as he’s tried to build up his company from scratch in between studying. He has received some business mentoring through Ben & Jerry’s (virtual) Climate Change College, and more recently through
Leapfrog, a UK-based group of leading professional services firms and a registered charity that provides free advice and professional support services to low carbon entrepreneurs.
"Leapfrog has helped me draw up contracts for members of staff. I now have three full time staff," said Jennings.
The plan now is to carry on signing up more universities to Student Switch Off (there are around another 100 potentially to bring onboard) and to expand the campaign to include action on
resource efficiency and
recycling.
Broadening the campaign to public sector offices and schoolsJennings is also looking to broaden the campaign to public sector offices and schools, even private sector offices – in fact anywhere where there are opportunities to pit different departments against each other.
"For it to work really successfully you have to have an element of competition – an opportunity of bragging rights," he said.
If a bit of bragging is all it takes to get people to change their behaviour on climate change then Jennings seems to have hit on a pretty good business proposition.
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