Top Green Giveaways of 2010

It's time for our annual round-up of the most popular giveaways on Ecobunga!  According to our trusty traffic stats, our enthusiastic readers went the most ga-ga for these green giveaways (sponsor in parentheses):

2010 Most Popular Giveaways on Ecobunga!

1. High Efficiency Frigidaire Washer/Dryer (Frigidaire)
2. High Efficiency Maytag Washer/Dryer (Clorox)
3. Ford Fiesta (Ford)
4. Ford Fiesta (BrandSource)
5. Honda Insight Hybrid (Better Homes & Garden)
6. Nissan Leaf Electric Car (Nissan)
7. $5000 Eco-Friendly Bedroom (Natural Home Magazine and Lifekind Mattresses)
8. Honda CR-Z Sport Hybrid (Honda)
9. $10,000 Ultimate Garden Giveaway (Ogden Publications)
10. SmartCar ForTwo (Pyrex)

If you're a big company looking to get the biggest green bang for your green prize buck, it's safe to say that home & garden eco-makeovers and fuel-efficient cars are the way to go.

But, but, but ... "I'm just a small retailer - I can't give away a $10,000 kitchen makeover!"

We hear you!  So we compiled a list of our most popular "small" giveaways featuring prizes with a retail value of under $200 -- items you could conceivably purchase yourself if you can't find a partner to donate them.  We posted previously on why it's smart to giveaway prizes that people want - even if their not your own products.

2010 Most Popular "Small" Giveaways on Ecobunga!

1. Natural Fiber Area Rug
2. Le Creuset Enamel Cast Iron Cookware
3. $50 Whole Foods Gift Card
4. Water-saving Rain Barrel
5. Bamboo Tableware
6. Gardening Cart
7. Gift Pack of Organic & Natural Foods
8. Backpack filled with Seventh Generation Cleaners
9. A Year's Worth of Stonyfield Organic Yogurt (in the form of 52 coupons)
10. Earth Box Ready-to-Grow Gardening Kit 

If you can spend a little more, give away a Cruiser Bike (around $200 - $300).  If you want to spend under $50, a Vegetarian/Vegan cookbook, Organic/Fair Trade chocolates, or Chemical-free Skincare are all good bets.

And although they didn't make it to the top ten lists, solar home product giveaways -- roof installations, water heaters etc. -- are greeted very enthusiastically by our Facebook Fans with lots of "likes" and "shares".  However, that enthusiasm doesn't necessarily translate into giveaway entries, leading us to conclude that many green consumers support these products in theory but in reality are not ready to switch to solar energy, even if it's a freebie. ... Why is that? Hmmm ... an interesting question for market researchers out there.  Any takers?

Read more...

What Do you Call a Greenwashed Sweepstakes? ... Greenswept?

We've talked about this one before.

Please, oh please.  If you're going to run a "Going Green" sweepstakes, make the prize, or at least part of the entry process, green.

Here's the latest example we just ran across:  Very Big Company X is running a promotion through Pretty Big Website Y targeted to women.  The name of the promotion is "Going Green Giveaway".  The prize:  $250 in cash, which they suggest that you use to go green.  One of those suggestions? ... "Eat granola and say things like 'righteous' and 'groovy'."

Let's leave aside the fact that $250 is a lot of money to spend on granola and freedom of speech means you can say "righteous" as many times as you like for no money down. The key selling point to entice folks to enter this "Going Green Giveaway" is that, if they win, they can spend the money however they like. And therein, dear reader, lies the problem.  Who's to say that the winner will do anything particularly green with the money? 

Of course, this type of giveaway is supremely easy to run.  Just ask for an email address, at the end of the promotion pick a winner at random, send them a check and you're done.  But if this company is truly looking to combine eco-stewardship with a sweepstakes, then the prize should be specifically green -- say a compost bin, home energy monitoring system, or a $250 gift card to an exclusively eco-friendly retailer.  Alternatively, the entry process could require some kind of recognition from the entrant of their efforts to go green -- a brief essay on their eco-New Year's resolutions, or a photo contest which shows them doing something eco-friendly, like recycling. 

We would urge Big Company X to do something, anything, to put the "Green" back in their "Going Green Giveaway".  Until then, we have no choice, alas, but to file their latest sweepstakes under our newly-labeled folder:  Greenswept.

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Facebook Promotion Guidelines Updated. Wall Giveaways Still a No-No.

Companies running social media promotions will want to stay abreast of Facebook's latest changes to its promotions policies. 

The bottom line is that it is still not permissable to run a giveaway on Facebook by simply asking people to enter by posting on a Wall of a Page, uploading a photo, or posting a status update.  We see many smaller companies run Facebook giveaways that way, and it's a "no-no" that could potentially result in your page being pulled.  Rather, promotions must still “be administered through an application on the platform”, meaning either a Facebook- or a third-party application (Wildfire is one example.)

What Facebook no longer requires is:

1. Prior written Facebook approval to administer a promotion on Facebook.

2. A minimum media spend threshold to support the promotion.

Which is good, because we're certain the vast majority of marketers were wholly unaware of these conditions!

Read more about Facebook's Promotion Policy Changes and its Full Promotions Policy.

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Green Bloggers + Product Reviews. A Toxic Combination?

It's been over a year now since the F.T.C. announced revisions in its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. In short, it required bloggers who review a product to disclose "the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service". That is, if Company X sends a blogger a product in return for a review, the blogger has to disclose that Company X sent them a freebie.

Green bloggers who submit their giveaway listings to Ecobunga! comply with the F.T.C. rule (and if they didn't, we wouldn't post the promotion.)  Typically, a blogger not only reviews the product, they often invite their readers to enter a giveaway in which they too can win the goodie.  Usually entry is by leaving a comment on the post, but also sometimes by liking the blogger's Facebook page, following them on Twitter, etc. 

So far so good.  Except one big problem comprised of three progressively smaller syllables. 

Green-wash-ing.

It's easy to review a product and evaluate whether you like it or whether it "works". It's not so easy to evaluate whether the product is actually green. 

How many bloggers have chemistry labs in their kitchens so they can verify that the ingredients in a cleaner are truly non-toxic or those in a skin care product are truly all-natural?  How many of them have the time or the knowledge to ask companies to supply the certifications for apparel that is claimed to be organic cotton?  From our experience reviewing hundreds of blogger giveaways -- not that many.

And that, dear reader, leads to greenwashing.  Certainly not of the same deliberate sort committed by some companies.  Our experience with green bloggers is that they are uniformly well-intentioned.  They really, really want to let their readers know about new green products and help create a more sustainable world.  It is just that they don't (or don't know how to) vet green claims.  They  rely solely on the information provided to them by the company -- usually the same copy which can be found on the company's website.  And we all know that just because something's on the internets, doesn't make it so.

Now, it may be tempting to pooh-pooh this issue.  After all, most bloggers don't have that many readers -- how much harm is really being done? But when you add all those green bloggers together, collectively there is the potential to spread a lot of mis-information.

Ecobunga! does our part by verifying the green claims of product giveaways submitted to us by bloggers.  If we can't verify through third party certifications and a whole host of other criteria that we list on our FAQ page, we either don't post the giveaway or we write to the blogger and ask them to try to get more information from the company.  Surely we've driven some of them a little nuts with our nit-picking, but when it comes to ensuring that green means green, we'll gladly assume the role of gadfly.

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