BC Hydro’s Green Gifts Facebook application: innovative and green
First published on October 20, 2007
Send a Facebook gift, respect the environment, possibly win some prizes (until November 14, 2007)! Unlike TELUS’s “we’ll plant a tree for you if you bring in this flyer” campaign, BC Hydro Power Smart‘s Green Gifts Facebook application is an example of an organization’s green initiative done right.
Green Gifts encourages you to send silly (but very fun) Facebook gifts (essentially, images on a screen) to your friends for free in order to be entered to win cool prizes like a self-sufficient, hand-cranked LED lantern; a solar-powered battery/phone charger; an electricity consumption monitor; and an iPod Nano with solar charger. Along the way, it gives you tips on sustainability and promotes the Power Smart program. Did you know that if you switch from hot water to cold when doing laundry, you’ll use one-sixteenth as much electricity?
It’s great to see the useful projects that have been created ever since Facebook opened up its platform to outside applications. See, Facebook isn’t evil.
Add Green Gifts and have fun learning about sustainability and sharing the message with your friends. You must be a BC resident to be eligible to win prizes, but if you live outside of BC, add the application anyway!
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October 24th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Derek says:
On my green gifts home page it says “gifts received to date: 2″, but then when I go to the received gifts page it says I haven’t received any. Clearly it’s not done 100% right.
October 25th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Rob Cottingham says:
Hi, Derek – Thanks for posting about this bug; every app has ‘em, but we’re determined to track ours down and stamp them out. What would help greatly is if we knew your user ID on Facebook. Would you mind mailing me your profile URL? I’m [email protected].
And Peter, thanks so much for blogging about Green Gifts! We appreciate the kind words, and we’re really excited about the potential that Facebook holds for organizations hoping to engage with their publics.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Derek says:
Hi Rob – It’s great to see developers actively supporting their apps! The problem actually resolved itself after I removed and then re-added the green gifts app to facebook.
Incidentally, my girlfriend just won an “electricity consumption monitor, valued at $150″ in the “prize of the week” draw. That’s pretty cool – I wonder how it works…