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Playing Games with Social Good: The Next Big Thing in Philanthropy

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By Jennifer Dawson

Given the sports analogies flying around, I was tempted to call this post “lessons philanthropy can learn from baseball and hockey” — and it wouldn’t have been a stretch, given the connection between games and giving.

In fact, social good, philanthropy and community engagement can all benefit from adopting principles from online games -- including challenges, competition, fun, measurement and rewards, but it rarely if ever does.

Until now.

Colin Duetta is founder and CEO of Xocial — pronounced soh-shuhl — an online community that connects people and organizations to causes they care about then inspires them to take action using the principles of online gaming. Jason Rosado is CEO and president of GivKwik, an organization that connects companies, causes and communities by offering turnkey solutions for cause marketing and employee engagement.

With connection and social good at the forefront of both organizations, it’s no surprise they united for a common cause — GivKwik’s GIV.NYC 2016 event in honor of Giving Tuesday.

Their partnership has made them the My Two Dads of philanthropic engagement, bringing together a platform for gamifying goodness (Xocial’s) with a platform for helping brands achieve greater social impact (GivKwik’s). The offspring of their technological union are taking their first baby steps toward changing the world of philanthropy.

I sat down with them to find out more.

Jennifer Dawson for TriplePundit: I was getting some background from Colin yesterday and he described your relationship as a love story. So, how did this love story start?

Colin Duetta: I don’t know if I’d describe it that way, Jason. She’s ad libbing already!

Jason Rosado: Well, we’re definitely dating.

CD: If we could only start by saying we’re both happily married!

JR: I was introduced to Xocial through a friend who attended South by Southwest and I saw a fit right away. If you look at the life cycle of a company in our space, the first, second and third innings of the game are about building out the tech infrastructure, the database, the brand, the credibility.

After that, your fourth, fifth and sixth innings are strategic. You have this platform that can do these things, now what do you want to add on top? Gamification was something we’ve wanted to do, for sure. But we didn’t have the time or the bench strength to get into designing all the game mechanics. Xocial came along at a really nice time, when we could come together around a specific campaign for Giving Tuesday.

CD: I would echo a lot of that statement. We felt very strong in our convictions about bringing gamification to social good actions but as we looked to our fourth, fifth and sixth innings—this is all going to be about baseball, Jason—we knew we had to address where the donation component would come from.

We wanted to bring in the engagement but didn’t want to take responsibility for the donation aspect. What GivKwik does with pooled philanthropy has really taken it to the next level. So there was this natural fit.

JR: Since we’re partnering with Canadians here, I can use my favorite Wayne Gretzky quote. He always said he skated to where he thought the puck would be, not to where it was. With this partnership we could skate to where the puck would be, which is Millennials, a highly targeted audience for the future of philanthropy. Millennials are very familiar with and attracted to game mechanics and game interactions.

3p: What were you trying to accomplish with the Giving Tuesday campaign?

CD: From our side, it was a concept validator. This was going to be a learning experience. Even though there’s the big goal, in pilots it’s so important to not overreach. That understanding was there between our two organizations from the get-go.

JR: I agree 100 percent. From our perspective, it was our third year doing an event in New York City on Giving Tuesday, where we get 10 nonprofits to pitch on a stage for the chance at a $10,000 grant.

I never wanted this event to be people sitting in their seats watching somebody on stage and then going home. I wanted it to be very interactive and for people to understand the power of the network, where the 200 people in the room become two million people online.

We thought that adding the gamification touch to the campaign would drive engagement, keep people coming back to the online portion of the campaign, and introduce the idea of reward and competition at the individual level, not just the 10 nonprofits on the stage.

It was the perfect proof of concept. It validated ideas we’d had about the best approach to take.

CD: For us there was an unexpected concept validator, which was using Xocial at a live event. It was the first time we’d done it. Having that “we’ll get through this together” attitude meant we were able to deliver that live scenario with a certain comfort.

We saw that not only can Xocial be used, but that it can be successful. The best part was our Twitter integration. People really are so focused on the power of the social network and we could contribute to telling social stories with the automatic tweeting of the challenge submissions.

JR: To piggy back on that, Xocial generated a lot of additional content documenting the event. We had our own photography and video team, but the user-generated content from the competition between participants exponentially increased what we had.

3p: Were there any early bumps in the road?

JR: Both parties are fairly visionary, so it was making sure that we weren’t biting off more than we could chew. Colin’s team was great at documentation and communication and tracking requirements and following up with my team about what was required. If we needed to jump on the phone we did.

CD: I don’t want to use the word “startup,” but you expect those types of things. We’re dealing with high-end technology, a live event, a pilot, so the openness between the teams was critical. Jason and I were able to convey the vision and then step back and let the teams engage with each other under the open umbrella.

We had to scale back the grand vision. Jason’s team was strategizing, organizing and delivering a very complex event and we were the bolt-on pilot. We had to understand that. I’d say the bumps in the road strengthen the partnership. To know that you can go through that kind of experience and have the results we did, what could we do with more time and resources?

JR: [Laughs] There were a couple of places where it was obvious that we were building the bridge between our two platforms as we were crossing it. It was a good exercise in pushing both our teams to get the platforms where they needed to be to support this type of event.

3p: Was there something that surprised you along the way? Moments where you went “Wow, I can’t believe we did that,” or “Wow, I really didn’t expect that!”

JR: I can’t think of a wow. I can think of a phew! Like “Oh wow, we did actually pull that off in the timeframe we hoped for.” [Laughs]

CD: [Laughs] The a-ha moment for me was when we showed up at the live event. That’s when I understood what these guys were trying to accomplish and how xocial could engage on the floor. Having been in software for 16 years, there’s two ways these things can go. There’s the uptight “We counted on you guys to do this, this was our expectation” or the “Let’s team up and get this thing done.”

It’s amazing what happens when you approach problems from that second perspective. When the first couple of snapshots came up instantaneously on the leaderboard I stopped sweating a little bit. Then when we got our first dozen people engaged, that was our second brow wipe. And then it was time for some beers.

JR: I’m not sure that Colin expected us to ask him to roll up his sleeves and handle that aspect of the event. To his credit he did it without flinching and even got his wife involved as well. We were super excited about what we accomplished at the end of it all.

