EarthLab "What's Your Impact" Calculator

Organization Information:

Organization Name:
EarthLab Foundation
City & State:
Kirkland, 
Washington
Organization Website:
http://www.earthlab.com
Organization's Mission Statement

At the EarthLab Foundation, our mission is to advance research and education in climate change and global warming. EarthLab provides functional outreach, research and educational efforts in part through EarthLab.com, (www.earthlab.com), capable of providing unsurpassed worldwide data collection.

Submission Information

Impact Essay

The EarthLab Foundation, founded in 2007, is a climate crisis community that provides a practical guide to green living through community interaction and its free personalized Carbon and Lifestyle Calculator, the first Carbon and Lifestyle Calculator of its kind - a unique three-minute survey that generates a carbon footprint score (ECP Score), which members can then save, work to reduce and track their success over time - as a member creates their own personal green strategy. Our foundation was faced with the challenge of developing a transformative technology, a dynamically scalable technology, capable of supporting millions of people around the world, and thousands concurrently – all while ensuring the rapid growth of the tool and website could be managed by the existing foundation team, and wouldn’t require hundreds of member services people.With the help of Microsoft software, the EarthLab foundation has dramatically elevated its reach within the United States, and now throughout the world, specifically, in large part to our upgrade and utilization of Microsoft products such as Windows 2008, and SQL 2005. Windows Server 2008 has provided the EarthLab foundation a rock solid platform that has performed at a high level, is secure, and balances our entire server workload and application requirements while also being easy to deploy and manage allowing us to automate routine system administration tasks across our servers and allowing us to create numerous automated tools, report and jobs to allow the foundation to easily manage the website application and the Carbon Calculator, while maintaining a staff of under ten employees!In 2008, EarthLab upgraded its database to a SQL 2005 database for its web application and carbon calculator. This upgrade immediately and dramatically elevated the speed and efficiency of site, and provided us an enormous amount of headroom to grow, to support the million plus users we’ve had on the site to take the calculator over the past 15 months! SQL has allowed the foundation to perform a tremendous amount of data mining (anonymous results energy and emissions use data throughout the world) from our carbon calculator leading to significant reporting and allowing us to provide functional outreach and reverse research to our partners, We’ve been able to minimize our downtime; it’s easier to manage, Over the past 18 months, the foundation has had over 1,000,000 members come through to take the calculator, save their results as part of their first step in a heightened awareness around environmental issues and lowering their impact. Members during this period have pledged to reduce their environmental impact by a whopping cumulative total of 4,806,210 tons of CO2/year. The foundations Carbon Calculator has become the most widely used carbon calculator in the world!Our ability to rapidly scale and replicate the calculator and support incoming traffic has allowed our small but effective team to forge partnerships with numerous world-class brands and organizations who create awareness for our site and calculator as well as implementing our employee awareness programs into their HR strategy, to improve moral, and create a heightened awareness around environmental issues, consistent with the goals of the partner. EarthLab Foundation partners include the Alliance for Climate Protection, chaired by Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore, Live Earth, The University of Phoenix, Vespa Scooters, Hearst / The Daily Green, The Prime Time Emmy’s on Fox, Leo DiCaprio’s, The 11th Hour Film, Dell Computers, eSurance, Accenture, Sun Microsystem’s, Barclay’s, world-class chef and restaurateur Mario Batali and The Carbon Challenge, an international sailing team preparing for Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 and The America's Cup.We’re most appreciative of the role Microsoft plays, not only in supporting our day to day operations through MS Office and Exchange, but more importantly, allowing the EarthLab Foudnation to maintain a solid, stable infrastructure, allowing us to broaden our reach, without borders.

Submission Category
Stable and Secure Technology
Project Image
EL-Sample.jpg
Supporting Work URL
http://www.earthlab.com