Tag: Conference

The Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council (WSBC) hosted a terrific conversation around sustainability standards and disclosures in conjunction with honoring its annual Sustainable Business Award winners on June 23rd, in Muskego. We review key points on these topics from three prominent speakers.

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Cool Choices is proud to announce that we will be presenting our fun, easy, and social approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the Smart Cities Connect Conference & Expo in Austin, Texas this year! The 2017 conference takes place from June 26-28, at The Austin Convention Center.

The Smart Cities conference is co-located with the US Ignite Application Summit, and brings together over 200 cities leaders from around the globe to prospect and partner with innovative technology and service providers like Cool Choices.

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Cool Choices is proud to announce that we will be attending the Sustainable Brands 2017 conference this year in Detroit, Michigan!

Sustainable Brands is a learning, collaboration, and commerce community of over 348,000 sustainable business leaders from around the world. Members include business leaders from a wide variety of industries, and represent brands such as Starbucks, Target, and Nike – just to name a very few.

Launched in 2006, Sustainable Brands’ mission is to empower more brands to prosper by leading the way to a better world. Sustainable Brands provides content, events, and other learning solutions to inspire, engage, and equip their community to be innovative, sustainable, and profitable.

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Kathy Kuntz, Executive Director at Cool Choices, is speaking at the Emerging Technologies Summit in Ontario, California on April 19-21, 2017. The Emerging Technologies Summit brings together energy efficiency thought leaders to “ideate and debate the intersection of utility programs, technology, market drivers, customer engagement, policy and implementation in order to impact the advancement and adoption of emerging technologies.”

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Cool Choices was privileged to help facilitate a session demonstrating the efficacy of game mechanics at this year’s Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) Conference. That meant we organized a fun and silly session of charades and got to talk a bit about the power of games.

For me, though, the most powerful thing was watching others play charades. Earlier in the evening, I had serious doubts about our plan. I walked into the hotel conference room, scanned the crowd of professionals networking in small groups and thought, “uh, oh, this is never going to work.”

Our plan, you see, was to put the group into teams and then get them to act out charades for each other. The charade topics would get increasingly silly (shifting from standard charade topics like “Fiddler on the Roof” to more animated topics like “sumo wrestlers”) to illustrate the way that games engage and pull you along.

As I looked around the room though, I had doubts. Could we really get these professionals to pretend to be members of a rock band or a cheerleading squad? Would they be willing to play if play compromised their dignity? The point of the event was to illustrate the power of games but, really, could games be this powerful?

Happily, I did not have a lot of time to express these doubts or to change our plan. As I stood in the back of the room fretting that our plan would not work, others put the plan into motion.

As I stood on stage watching the previously dignified group disappear, people’s playful sides emerged. I was soon watching groups of conference attendees flap their arms like chickens, march in an imaginary parade and, yes, wrestle sumo-style. Some teams argued with referees over point values, instant alliances were born on other teams and laughter—laughter pervaded the room.

In the end my hardest task was to get the groups to stop playing. Their response was a powerful reminder of the potential of games.