CD: Yeah, my wife Megan was my big story. She’s an actress at heart but just the other night we were talking about the stresses of being on the arm of the corporate guy at these different events. When she has a role, it’s so much better for her. At the Giving Tuesday event she could be the Vanna White to the Xocial component and it was hilarious to see. She really dove in. It made it that much more fun.

3p: How was the GIV.NYC program enhanced by your partnership? You’ve mentioned innovation and authentic storytelling so far. Anything else?

JR: We could take our platform from a simple donor platform to something that was gamified. It wasn’t just “go to this website, browse around, vote for your favorite charities.” By plugging in the Xocial component you could win something—which is still relatively unheard of in the space. That drove engagement from our perspective.

CD: I’ll echo that. But it takes a platform like GivKwik to make our little contribution shine.

3p: Indulge me for a second. I’d like you to pretend the other person isn’t here and tell me what it’s like to work with him.

JR: You go first. [Laughing]

CD: [Laughing] I come from over a decade’s worth of custom IT app development experience, and client management has always been at the forefront of what I do. You try to find out what’s important to that person and meet expectations.

Jason and I don’t know each other super well, but from a business perspective, there’s a bit of a kindred spirit there. We’re both upfront and honest in our expectations. When you have that from your leadership it boils down to your teams.

JR: Aw shucks. [Laughs] For me, being a born and raised New Yorker I have to be conscious of how I might come off, perhaps a bit brash and to the point. And on the flip side, I’m not sure if Colin is a born and raised Canadian, but the first thing Americans think of is that Canadians are very nice.

Ultimately, you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy than Colin. We were kindred spirits—both skating to where the puck was going to be. Part of the fun of working in this space, not just with Colin but with others, is that there’s competition but it’s very friendly competition. We could’ve looked at each other and said, “Xocial could end up doing what GivKwik is doing and vice versa, we shouldn’t talk to each other.” But we saw strength in partnership. I’m glad we took that risk.

3p: Any specific stories related to Xocial and GivKwik that made you laugh? Warmed your heart? Gave you additional ideas?

CD: We showed up in New York in a torrential downpour that lasted two days and I think we took seven hours of Ubers. When we first arrived at the live event—a little late and carsick—it was literally T-minus 2 hours to the event. It was stereotypical Manhattan, you couldn’t find the door, the elevator gave me pause to say the least, but that’s just the culture in New York. It was amazing to walk in there to see the calm, cool and collected GivKwik team.

JR: For me the most exciting part of an event is knowing you’re going to produce it and the rest becomes an ongoing state of anxiety about all the details. Who will be on stage? What will the run of show be? Who will we partner with? What will the online campaign look like?

The single best thing you can have when you’re producing an event is something you don’t have to worry about. I had my own nervousness about whether the Xocial aspect of the campaign would take. Once things got rolling, the screen was filled with completed challenges and pictures and the Twitter feed was blowing up—ultimately we reached 1.3 million people with the #GivNYC hashtag.

3p: What lessons did you learn from your work together that you’d share with someone else thinking of using Xocial integration for their program or event?

CD: We’ve learned just how much we can share opportunities with each other. There’s so much GivKwik does that Xocial isn’t in the business of doing, and they do it very well. As we grow our networks, we’ll find opportunities where Xocial isn’t the fit, GivKwik is. Any event with a pooled philanthropy or review-and-vote approach, that’s GivKwik. We can offer our little piece around gamification and help deliver a more exciting event.

JR: Game design is very nuanced. It really focuses on the motivations of the players and an essential baseline of fairness and realistic achievements. There’s a lot of thought that goes into that, and while I would love to spend all my days working on it [laughs], I have the rest of this platform to continue to build.

That’s why the partnership with Xocial made so much sense. The lesson learned for a potential client is to really think about what motivations, incentives, rewards and point scenarios will make the user experience as engaging as possible. That’s not something you just pull off the shelf. You want to put yourself in the shoes of the user, the player, the event attendee to try to create that experience. That’s something that Colin and his team did so well for us.

3p: Where do you see the puck going next in your relationship?

JR: We do have another campaign in the works and we’re thinking of bringing in a Xocial component to add an extra level of competition and engagement. We’d also like to integrate Xocial features in our employee engagement campaigns. We’d like it if gamification became part of our services at GivKwik.

CD: Xocial’s primary business is around partnerships, not only with social good organizations but also forward-thinking technology companies. This next endeavor with GivKwik will allow us to move forward with the relationship and the technology. I think we’re taking social good philanthropy and employee engagement to the next level. This is where the dream is. It’s not just where the puck’s going to be next—it’s where the puck’s going to land in the net.

For a recap of the event in NYC, check out the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEd400_iIRk

Images courtesy of GivKwik

Jennifer Dawson is a freelance writer and community activist who has covered subjects as diverse as community gardens, industrial insulation and men’s socks.

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Koch Brothers Pushing Scott Pruitt Pick for EPA

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Energy & Environment

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By Elliott Negin

The two dozen nonprofit groups and Senate committee members defending Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, have at least two things in common.

Like Pruitt, they’re climate science deniers. And, like Pruitt, most of them are funded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who own the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

That funding helps explain why they all consistently misrepresent the scientific consensus on climate change. After all, money buys influence, and since 1997, Koch foundations have paid a network of think tanks and advocacy groups more than $88 million to spread climate science disinformation — more than twice what ExxonMobil, the second-biggest denier-network funder, has spent. Likewise, Koch Industries has contributed $38.5 million to federal candidates over the last 25 years and spent another $117 million since 1998 on lobbying.

The Kochs didn’t endorse Trump for president, but there’s no doubt they would consider a guy like Pruitt heading the EPA a dream come true. When David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket back in 1980, his party platform called for abolishing the EPA (and a number of other federal agencies, along with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). Although Pruitt won’t be able to go that far, his six-year track record as Oklahoma’s attorney general suggests he will do what he can — with the help of Koch-funded members of Congress and the rest of the Trump administration — to defund the agency and undermine its authority.

Koch Denial Network is Alive and Well

In advance of Pruitt’s nomination hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on January 18, a coalition of 23 nonprofit groups sent a letter to the entire Senate urging his confirmation. “Attorney General Pruitt has consistently fought for Oklahoma families and communities,” the letter states, “and has been a stalwart defender against federal intrusion into state and individual rights.”

