Audio and Web Conferencing Services Lead to Green Business

These days it seems as though everyone is striving to be more “green.” Many providers are claiming to have solutions and products that are more “green,” and businesses of all types and sizes are announcing they are taking a more eco-friendly approach to their daily operations.

Although both audio conferencing and web conferencing has been around for years, it was only recently that providers realized they too were helping to save the planet. In fact, it has become such a large selling point, that now some providers even offer CO2 calculators that indicate how much carbon dioxide you saved by hosting a virtual conference as opposed to an in-person meeting.

As someone who deals with both audio and web conferences on a regular basis, I thought it would be a good practice to dig a little deeper and shed some light on the impact that conferencing services really have on the environment.

To start, we’ll split conferences into 2 categories:

• Traditional remote meetings
• New business opportunities

The first category is comprised of virtual conferences that are used take the place of in-person meetings that require travel for one or more participants. In other words, if modern conferencing technology didn’t exist, participants would travel to a specific destination to hold or attend these meetings. Examples of traditional remote meetings include brainstorming/collaboration sessions between employees, product demos, sales presentations, etc.

It is well known that the emissions from planes, trains, cars, and boats take a huge toll on our environment. By eliminating even one of these for your participants, clearly you are taking a positive step in the right direction.

That being said, we still have not seen the true impact that conferencing services can potentially have on the environment for the simple reason that many businesses have yet to use them the way they could and should. In its pioneer days, conferencing services were complex and fickle, causing many executives to shy away from frequent use. Modern conferencing services, on the other hand, are reliable, flexible, easy-to-use, and offer a robust set of features to make your meetings more powerful and effective than ever before. Meet with as few as 2 or as many as 2,000 participants – anywhere, anytime.

The second category refers to new business opportunities enabled by your audio or web conferencing service. These meetings include training or student courses, etc. Essentially, if conferencing technology did not exist, neither would these meetings. As such, this category does not really bring any environment savings, but does offer a wide range of new business opportunities.

In short, reducing the amount of travel your participants need to join your meeting will result in significant cost savings and a smaller carbon footprint for your business – what’s not to love about that?