Measuring the Success of Green

Report from Buildings magazine and Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute, 2002, 46 pages. Order at

www.squarefootage.net or by calling 800-452-4480, $495 + $7.50 s+h

Measuring the Success of Greenis a report documenting the results from an online survey of a broad range of building professionals conducted in the 3rd quarter of 2002. The report is well organized and thorough, with a four-page summary of key findings, a description of the survey method, and a breakdown of the responses to each question. Several cross-tabulations showing the responses to questions by different demographic groups are also provided.

The tabulated data includes some interesting, even surprising, results. For example, a majority of respondents believe that green is “very” or “extremely important,” but most did not rate their own understanding of green design very highly and rated their organization’s understanding even lower.

The survey’s 20 questions included three on demographics, several on the respondent’s relationship to green design (including perceived obstacles to green building and the use of LEED™), and one open-ended comments field—the 236 unedited comments comprise a large portion of the report. Ten of the questions evaluated the green communications efforts of major building product suppliers. The ten targeted industries are:

•Carpet fiber

•Carpet mills

•Resilient flooring

•HVAC/environmental controls

•Access floors

•Wall systems

•Ceilings

•Lighting

•Roofing

•Office furniture

The 578 valid responses represent just under 10% of those contacted by e-mail, but over 20% of those who actually opened the messages. The e-mail addresses came from two sources: 5,000 were randomly selected from the

Buildings magazine circulation, and almost 2,000 more represented attendees of seminars by the Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute. The report’s authors claim that the results can be projected onto the broader population from which the names were drawn. It seems likely, however, that the respondents are skewed toward a higher level of awareness of, and sympathy for, green building for several reasons: 1) the self-selecting nature of an e-mail survey; 2) the fact that most of the seminars from which the names were taken were about the costs and benefits of green building; and 3) e-mail recipients were offered an inducement to complete the survey in the form of a drawing for a free seminar. This bias is an unfortunate weakness in an otherwise powerful study.

While

Measuring the Success of Green is not cheap, this sort of concrete information from potential customers is a valuable commodity. Anyone selling green products for commercial buildings, especially in one of the ten targeted industries, should consider investing in the report. With the exception of one question about the market penetration of LEED, however, this report does not provide thorough market research regarding the breadth and depth of the green building industry as a whole. Nevertheless, anyone working on such research will find that it contains useful raw material.

– NM