In fact, Pruitt has consistently fought for the corporate polluters that have financed his political campaigns, dismantling his office’s Environmental Protection Unit, halting efforts to reduce poultry manure in Oklahoma waterways, opposing a wind energy transmission line, and suing the EPA 14 times to block stronger air, water and climate safeguards that would better protect Oklahoma families and communities.

But I digress. Let’s follow the money.

The groups that signed the letter endorsing Pruitt include such high-profile, climate-science-denier organizations as the American Energy Alliance (AEA), whose president, Thomas Pyle, is a former Koch Industries lobbyist; the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose top climate disinformer, Myron Ebell, oversaw the Trump EPA transition team; and Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage economist David Kreutzer, who maintains there is no justification for Obama administration climate policies, also served on the EPA transition team.

Those three groups and at least 15 other letter signatories have received generous support from one or more of the Koch brothers’ numerous foundations, including American Encore, the Charles Koch Foundation, Charles Koch Institute, the now defunct Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, and Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a de facto Koch bank that distributes contributions from wealthy conservatives to free-market, anti-government groups. A number of the organizations on the letter are also funded by Donors Trust, a secretive, pass-through money laundering operation that received more than $13 million from the Kochs’ Knowledge and Progress Fund between 2005 and 2014.

Eight of the signatories, including AEA, CEI and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, collectively received $30.2 million between 2010 and 2014 from American Encore, a “social welfare” nonprofit organization the Kochs established in 2009 as the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR). The organization has been one of the Koch network’s primary conduits for funneling dark money — private donations not subject to public disclosure — to conservative campaign funding groups.

American Encore is no fan of environmental protections. A December 2016 blog post on its website calls for slashing “excessive and burdensome regulations” on hydraulic fracturing, opening up the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil drilling, and canceling the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to curb electric utility carbon emissions.

A significant chunk of the American Encore-CPPR budget came from Freedom Partners, which gave the organization a whopping $115 million between 2012 and 2013. From 2012 through 2015, Freedom Partners also donated nearly $38 million to five of the groups on the Pruitt support letter: AEA, American Commitment, Club for Growth, Heritage Action and the 60 Plus Association, which spent the bulk of its $16.5 million in Freedom Partner grants on political advertising.

Like American Encore, Freedom Partners’ goal is to roll back consumer, public health, environmental and workplace safeguards. It recently posted A Roadmap to Repeal, a list of Obama administration initiatives that can be repealed in the new administration’s first 100 days and others that would require a longer term strategy.

In the short term, Freedom Partners calls on the Trump administration to rescind the moratorium on new federal land coal leases, abandon the Paris climate agreement, and block any proposed EPA programs related to the Clean Power Plan. It also recommends that Congress repeal a number of regulations finalized during the last 60 legislative days of 2016, including rules that protect streams from coal mining, cut heavy-duty truck carbon emissions, and reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations on public lands. Over the long term, Freedom Partners wants the administration and Congress to kill the Clean Power Plan and the “Waters of the United States” rule, which extends federal protection to headwaters and wetlands that feed drinking water supplies.

Koch-Funded Senators Fawn Over Pruitt

How much impact could Freedom Partners and the rest of the Koch network have? Quite a bit, actually. They are planning to spend $300 million to $400 million over the next two years to influence politics and public policy, and Marc Short — Freedom Partners’ president up until February 2016 — was just named the White House director of legislative affairs. Formerly Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff when Pence was in the House of Representatives, Short likely will find a receptive audience on the Hill — at least from one side of the aisle.

The welcome Pruitt got at his Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee hearing two weeks ago may be an indication of things to come. Republican committee members fell all over themselves to praise Pruitt and attack the EPA for, as Chairman John Barrasso put it, creating “broad and legally questionable new regulations [that] have done great damage....” Democratic committee members, conversely, pressed Pruitt on his financial ties to fossil fuel interests, his efforts to weaken environmental safeguards, and his scientifically indefensible claim that the role human activity plays in causing climate change is “subject to continuing debate.”

Why were Republican EPW Committee members so hospitable to Pruitt?

Like Pruitt, most of them are on the Koch gravy train and their campaign coffers are flush with fossil fuel industry cash. Nine of the 11 Republicans on the committee together received $368,000 in campaign contributions from Koch Industries over the last five years. Even more telling, the company was among the top 10 donors for seven of those nine beneficiaries and the top donor for two — Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who is in line to become the Trump administration’s attorney general.

In addition to the Koch funding, the Republican committee members received more than $1.5 million since 2011 from a veritable Who’s Who of energy companies, including coal giants Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, Murray Energy and Peabody Energy; oil and gas titans BP, Chevron, Devon Energy, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil and Valero Energy; and electric utilities American Electric Power, NextEra Energy and Southern Company. Pruitt, meanwhile, received $62,500 since 2010 from Koch Industries and eight other companies listed above, including Devon Energy, ExxonMobil and Valero Energy.

By contrast, none of the 10 Democrats on the committee received Koch money, let alone any coal or oil and gas industry support. The only energy-related businesses that contributed to their campaigns in the last five years were three diversified electric utilities that are heavily invested in nuclear power: Dominion Resources, Entergy and Exelon.

Drain the Swamp?

Donald Trump campaigned as a populist who promised to stand up to Washington lobbyists and “drain the swamp.” The back story on Scott Pruitt — and the vast sums spent by the Kochs and other fossil fuel interests to promote their agenda — tell a very different story.

Still, one may fairly question what any of this actually proves. Does money really dictate the positions that a nonprofit think tank or U.S. senator takes, be it on climate change or any other policy issue?

As it turns out, none other than David Koch addressed this very question in an interview with Brian Doherty, author of the 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Koch was talking specifically about funding think tanks and advocacy groups, but what he said could easily be applied to elected officials as well.

“If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

I rest my case.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. All federal campaign spending information came from the Center for Responsible Politics. State campaign information came from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Unless otherwise identified, foundation donation information came from Conservative Transparency and tax forms posted by the Foundation Center.

Follow Elliott Negin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ElliottNegin

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New method identifies sustainably caught fish

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By Brian Collett — A scientific analysis has been devised to discover the origins of caught fish so that customers can be sure they are derived from sustainable sources.

A team at Southampton University discovered that jellyfish had chemical compositions unique to the North Sea locations where they were caught.

