We help music festivals manage their carbon strategy by engaging their communities in sustainable and rewarding practices. We sell 15 euros add-on Green Tsunami bracelets to empower music festivals audiences and encourage them to adopt low-carbon behaviors through perks and rewards. The money raised with the bracelets helps us in measuring, reducing, and financing local suppliers (recycling centers, agricultural cooperatives), carbon capture (mineralization), and local reforestation projects.
Green Tsunami tackles music festivals' carbon emissions over the 3 SCOPES by engaging their communities in sustainable and rewarding practices. We sell optional add-on Green Tsunami bracelets to engage music festivals audiences and encourage them to adopt low-carbon behaviors through premiums and rewards. The money raised with the bracelets then helps us on 3 different matters. First, we measure (Data gathering and GHG protocol) and reduce carbon emissions, through an action plan based on the data we gathered. We then finance contribution programs such as carbon capture projects (mineralization), reforestation near the venue to sequester the remaining emissions of the festivals we work with. We also use the money to invest in new sustainable and local suppliers that we integrate later on into our solutions for the music festival industry, in order to create a circular economy. We can invest in local recycling centers or agricultural cooperatives, or even sustainable dry toilet solutions and as such create a network of sustainable service providers. We also act on the attendee's side, by fostering sustainable behaviors in exchange for perks. For example, if you decide to only eat vegetarian at the festival, you can access an exclusive fast-track entrance. We finally partner with sustainable alternatives, such as plant-based meat companies (Algama, Umiami) to sell their products at the festival and then reduce meat consumption. Our plan is to help festivals with their transition, as everything will not happen in one year. We aim at bringing long-term value by improving our processes through constant iteration. Year over year, we can collect more relevant data and implement more accurate action and precisely map the music festival industry carbon footprint. We are thus able to help festivals take back control of their carbon footprint in a community-driven approach, aligning
their interests with those of the attendees in a sustainable and committed perspective.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Our goal is to transform the music festival industry by accompanying them in their transition. We want to reduce the gap of skills, budget, and time allocated to this topic which is central if the industry wants to transform itself and respect the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
Our first objective is to have a clear and thorough measurement of the carbon emissions of European music festivals on the 3 SCOPES. Today very few can provide a figure that meets an official methodology, so the consumer does not have access to the information to make a decision at the time of purchase. This is a central transparency issue if we want to create the right incentives.
Our second objective is to divide by 2 the emissions of the festivals we work with within 3 years of partnership. Our solution offers a clear and efficient path, our calculation system will be certified by ADEME. It will be grafted onto the festival infrastructure (cashless, invoice management tools, etc...) in order to be able to calculate simply and precisely the carbon emissions linked to the actions undertaken by the festival.
Our solution also allows crowdfunding, to finance a carbon reduction action in the long term (carbon consultant support), as well as the different methods of contribution and carbon capture mentioned above. We believe that the initiative must be community-based, and engage all stakeholders and not just the festival organization which is not competent, funded, and efficient enough to achieve these goals alone.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Regarding the user experience, we want to offer an effective solution that can be engaged, effective but also enjoyable.
With Green Tsunami, we want to prove that making the festival greener can also make it cooler. This is where the exclusive benefits for green tsunami users come into play. We want to offer discounts on local drinks, easy entry lines, exclusive raffles for the backstage, or even a dedicated area on the festival grounds for those who decided to commit and buy our Green Tsunami bracelet. Also, consuming more sustainable products (vegetarian meals, recycled goblets...) can also be more interesting in terms of costs, and allow the emergence of more interesting alternatives in terms of price and environmental responsibility.
User experience also includes the festivals. With the information gathered discussing to festival organizers we understood how difficult it is today to understand the different tools available in terms of making the industry more sustainable (many excels without notice to use them, calculators needing python or programming skills, ...). We would provide a digital toolbox on Notion to support them through their journey.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Green Tsunami is committed to parity when hiring employees and volunteers, and to treating each of its stakeholders without discrimination. These commitments are at the root of the values that we want to defend and disseminate to the public with whom we will come into contact.
Indeed, our solution is mainly designed by our product manager Ilo Rakotonavahy. As a Malagasy woman, she uses her personal experience as a tool to not invisibilize minorities. Buying our bracelet is the main way to help but not the only one. For more modest revenues, we would organize contest but also call for benevolent work to actively participate in the festival, while also attending some of the musical performances.
