Planning a zero waste event isn’t just about having a plan for recycling, composting, or even donating your leftover materials. Zero waste planning starts with consciously minimizing the amount of waste your event generates in the first place.
One significant and often challenging source of event waste is promotional items, a.k.a. giveaways and swag. When I attend events, I’ve definitely been a major offender of doing the “frantic swag grab.” I’m super thrifty, so when there’s free stuff to be had, it’s hard for me to resist! Even if I don’t really need the item, I can always imagine “potential” uses that motivate me to take things I never actually end up using, from brands I don’t remember anything about two seconds after I walk away from their booth.
Free stuff has a psychological effect on even eco-conscious event attendees (like me!). So as an event organizer or exhibitor, you have a lot of power to reduce waste by being more strategic with your promotional items. This approach is not only more eco-friendly, but it will also help you create better, more meaningful connections with your target audience.
“Gone are the days of cheap, fast and throwaway swag,” says Kelly Elsner, co-founder of sustainable branded gift company Blue Dot. “Instead we help our clients put their swag dollars toward meaningful impact and connection.”
Here are five ways to reduce event waste from promotional items and giveaways:
1) Purchase fewer, higher-quality, sustainably-sourced items.
What do your promotional item choices say about your brand? Do low-value items like cheap pens and stress balls really convey the message you want to send?
For many companies, giving away swag is something they do because they’ve always done it. It’s easy to fall into repeat patterns of reordering the same items or looking for items at the same price point that you’ve gotten before. However, it’s important to ask yourself what you really want to achieve by giving away promo items.
“Brand awareness” is a common goal of promotional item campaigns. However, brand awareness isn’t valuable to your company if you’re giving away cheap items to people who are not realistically in a position to need your products or services.
Just looking around my desk, here are the promo items I have within arm’s reach that are from brands 1) I am not the target audience for, or 2) I have no interest in:
- Flash drive from software company targeted to huge corporations
- Stick-on phone wallet from hotel that I don’t even remember what state it’s in
- Camera cover from a golf resort (I do not golf)
- Set of highlighters from a company I’m not sure is even in business anymore
Brand awareness is only valuable if you make the right people aware, and if you make enough of an impression that they bother to remember what your company is all about.
One way to make a better impression is to give away higher-quality, sustainably-sourced items. Not only will these items be more attractive and enjoyable for recipients to use for a longer period of time, they’ll convey a better image than cheap chotchkes.
The second vital aspect of this strategy is to give out fewer items. If you’re purchasing more expensive items, it logically follows that you won’t be able to give them to everyone. But this actually has a strategic advantage too: By requiring a baseline level of engagement from attendees before giving them a gift, you’ll cultivate warmer leads and be able to weed out attendees who aren’t a good fit for your services.
Offering a higher-quality gift may also create a greater incentive for event attendees to actually talk to the rep at your booth, whereas they may not think it’s worth risking a sales conversation just to grab a free pen (hello, introverts!).
As fun as it can be to walk out of an event with a bag full of free stuff, I’m also fully aware that I am not my best self when I’m grabbing free swag, and the thrill of the haul quickly fades. It’s time to shift event culture so attendees don’t expect to get free stuff from brands they have no interest in or ability to do business with. If your goal as an exhibitor is to generate leads, choose promo items that will actually help you do that, and don’t worry about snubbing Nancy Not-Your-Target-Audience-Anyway.
Here are a few companies and e-commerce websites that can help you start creating a higher-quality promo item strategy:
- Blue Dot
- Ethix Merch
- Fairware
- Eco Promotional Products, Inc.
- Ethical Swag
- Local artisans and makers in the event’s host city
2) Minimize branding and date-specific designs for longevity and usefulness.
Quality doesn’t just come from the base item itself — it also comes from the design you apply to it. You don’t want to invest in a high-quality water bottle or shirt and then over-brand it so no one wants to be seen using it.
People don’t want to be walking billboards, even for brands they like. Yes, you’ll see people wearing shirts with bold Nike or Adidas logos, but most corporate brands don’t have the cultural clout that make them appealing to wear as a fashion statement.
“We help clients choose gifts with subtle or no branding,” says Elsner of Blue Dot. “Our goal is to design products their audiences will LOVE and keep.”
When choosing what to print on your giveaways, think about what you would personally want to wear or use in both personal and professional settings. The “max imprint” area on a promotional item is not a requirement of the space you have to fill! You can always go smaller and more subtle than space allows.
It’s also important to avoid printing your items with event-specific information, dates, or short-term themes/campaigns. Focus on your company’s general branding/name/logo instead. This will not only give your items a longer useful life for recipients (at some point, you don’t want to wear the “Y2K Golf Outing” polo anymore), but it will also save you money: By ordering simpler, more versatile designs, you’ll be able to use leftover promo items for many different events and purposes, reducing the amount you need to reorder and the number of items that go to waste.
3) Consider the entire life cycle of an item.
When I see promo items get left behind after events, exhibitors often claim that it’s not worth it to ship the items back to their office. Sometimes they even imply they are attempting to avoid the carbon footprint of shipping. However, in order to truly understand the value or environmental impact of shipping items back to your home base, you need to think about the entire life cycle of your promo items.