Then they found many of the same chemical signatures were present in North Sea herring and scallops.

With this information they were able to draw a map showing areas of the sea and the chemical compositions of the fish and sea creatures occupying them.

Traders could use the analysis method to pinpoint the origin of catches, making sure they come from stretches of water with sustainable stocks and minimising fraud from suppliers.

Dr Clive Trueman, who jointly headed the Southampton research, said: “Understanding the origin of fish or fish products is increasingly important as we try to manage our marine resources more effectively.

“Fish from sustainable fisheries can fetch a premium price, but concerned consumers need to be confident that fish really were caught from sustainable sources.”

The research follows an RNA-analysing sensor developed by South Florida University to confirm the species of caught fish or seafood and remove another fraud threat.

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Kellogg partners for progress

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Kellogg works with local charities and NGO’s to run breakfast programmes for children in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Russia, Denmark and Sweden. Tom Idle reports.

“Corporates that ignore the communities in which they operate will no doubt suffer in the future,” says Bruce Learner, Senior CSR and Partnerships Manager for Kellogg in Europe. In fact, addressing local community issues remains a core part of the global food brand’s sustainability commitment – something the company takes just as seriously as implementing climate-smart best practice within its agricultural supply base.

With a long history of giving and investing in community projects – founder W. K. Kellogg is often cited as one of the great philanthropists of the 20th century – the company’s global social responsibility strategy manifests itself in a number of ways.

While the goal is for every ounce of food produced to be sold and consumed, there is sometimes excess food, and that is given to food banks.

There is also a focus on cause-related marketing campaigns, which sees Kellogg making donations in response to customers buying products. In 2014, the ‘Buy a box = Give a bowl’ promotion, which ran in 18 countries, saw it donate a serving of cereal to a food bank for every box of Cornflakes, Crunchy Nut, or other popular brand cereals sold. Since the beginning of 2013, the company has given away more than 175 million servings of food to children and families in need across Europe.

But it is the third pillar of Kellogg’s signature Breakfasts for Better Days programme that Learner is most excited about right now. The Breakfast programme is an initiative that gives cash (and sometimes food) to schools to help them create and run long-lasting breakfast clubs where children can get nutritiously balanced food before they start their school day. “The idea is to make sure that children from tougher backgrounds or families that can’t afford to provide breakfast are getting what they need – Kellogg’s products, and other breakfast foods popular in each country,” says Learner.

Traditionally, breakfast clubs run for an hour at the beginning of the school day where children can grab some much needed food, like cereal, fruit, yoghurt or bread. According to Kellogg’s these clubs can help to boost the punctuality, behaviour and concentration of kids aged 4 to 11. In countries like the UK, they can also provide affordable childcare, enabling parents get to work earlier. The breakfasts also provide essential micronutrients that may be lacking in the diets of kids from communities with a low socio-economic status.

Kellogg works with local charities and NGO’s to run programmes in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Russia, Denmark and Sweden

In the UK, where the initiative has been running one year, more than 2,500 school breakfast clubs have opened their doors thanks to the cash grants, food donations and equipment provided by Kellogg’s.

But rather than just providing cash to schools, Kellogg thought it was essential to provide training, to support school staff in running successful and sustainable breakfast clubs that have the desired impact within local communities. “In the UK, breakfast clubs are well established and most schools offer some sort of early morning care for kids, whether to provide breakfast or childcare,” says Learner.

“By providing training we were doing our best to support a high quality project, and helping to share best practice,” says Learner.

So, in the UK, the business developed a series of Breakfast Club Master-classes – a roadshow of face-to-face sessions designed to give schools the tools they need. Each Master-class gave guidance on how to best run a breakfast club, where to get funding, what kind of staffing is required and what are the benefits.

Over a three-year period, Kellogg and its charity partner ContinYou helped to train more than 1,000 teachers, creating over 1,000 new breakfast clubs across the UK. “But as time went on, it became clear that school staff were finding it harder to travel to these meetings, even though they were regionally based,” says Learner.

The solution has been found in the development of online breakfast club training, created in partnership with the University of Northumbria’ s Healthy Living Unit. The Online Training and Grants Package is an e-learning platform which users can access at any time of the day, 365 days of the year. All of the training is free, paid for by Kellogg, and consists of a series of bite-sized sessions – tackling everything from social relationships and education and cognitive performance, to child nutrition and financial planning. Learners have to take a short quiz after each module and, in return, they get individual feedback and a certificate to acknowledge they have completed the training. A team from the University is on hand to deal with any technical problems and provide advice.

Professor Greta Defeyter Director of Healthy Living at the University said, ”The online training is an excellent example of Northumbria University’s commitment to Knowledge Exchange. The partnership between Healthy Living and Kellogg’s has been a tremendous success and enabled school staff to engage in CPD that has resulted in a direct impact on pupils’ educational attainment, social relationships, eating habits and engagement.”

Cash support has not been removed entirely. Once the training is complete, those from schools where there is a 35% (or more) free school meal entitlement are able to access a grant of £1,000 to help sustain their breakfast

In the next 12 months, Kellogg and the University aim to help 250 school staff through the e-learning vehicle.

To ensure Kellogg’s and the University of Northumbria are delivering what schools need Learner and his team have asked the University of Leeds, to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme – to assess the user experience of taking the online training, and to establish just how well it might help support their breakfast club. The findings were positive, with 82% of those completing the e learning rating it as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’,

Meanwhile, 101 respondents (78% of those that completed the online training) received the Kellogg’s Sustainability Grant. 76% of those that did not get the cash still found the training to be useful.

Not keen to rest on its laurels and let its cash donations do the talking, Kellogg’s has sought to evolve its popular Breakfast Club initiative in a way that scales its impact by sharing best practice more efficiently and effectively. And, as with so many best practice CSR programmes, partnerships – whether in delivering the initiative, or having it evaluated – are proving invaluable.

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SABIC finds profit in good practice

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The Saudi Arabian Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) cuts carbon emissions by recycle CO2. Miranda Ingram reports…

Global petrochemical giant SABIC is celebrating its large-scale circular economy initiative whereby waste CO2 that used to vent into the atmosphere is now being converted into feedstock for the company’s manufacturing facilities. This drastically cuts carbon emissions and reduces the purchase of natural gas. The initiative is both an environmental and a financial triumph.