We intend to spread a strong communication strategy on these subjects to our public, and to underline the importance of responsible behavior on the ecological level, but also in the respect of living together. We will process data in an anonymized manner, and comply with the established rules of the GDPR. Moreover, regarding the costs of our solution to the public, we propose a solution to transform festivals that aims to make their offer of food, and alternatives wider, local, and cheaper. The price of our optional bracelet is calculated to guarantee optimal fundraising while remaining reasonable (10% of the price of an average ticket).
Finally, our solution is intimately integrated into the local fabric of the communities in which the festivals take place. Thus, we want to promote the production of local products on the festival sites with which we work, and thus employment and local economic dynamism. We can, in the axes of transformation of the festival, integrate accessibility actions by creating partnerships with local transportation networks (the RATP in Paris for example) and reduce transport costs (as well as emissions) for all festival-goers, and charter specialized shuttles for people with reduced mobility.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
Our solution seeks to accompany our customers: festivals in their low-carbon transition. We want to rely on many stakeholders to achieve this goal: festival-goers, local brand partners, festival volunteers, or even our employees and service providers. Through our values, we want to establish ourselves as a brand that transforms profoundly through its carbon action, and that does so in a circular, social and inclusive approach.
We will integrate all of the above elements into our interactions to make the music festival industry a leader in the low-carbon transition while respecting the rules of inclusion, parity, and equality.
Our main competitors are consulting firms specialized in sustainable development such as Carbon4 or Ekodev in France, but we can also mention smaller start-ups focused on sustainable development such as Sami, Cargo, or Aktios (their CEO is one of our mentors).
We have several competitive advantages to differentiate ourselves from them. First of all, our system adapts to the music festival industry, which is a particular sector in terms of environmental impact, number of interlocutors, and data collection. We have designed a calculation tool based on the ADEME's carbon standards that can be easily integrated into the festival's infrastructure in order to gather the maximum amount of relevant information. This innovation allows us to save time, but we intend to automate the process of calculation and carbon measurement over time. We can quickly build a defensible position through experience, data gathering, and network effects.
Our bracelet also allows participants to change their behavior through incentives (backstage access, fast-track, etc...) in exchange for sustainable behaviors (carpooling, vegetarian meals, etc...), which consulting firms are unable to do in their current structure. In addition, we can offer our product at no direct cost to the festivals, as it is funded by the demand for impact and rewards from the participants, which lower the economic burden of the transition for the festivals, increase the potential for change and accelerate the transition.
Finally, we build a network of suppliers that we invest in, which grows over time, which allows us to achieve economies of scale, synergies, and strengthen our leadership position. Our innovation lies in the specific character of our solution, designed for and by the festivals, with the support of the whole community, in order to amplify the impact and the reach of our solution, with more budget, more empowered population, and ultimately more transparency.
Our strategy is to launch our social networks and website by the end of April. To get the Carbon Footprint certification in May to guarantee our working methods. To work this summer with some French festivals: Lollapalooza Paris, Main square festival and Soliday's, with whom we are already in discussion.
We will be able to start centralizing a community on our networks to A/B test some of the solutions we want to implement, to test our carbon measurement and reduction solution with festivals, to collect the first funds to invest in the circular economy we aim to launch and to act according to our results for the following years.
The goal is to work with big names in the festival industry to build our credibility in the eyes of the public and professionals, and then accelerate to a European scale. We also intend to rely on various partnerships with local authorities who are increasingly imposing restrictive rules on the carbon strategy of festivals, but also with the Shift Project (with whom we are already in contact) so that they can validate and support the solutions that our initiative proposes.
If we were awarded the prize, we would expand our activities and outreach thanks to three main points.
First, we will invest in our go-to-market and marketing strategy through advertising on social media, content marketing, and visuals. The goal is to build our community of festival-goers without depending on our client's own communities. We want to nurture our community beyond the duration of the festivals. Emailing and marketing tools will also help us evaluate the success of our campaigns.
Our second mission would be to expand our team. Indeed, with all the tasks related to administration and internal operations split between the two of us, we cannot focus as much as we would like on the design of our solution. Thus, we must add an IT profile to help with the technical execution and integration of our solution while we delegate our accounting to a freelancer. We also think of building special reward packages to recruit consulting interns to be able to work on more than 2 festivals over the summer without diminishing the quality of our services.
Finally, as we gain visibility and expand our team, our last goal is to formalize our internal processes by respecting CSR objectives under the law or B corporation certificate. It would be different than a carbon footprint certificate as it would show that we follow our own recommendations and apply low-carbon processes inside our internal organization. It would help build our potential partners and community trust and improve our expertise on the subject.
Those three goals require time and investments that cannot be taken without proper funding. Yet, they would truly bring us to the next level of our project.
@Jean Crosetti, 2022
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