By David Dodge
David Betke considers himself an environmentalist and it was those roots that led to him starting a marketing company back in the day.
Today his company is called Do Better Marketing, but it started as PET, which stood for Preserving Our Environment for Tomorrow.
In the early 1990s people formed “a massive roadblock outside of Nelson B.C.” to stop logging of old-growth forests.
“I decided to go out and do a different thing. I designed a number of really kind of far-sideish cartoons and printed them on t-shirts and magnets and stickers,” says Betke.
Betke traveled across the country to universities and colleges selling his t-shirts and collecting names on a petition to stop the logging.
“And during the evenings, I would go to the stores in the community and ask if they would sell my shirts,” says Betke.
Then while traveling through Edmonton, Alberta Betke met Andrea his future wife and there he started connecting with festivals such as the infamous Edmonton Folk Music Festival and printed their t-shirts and swag.
“I was bothered by the fact that I had just put a forest or provincial park on the map and, what am I doing by just selling all this stuff?” says Betke.
After getting involved in the events industry he discovered there was waste everywhere.
“All of these companies giving away all these shiny things and really getting nothing out of it at the end of the day,” so Betke created a couple of apps called GreenTaps and GreenTexts.
So rather than leaving a big pile of waste behind at the end of a trade show, booth visitors would load the app, click on the booth’s code and voila a list of the brochures and information is right at your fingertips in digital format.
GreenShows born of crisis
David Betke had no plans to create a full-on virtual event hosting app, but once COVID hit the events industry was shut down over night.
“I started phoning up a number of my clients in March of 2020 and to my absolute horror, a number of them had been laid off.
“They were all in dire straits. So, I decided let’s get to get something together and started developing GreenShows.”
Knowing how shows work best Betke knew an app could be created that eclipsed the meeting apps that were suddenly all the rage.
So he created GreenShows based on three primary widgets. The first is a trade show widget with a trade show, floor, and scrolling booths you could enter.
The second is an on-demand speaker widget complete with a main stage that can take over the entire app when a presentation is on.
Then he created a meeting and networking widget complete with round tables you can join or set up anytime while attending the show.
It seems Betke has nailed his niche. These days he’s very busy with clients from Alberta and around the world. His platform recently hosted a student environmental competition for the Battle River Watershed Alliance and he even hosted a volunteer party for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival that ran overtime because lock-down, home-ridden volunteers were really enjoying getting together, even if virtually. The event included five “live” bands and some rallying comments from festival producer Terry Wickam.
Oh, by the way Betke hit a nerve with this one. It turns out his company produced t-shirts for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival for years and now I know who to blame for my drawer full of Folk Fest shirts.
GreenShows hosted a speaker series for the Alberta Emerald Awards Foundation recently and is getting set to host the Alberta Emerald Awards which is normally a very splashy gala where environmental awards are handed out each year.
What is the “Green” in GreenShows?
Thanks again to Betke’s environmental roots he also decided to make all GreenShow Events carbon neutral. GreenShows plants 10 trees for every booth at a trade show and offsets the events “to the tune of one kilogram per person, per hour of video served; which is the best academic information we can get about carbon offsets for virtual events.”
“They’re planted in Canada. They’re bar coded. And then we give the code to the recipient and they can actually take that code and they can also plant the tree in our virtual forests,” says Betke.
Virtual events not only save a ton of travel and emissions, GreenShows has turned tree planting into a fashionable alternative to traditional swag and clients seem to love it.
Not only does GreenShows plant real trees, they create virtual versions of the real trees so you can plant it online in GreenShow’s virtual forest for all to see.
At the site you can see trees planted to honour front-line health care workers, loved ones and even people’s family members or businesses.
Business went a little crazy after a recent COVID lockdown with GreenShows booking 14 more shows.
Post Covid – Are we hooked on virtual events?
So where will this all go in the future? People are certainly craving live concerts and live events after more than a year of COVID-19, but on the other hand people have also become very accustomed to attending online events and using apps like GreenShows.
“The virtual [event] is not going away. I know a couple of our customers are never going back to physical,” says Betke. “They’ve seen the environmental savings of virtual [events] and they’ve also seen the, the amazing cost savings of virtual.”
Good virtual events are achieving retention rates of 89%, says Betke. “It’s never going to replace physical [events], but I don’t see virtual ever going away.”
Prior to the pandemic some events would bring in virtual speakers occasionally, but it never seemed to catch on. But now the market is so experienced doing this, it’s become second nature and participants see significant benefits in virtual events.
Sure, there is reduced travel and carbon emissions, but also you can attend events you would not have attended because they were too far away, or cost too much in time or money.
Besides you can go to the kitchen and make coffee while listening to a speaker instead of sitting quietly on their hands in uncomfortable chairs.
Ok we both agree there is no fricken way virtual will ever replace live events like the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, but Betke says he believes there will be a significant new market niche for virtual events even after the pandemic subsides.
Green Meets – Coming Soon
Betke says he’s now working on something called GreenMeets with the Canadian Business for Social Responsibility Association. The idea is to facilitate networking for small and medium-sized enterprises trying to raise the bar on sustainability. It will also have a permanent sustainable green trade show component as well.
In these times of extraordinary change, GreenMeets plans to facilitate networking among sustainability folks on a semi-permanent basis.