“SABIC has been a sustainable company since its foundation by turning excess gas into useful products,” said Corporate Sustainability Director Gretchen Govoni, “but our sustainability function began in 2008, when we started examining our energy and water usage and greenhouse-gas emissions. As we collected and analysed our data it became apparent that our biggest opportunity to make a difference was not in cutting traditional hazardous waste but in tackling our carbon emissions.”

SABIC’s dedication to sustainable innovation is ‘Chemistry that Matters'™ to the environment and future generations.

“We committed to reducing our CO2, energy and water usage by 25 percent, and our material losses by a massive 50 percent by 2025, on an intensity basis,” said Govoni. “That was the pledge; the question was, ‘how?’”

With more than 12,060 global patents and applications, SABIC has operations in over 50 countries and a global workforce of over 40,000. A considerable amount of its manufacturing is done in Saudi Arabia in the industrial city of Jubail, which includes several wholly-owned manufacturing affiliates and other joint ventures.

“Our sustainability team was able to collect all the corporate data and see the potential in integrating materials between plants,” Govoni explained.

SABIC’s manufacturing affiliates operate several processes which produce highly concentrated CO2, such as the manufacturing of ethylene glycol and ammonia. The CO2 stream from the ethylene glycol plant contains small quantities of impurities that must be removed to be suitable for reuse.

Step one involved SABIC working with Jubail-based affiliate United, which produces ethylene glycol, to build a CO2 recapture and purification plant, which first dries and compresses the CO2 stream coming from the ethylene glycol plant, then removes the remaining hydrocarbons and other contaminants. What emerged is the world’s largest CO2 purification plant, producing CO2 pure enough not only to use as feedstock but also to sell to the food, beverage and medical industries.

Operational since last year, the CO2 plant at United can purify up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 from ethylene glycol production annually—roughly the amount produced by powering 70,000 homes for a year.

The second step was the sustainability project which required cross-site collaboration and involved building 25 km of pipeline to deliver the purified stream to nearby affiliates to use in their manufacture of products such as urea, used in fertilisers, methanol, a basic chemical building block used in such things as plastics, fabrics and construction, and 2-ethylhexanol.

“The affiliates were initially cautious,” said Govoni, “but once the financial rewards—reducing natural gas supply costs—were as clear as the environmental advantages, everyone got excited.”

The project increases economic returns, enhances the social value by producing more products from the same amount of raw material, and improves environmental emissions. “It is win-win,” said Govoni.

Moreover, SABIC’s investments in energy and resource improvements have helped reduce operating costs, making SABIC and its affiliates more resilient to market dynamics.

As the affiliates came on board, one of them, SAFCO, launched the SAFCO V plant, which is designed to use 780,000 metric tons of CO2 per year as feedstock to produce urea. This helped increase the overall resource efficiency and CO2 intensity of SABIC’s urea operations. It will have an even greater impact on the company’s greenhouse gas-intensity performance during its first full year of operation in 2016.

Already last year, SABIC greenhouse gas intensity, measured in Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent per MT of product sales, fell 2.6 percent below 2014, and 7.8 percent lower than 2010, their base year.

This leadership in carbon emission reduction was recognised during the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) Ministerial Meeting in November 2015 in Riyadh, an international climate change initiative, where this project received a certificate of recognition. The CSLF focuses on the development of improved cost-effective technologies for the separation and capture of CO2, as well as for its transport and long-term safe storage.?

“International recognition highlights SABIC’s contribution to carbon capture and utilisation and our commitment to building value for all the dimensions of sustainability to create ‘Chemistry that Matters™’,” said Govoni. “The initiative is also a good example of how a large integrated complex of affiliated operating sites can collaborate to reduce overall CO2 emissions.”

While this is good for SABIC’s corporate reputation, the award, along with the sheer scale of the initiative, also prompted a feel-good factor among the company’s employees. “For many years we have been making small sustainability improvements, setting short-term savings goals,” Govoni said. “This innovation is so large and involved so many people that it has generated huge excitement around the circular economy amongst our staff. Now, they get the big picture and understand not just the environmental good of sustainable practices but their economic viability, too.”

“Looking to the future, we will continue to look for ways to improve resource efficiency by sharing energy or materials between sites,” she said. “And our?technology and innovation teams worldwide are also looking into additional ways of converting CO2 into valuable products.”

United is already selling its purified CO2 off-site and now, there is interesting research into developing a catalyst that converts CO2 into alcohol during the natural gas reforming process.

SABIC is also in the midst of a multi-year effort to upgrade catalysts in ethylene glycol processes to lower CO2 byproduct and further reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. There are two projects within the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) program: The Al-Bayroni project in Jubail was registered in 2014, and the UN audit for a project in a second affiliate is scheduled to be completed in 2016. These two projects are expected to save another 600,000 MT of CO2 eq in their lifetimes.

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GSK creates a new business model with innovative marketing and sales practices

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The pharmaceutical company ranks first in both trust and customer value, according to a survey of 4,000 US healthcare professionals. Tom Idle reports…

It is hard to think of a more contentious business practice than the one historically used to sell pharmaceuticals. For the past 50 years, sales representatives have been compensated based on the total number of prescriptions written, without any specific regard as to patient need. Similarly, doctors have been paid to represent and speak on behalf of the same products and companies that the sector is keen for them to prescribe.

It is a situation that has fuelled a widespread belief that the pharma industry cares more about profit than patient wellbeing. These traditional commercial practices have gone unchallenged—until now.

Global healthcare company GSK has made a number of changes to the way it sells and markets its products around the world. Now, no GSK sales representatives are compensated based on individual sales targets. Instead, they are incentivised on their scientific knowledge of each product, their customer service feedback, and the wider success of the business.

Also, nowhere in the world is an external doctor paid to speak about GSK pharmaceuticals or vaccines. And no doctor receives direct sponsorship from the company for medical education, with all GSK funding for education now determined by independent bodies instead.

Where healthcare professionals are paid – say, for non-promotional activity – the company says it is committed to disclosing those payments on an individual or aggregate basis. It has already been doing so in several countries, including Australia, Japan, the UK and the US, in line with local regulation.

