Bringing the Sustainability Expo to Your Town

1 month Scott Cooney 0 Comments
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This April, CleanTechnica ran our first major event, the Hawaii Sustainability Expo & Electric Home Show. It drew about 1300 attendees, ~80 eco-friendly vendors, and a dozen elected representatives. The event featured 7 EVs for test driving, 20 more EVs for the EV showcase, an ebike track, a nontoxic kids room, a solar-powered bounce house, a farm-to-expo food court, a wellness track, and a wide range of speakers and workshops. Bill McKibben keynoted the event with a rousing speech.

This is a very scaleable event that can be produced anywhere.

There’s nothing particularly unique about Hawaii that isn’t also present elsewhere — people want more organic and eco-friendly options, people want to have fun test driving EVs, people like e-bikes, kids love a good bounce house, everyone loves local and interesting food, and most everyone wants to save money and increase their resiliency. So, if you or someone you know in your community would be a good candidate and interested in running their own Expo, CleanTechnica is here to support. This video lays it out — what we’d expect from you, and what we can do to support.

What we can do to support, in sum, is the following:

  • Provide a blueprint.
  • Offer strategic guidance — so that you don’t make all the mistakes we made.
  • Be a hub — so that each organizer learns from each other and, as a whole, the ecosystem rises, makes more impact, makes more money, and wastes less time/resources.
  • Do sales — we have direct conduits to the GEs, the Sunruns, the Teslas, the Rivians, and more, and we can help bring them to local events. We’ve already gotten participation from Rinnai, Tesla, Sunrun, Bluetti, and a lot more global companies, and we’ve put the event on the radar of hundreds of others.

Locally, the people/company/organization running the event will need to:

  • do customer discovery with key stakeholders in the region
  • do local sales, logistics, and marketing of the event
  • create the speaker lineup.

For additional details, please check out the video below, and contact us if you’re interested.

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Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (LinkedIn) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 20,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. Scott wanted to contribute to native ownership of the clean energy revolution, so he gifted Pono Home to a long tenured employee with native Hawaiian roots for just the liquidation value, turning down a mainland company interested in purchasing the company. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, a consultant at Saatchi & Saatchi S, where he worked with a team to educate and empower millions of employees to live healthier and more sustainably. He is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas. Scott is an occasional investor, currently he has investments in Rivian (RIVN).

Scott Cooney has 196 posts and counting. See all posts by Scott Cooney