If you don’t ship the items you have back, will you need to order new ones for your next event? If yes, where are those items coming from originally? Even if you order from a promo item vendor in the event’s host city, the items they source will likely come from China or other far away locations before being branded and distributed locally. And that’s just transportation — new items also require the extraction of raw materials and energy-intensive manufacturing. Is adding one more moderate leg of ground shipping really going to be worse than the environmental impact of an entirely new order? Probably not.
If you feel no need to ship your items back to your office for reuse, you’re also acknowledging that your items are so inconsequential and cheap that they are virtually worthless to you. What kind of impression do you think that kind of item is making on your audience?
Here are some other ways to minimize the impact of shipping items back:
- Did you bring too many items with you in the first place? If you always have a box full of items leftover, order fewer in the first place, and order items that people actually want. (No more stress balls!)
- Even better, bring a smaller number of higher-quality items and only give them to warm leads. If you run out, collect contact information from the remaining leads and send them a gift directly after the event, or give them an alternate offer like a discount.
- Opt-in to purchasing a carbon offset for your shipments, if offered by your shipping vendor. UPS offers a carbon neutral shipping option.
4) Always make gifts and promotional items optional.
Guests should always be presented with a choice of whether or not they want to accept a gift item. Even if you’ve chosen attractive, high-quality items, “not everyone wants a branded freebie,” says Elsner. “That’s why we help eliminate waste through opt-ins.”
Don’t take it personally if attendees decline your gifts — it’s likely because they already have a similar item (or way too many of them) or are packing light. I attended a conference a few years ago and was relieved that the vast majority of promo items were optional. Even though a brand I liked was giving out cute mugs, my suitcase and my kitchen cabinets were very grateful I didn’t bring home another mug to cram in.
It’s important to present the choice explicitly by asking “Would you like XYZ?”, rather than holding out an item and leaving it to the attendee to decline. When someone is actively handing you an item, most people will take it automatically to be polite, even if they don’t want the item. It’s considered rude to turn down a gift someone is handing you, even if you know you technically have permission to say no.
I saw this in action a couple of years ago at a street festival for a major football game. A national sandwich chain was exhibiting and had a representative actively handing out plastic souvenir cups to passers-by. Ecosystem Events was running the waste diversion stations at the festival, and I noticed that the waste station just past the sandwich tent was full of these souvenir cups. Even though it was a practical and reusable gift item, most people were only accepting the cup out of obligation and then throwing it away just a few steps later.
For virtual events, it’s just as important to give attendees a choice. If you’re planning to mail a gift or experience box, ask guests to opt-in, rather than assuming everyone wants to receive it. I also recommend avoiding “surprise” gift boxes and instead letting guests know what you plan to send them. If participants don’t know in advance what they’re opting in to, after the initial excitement of opening the box, they may find themselves with yet another tumbler/tote bag/notebook that they already have dozens of, or a food & beverage kit that doesn’t fit with their dietary restrictions. When a gift turns out to be unneeded or even exclusionary, the experience of receiving it is a burden rather than a delight.
5) Embrace impermanence.
Many promotional items, especially higher-quality gifts, are designed to be long-lasting and timeless. But do you really need a long-lasting item to reach your marketing goal?
As much as we may wish it was the case, giving a potential client a durable gift will not automatically result in their long-term relationship with your brand. Due to the unrecyclable nature of most promotional items, your swag is almost guaranteed to outlive the recipient’s relationship with your brand — even if they end up becoming a brand evangelist and using the item everyday, which happens in only a small percentage of cases. It’s much more likely that recipients will use your items for only a short time, forget about them altogether, or that the items will break or become outdated at some point… all scenarios ultimately ending at the landfill.
So sometimes it’s okay for gifts or information to be ephemeral… if you’ve designed them so they can be easily recycled.
Two of the best examples I’ve seen of recyclable, impermanent promotional items are MailChimp’s “paper buddy” and this wearable paper beard I picked up from French Paper at a design conference. Both of these items are memorable and fun, so they succeed at creating a positive impression, but they also are very easy to get rid of when their usefulness/enjoyment is spent.
Working with a local designer and printer to come up with your own unique paper giveaway will both reduce the manufacturing impact on the front end (especially if you print on 100% recycled paper!) and the disposal impact on the back end. When the recipient is done having fun with your paper hat, folding puzzle, or other fun paper creation, they can simply recycle it with their other mail and office paper.
Digital promotions can also replace physical items. Display a QR code that attendees can scan to receive a coupon via email. Or have a fun activation at your booth that attendees can take pictures of, instead of taking a physical item.
Gift-giving can be a valuable tool for building relationships — if you approach the process responsibly and strategically. Inexpensive plastic junk scattered to the masses won’t yield value for your business or make an impression on the people you want to reach. By keeping your marketing goals in mind, you can build better connections by choosing sustainably-made, high-quality items to give out more selectively, and sticking with recyclable or digital promotions when casting a wider net. Put guests in the driver’s seat to choose what they want to receive, and design your items wisely so you can save and reuse leftovers at future events.
What are the main sources of leftover promo items at your events? Which of these strategies might help you cut down on promotional item waste? Let me know in the comments below!