“Our staff now have a deeper understanding that being a responsible business is not just about what we do, but how we do it,” says Katie Loovis, GSK’s director of corporate responsibility. “By replacing the industry’s old ways of working with totally new, modern commercial practices, we are able to better align the business with our purpose and the expectations of society.”

It is working. In the US, a survey of almost 4,000 healthcare professionals ranked GSK first in both trust and customer value for the second time in a row – largely because a more simplified system has boosted engagement levels among US sales teams. In a 2015 employee survey, 81% said they were proud to work for GSK.

The “old ways” Loovis mentions have persisted for so long because of a reluctance within the sector to modernise, says GSK’s CEO Andrew Witty. He recalls the early years of his career flying to all corners of the globe in a bid to grow the business from what was the 35th biggest drug company in the world when he joined the company in 1985, to one of the world’s biggest. “For 20 years, I spent my entire time trying to get a seat that was not behind the smoking row,” he says.

“The world was loading millions of people a year into metal tubes to get them to inhale cigarette smoke. Now we’d say that was shocking, but then it was normal. It’s an example of how minds change, and industries have to change with the change of mind.”

Changing marketing and sales practices is less about building trust and more about modernising, according to Witty. Is it really right that in the 21st century, the best way for doctors to get information about new drugs is to turn up to listen to somebody giving a speech in a hotel venue? ‘No,’ is GSK’s answer. Instead, it wants them to go online and have a direct interaction with a qualified physician who can give them the information they need within the framework of local regulations.

The changes are also about giving the company a competitive edge as the only player of its type to have made such a move to wipe out legacy practices across the sector. As Witty attests, many people in the industry think GSK’s new approach is madness. “The world does not stop turning,” he says. “What happens is you start to have intelligent, mature conversations with your employees about what value really means to customers; what do your customers really need in a world where they are under pressure; how do you help a customer, a doctor make a better, more appropriate decision.”

The new requirements will also apply to any company that collaborates with GSK, too, including co-marketers and licensers of GSK products.

Beyond ethics, trust and responsibility, it is a move that is also reaping pure economic benefits. The company has now executed several successful product launches using the new commercial model, including the most successful HIV medicine launch ever (growth in excess of 50%). And sales of GSK’s new pharmaceutical products have dramatically accelerated, representing 25% of total pharmaceutical sales (up from 14% a year ago).

The company’s Q3 numbers point to strong group sales of £7.5 billion, and growth across not only pharmaceuticals (£4.1 billion, +6%), but vaccines (£1.6 billion, +20%) and consumer healthcare (£1.9 billion, +5%) too.

And the company is keen to maintain momentum in delivering commercial success while being able to demonstrate its values and purpose. During the recent UN General Assembly, GSK made pledges to improve access to immunisation for refugees, tackle antimicrobial resistance and prepare for global pandemics, for example. Topping Fortune magazine’s ‘Change the World’ list and the Access to Medicine Index (for the fifth consecutive time), and ranking within the top 5% of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index is further evidence of progress by the company.

Identifying an opportunity to grab a first mover advantage is not always easy. Moving to shake up legacy practices, which have for so long served the pharma sector so well – and where the risk and opportunity are not that clearly defined – is harder still. The changes to payments and incentives are not about compliance; nothing that has been going on for decades has been illegal.

“The real test to pass is not a lawyer test, it’s a society question: is it right that the company who’s selling you the product is paying you to talk about the product that they’re selling you? Does that feel right? Does it create a perception?” asks Witty. “Our conclusion was that it did create a perception, and our conclusion was it was right to stop.”

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Barclays partners with Unreasonable Group to support entrepreneurs

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The bank’s joint programme is part of its Shared Growth Ambition strategy to improve lives while providing returns to shareholders. Tom Idle reports…

As global financial institutions double down on programs to earn public trust, Barclays’ roots in the Quaker movement give it a unique context from which to project its social contributions. The business, which has operations in more than 50 countries, can be traced back some 325 years to two Quakers, John Freame and Thomas Gould, who established themselves as goldsmith bankers in the City of London in 1690. Helped in no small part by their Quaker connections, their business flourished and helped to pave the way for the development of the business we know today.

Fast forward to 2012, and the company launched its first ever unified citizenship plan – a commitment designed to engage all parts of its global business and explore how the key decisions it makes at a strategic level, as well as on a day-to-day basis, might contribute more positively to society. The result is a strategic plan designed to help customers, clients and community members better prosper, enabling further growth of the business in the process.

The strategy will play out over the next few years in a number of ways, including a smart new initiative called Unreasonable Impact – a multi-year partnership between Barclays and Unreasonable Group. It is a programme designed to support entrepreneurs whose ideas and solutions have the potential to be scaled up to both help solve some of today’s most pressing societal challenges, as well as employing people worldwide.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), within the next four years the global economy will need 212 million new jobs in order to accommodate people who are currently unemployed, to supplement projected job losses as a result of industries becoming more automated, and to provide opportunities for the next generation. It is this global challenge Barclays is keen to address head on. “Our employability strategy includes both developing skills training to ready people for jobs, plus looking at the demand side of that equation: job creation,” says Mark Thain, Barclays’ director of social innovation.

The bank acknowledges that the majority of new jobs will not come from big business. Instead they will come from a subset of entrepreneurs whose ideas, solutions and products are best primed for scale when supported by a major corporate that is able to support their growth. So, that’s where it is focusing its attention.

The first Unreasonable Impact programme launched in the UK in September 2016 as an intensive two-week accelerator session. A group of 10 entrepreneurs descended on the remote Alderley House in Gloucestershire, and hunkered down to work with a group of expert mentors and industry experts, as well as a number of people from across Barclays. “We use the island effect, which isolates these entrepreneurs for two weeks, takes them away from the craziness of their day jobs running a business in the scale up stage. We wrap them in this bubble so they can really immerse themselves in the experience,” says Thain.

“Daily life at a programme is centred around a belief that business is fundamentally about people, partnerships, and relationships. Given the selected ventures are at a high-growth rather than early-stage in their company’s development, their needs are often precise and specific to their team and business model.”

Among the entrepreneurs that spent a fortnight in Gloucestershire was the hydrogen fuel cell car manufacturer, Riversimple, which is developing a product-as-service concept that could change how the world uses resources. The business currently employs 15 people, but its R&D centre is expanding and is set to employ more than 100 people within five years.

A company turning waste into luxury fashion items, Elvis & Kresse, was also there. It dreams of a world without landfills, where everything is recycled or composted. And it has its sights set on dealing with the 35,000 tonnes of leather waste produced every year across Europe. Reclaiming that waste and making new products will demand more and more labour.

“We were keen to work with Unreasonable Group because they are renowned for their ability to search and select the very best entrepreneurs for this programme,” says Thain. “We agreed to the parameters and we wanted to look beyond those start ups who were still cooking in the kitchen and instead support those that were closer to a proven business model with products in the market – and with the potential to create jobs.

“We’re also selecting ventures that are creating positive social impact too – whether environmental, clean tech, healthcare, waste management.”

Successive programmes will run in the US and Asia, with a second and third wave repeated in each region over the next three years.

So, how will Barclays and Unreasonable know if their programme has had the lasting impact? Well, largely it will be about jobs. The organisations expect each company to create at least 500 jobs within the next five years – and will track this goal across participating companies and emerging industries that result from developed innovations.

The other metric that will be used is the speed of scale. Each year, the programme will monitor the growth in revenue, profits, customers, team sizes, and geographic expansion of each participating company. And ultimately, the partnership is looking to build and support a strong portfolio of entrepreneurial-led companies that are tackling the big social and environmental challenges of our time.

Unreasonable Impact is a great example of how a company’s expertise and insight can be leveraged, in partnership, to support action where it is needed most.

In the bigger picture of Barclays’ strategy, between now and 2018 the company’s Shared Growth Ambition is designed to build a stronger link between the bank’s own success and the progress of society in general; it needs a strong economy, full of thriving and healthy citizens if it is to enjoy strong growth itself.

“Our long-term aim is to create and grow a collection of products, services and partnerships that improve the lives of people in the communities which we serve, while providing the commercial return our shareholders deserve,” says Barclays’ group chief executive, Jes Staley.

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Trump's Federal Hiring Freeze: Leaner Doesn't Always Mean Better

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Federal agencies are still trying to size up the effect of one of President Donald Trump's broadest executive orders: a freeze that bans all new hires excluding military personnel.

Last week, within less than 72 hours of taking office, Trump initiated a freeze on new positions for all "federal civilian employees to be applied across the board in the executive branch." The freeze was immediate and "excluded those positions that [are] necessary to meet national security or public safety responsibilities."

It was the first of several indications that Trump meant to keep to his promise to root out what he sees as "waste, fraud and abuse" in federal spending.

It's hard to overlook the irony, however. A phrase which for decades defined the responsibilities of the Office of Inspector General and the General Accounting Office has become the new administration's rallying call, inferring for many of Trump's supporters that unneeded, if not illicit, use of funds was a rampant problem that could only be stopped by removing autonomy from hiring and publishing practices.

For many federal agencies (and those relying on their services), however, the hiring freeze is troubling. Just how does one define what is necessary and what is excessive to the daily operations of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, or Health and Human Services?

For example, does the exemption for medical personnel cover the new hires needed by the Federal Drug Administration? Some 1,500 new medication approvals are expected in 2017. And that number doesn't take into account any backlogs that would have been handled by new staff.

And what about Department of Agriculture staff who field calls and handle lab tests related to food-borne illness outbreaks?

According to Food Safety News, which obtained a copy of an email sent to employees of the Food Safety Inspection Service, the freeze will likely slow down lab testing at FSIS by a least a month "dependent on staffing key vacancies."

And what about USDA lab technicians who are working to corner the research on declining bee populations and, by extension, ensure food and crop safety in the country's farms? They, too, are unlikely to win preferential consideration.

Given Trump's focus on border security, it seems logical that federal rangers -- the eyes and ears in the country's 294,300-square-mile, federally-protected public lands -- would be considered vital security personnel. Federal forest lands hem in much of the country's borders with Mexico and Canada. Surely the rangers who patrol vulnerable areas, as well as promote revenue-producing tourism, would be a priority.

But as Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) noted, U.S. park staffing is frozen as well. "[For] lawmakers who think this only affects people inside the [Captal] Beltway, think again," Connoll said.

Rachel Greszler, a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, defended the freeze, saying the president's action would allow him to "evaluate things and see where the waste and inefficiencies are" in federal agencies.

But according to the president's memorandum, that isn't necessarily the purpose of the freeze. The administration says it intends to implement "a long-term plan to reduce the size of the federal government's workforce through attrition." And the hiring freeze, which is to last until the plan is implemented in the next 90 days, is meant as a preliminary step to that downsizing.

"There’s real need for change in the federal government, and this is not the kind of change that’s constructive,” Max Stier told the Washington Post in interview. Stier is the president and chief executive of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.

He pointed out that by freezing hiring, the government risks exacerbating the problem. The majority of federal workers are now over the age of 60, Stier said. The attrition plan that Trump is talking about is liable to have long-term impacts on a skilled federal workforce.

That's a concern in agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, where preferential hiring of veterans ensure that offices are staffed by those most familiar with veterans' needs. Initial statements by the administration's press secretary, Sean Spicer, led veterans to think their medical coverage would be affected by the freeze. On Friday, the VA's Acting Secretary Robert D. Snyder corrected that, outlining a list of positions that would be exempted from the hiring ban.

Still, with nearly a third of the federal workforce made up of veterans, attrition may be a risky prospect for a new administration bent on showing it has the voters' backs. Veterans were by far Trump's largest voter bloc. Will a leaner federal government and fewer government jobs for those who served be what his voters had in mind? The next 90 days may tell.

Image credits: 1) Flickr/Lance Cheung - USDA; 2) Flickr/USDA

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World Bank Accused of Undermining Its Own Climate Change Agenda

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“The impacts and risks posed by climate change highlight the need for action,” the World Bank says on its website, in a section explaining its progress on climate change.

But according to a report issued late last week, the World Bank is financing initiatives that accomplish quite the opposite.

Programs including the introduction of new fossil fuel subsidies, weak policy support for renewables, the undermining of environmental regulations, and a resulting increased risk of deforestation are just some of the ways in which the World Bank is accused of funding programs that are in sharp contrast to its rhetoric stating that any fight against climate change goes hand-in-hand with poverty reduction.

The study, conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based NGO Bank Information Center (BIC), evaluated the World Bank’s $15 billion Development Policy Operations loans and economic development program.

BIC’s researches zeroed in on four countries in which the World Bank implemented these programs. In Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique and Peru, BIC that incentives for clean-energy investments had indeed launched in recent years. But the researchers concluded that the World Bank's funding programs actually wound up undermining any progress in transitioning these countries to a lower-carbon economy.

Many NGOs and intergovernmental agencies, including the World Bank, have long touted renewable-energy technologies such as wind and solar as a means to expand energy access to citizens who aren't connected to a regional or national grid. For many of the world’s poorest citizens, access to energy comes in the form of dirty fuels such as kerosene, charcoal or even animal dung.

To that end, the World Bank’s Development Policy Operations completed its work largely by helping to fund private-public partnerships (PPPs) to launch programs that the private sector could not or would not finance alone.

But BIC claims such PPPs were overwhelmingly fossil fuel projects in the four countries it studied, and even included coal investments in Indonesia and Mozambique.

Indonesia’s largess from the World Bank included 4,800 megawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity, complemented by the financing of three coal transport railways on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra — regions already suffering deforestation due to the country’s booming palm oil industry. Meanwhile, only one hydropower plant received World Bank funding. And no “climate-smart” renewables projects such as solar or wind power installations were funded by the World Bank in the island nation of 250 million people.

Peru, another country of focus within BIC’s analysis, did not fare much better or worse (depending on one’s perspective).

BIC accused the World Bank of becoming a driver of deforestation in Peru, due to the funding of projects such as a liquid petroleum gas pipeline, a 500 MW diesel power plant, and 26 new oil and gas concessions in the country’s Amazon rain forest. Clean-energy projects, however, were minuscule. They included a 200 MW hydropower plant. And based on its location, hydropower plants can contribute to deforestation in Peru, the BIC pointed out. The World Bank also funded two energy-efficient street light installations in the South American country.

While the BIC was far more tactful and elegant in concluding this report, it wraps up the study by essentially telling the World Bank to put its money where its mouth is on sustainable development.

The BIC urged the World Bank to stop funding any projects that contribute to rather than mitigate climate change. Furthermore, the organization asked the global financial lender to establish a more robust framework, with greater transparency, as it evaluates potential energy projects in developing countries.

Such guidelines, the BIC insisted, should include parameters such as climate change assessments that help these nations reach the goals to which they agreed at the COP21 talks in Paris; an unequivocal end to fossil fuel subsidies; low-carbon financial incentives that go beyond feed-in tariffs; forest protection that projects both the environment and local citizens; and an assurance that these programs strengthen local governance instead of weakening these governments’ regulatory authorities.

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Study: Residential Solar Power Crosses Party Lines

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Division between America's two political parties reached a fever pitch in this election season. These days it's easy to assume Republicans and Democrats don't agree on much, if anything at all. But if a new study is any indication, residential solar power may be one surprising area where right and left find common ground.

Last week PowerScout, a startup company that serves as a marketplace for clean-energy products and services, set out to determine whether Democrats or Republicans adopted more rooftop solar.

They pulled the addresses of 1.5 million Democratic and Republican party donors in the top 20 solar states and analyzed their rooftops using satellite images and an image-recognition model.

Their discovery? The solar adoption rate among the two parties was more or less the same. A little over 3 percent of Democratic donors in those states installed rooftop solar, compared to 2.24 percent of Republican donors. In some areas, Republicans were even more likely to have solar installed than their Democratic neighbors.

"We went in with an open mind,” Kumar Dhuvur, co-founder of PowerScout, told TriplePundit. “We wanted to really look at the hard data."

His team decided to look at the people who actually donate money to one of the two major political parties. Donor data is publicly available, so they “thought it would be a nice way to test it,” Dhuvur explained.

“This topic has been portrayed as a partisan topic, but I think what this study clearly shows is that clean energy is bipartisan,” Dhuvur told us.
“It has a significant amount of support from people. And if you consider that donors are usually the ones who are more partisan, and you see the data that Republican donors are installing as much solar if not more, then it's clearly a non-partisan topic."

In states like California and Hawaii that have well-established solar markets, party affiliation does not matter when it comes to adopting rooftop solar. In Hawaii, Republicans install more solar than Democrats do, while in California the rate is nearly equal.

As Dhuvur said, “Republicans are actually doing more than Democrats” in more established markets. In states that have solar markets that are not well-established, Democrats install more solar than do Republicans. “Democrats have a lead but not by much,” he explained.

PowerScout hopes the study “leads to more favorable policies from the new administration that exist at the federal level,” Dhuvur told us. He said their study shows “there is a lot of interest in clean energy if the economics are compelling.”

So policies needs to promote the economics of clean energy. And with an administration like President Trump’s, it becomes even more important to break things down financially.

A previous study by SolarPulse, released last fall, found similar results.

SolarPulse, a Denver-based energy company, reviewed data of 25,000 California households that installed solar panels from 1997 to 2015. They found that people in a district that elected a Republican to Congress are “far more likely” to install solar power for their homes than those that elected a Democrat.

California leans heavily to the Democratic party, with 39 of the state’s 53 House representatives being Democrats. The state also produces more energy from rooftop solar panels than any other state in the country. So, it is surprising that SolarPulse found that Republican-leaning areas were five times more likely to install rooftop solar panels. While 1 in every 100 households in areas that elected Republicans bought solar panels in the last five years, only 1 in every 500 households in areas that elected a Democrat did.

SolarPulse found that income does not account for the higher solar power adoption rates in California's Republican districts as Democratic districts have a median per-capita income that is about $8,000 higher. However, the Democratic districts they examined have more renters. While only 40.5 percent of Republicans in California are renters, nearly 50 percent of California Democrats rent.

That accounts for part of the reason why Republicans in California adopt solar more than Democrats do, but geography also plays a big part. Republican districts generally lie in the sunny southeastern parts of the state, while Democratic districts lie in the cooler northern and coastal areas of California. The average Republican district has five time more days of sun annually.

In other words, Californians are adopting solar for practical reasons and party affiliation just is not playing a part -- a conclusion the latest study from PowerScout backs up.

Will these findings pave the way for more friendly conversation between Republicans and Democrats -- or friendlier environmental policies coming out of Washington? Only time will tell.

Image credit: Flickr/Elliot Brown

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