How to Fight Deforestation? Just 24 Trees Can Make a Difference

Fighting against deforestation is a cause we should all care about, because it affects all of us. And at Sociabble, we’ve created a CSR initiative feature to help our company and others offset their carbon emissions with trees—and 24 is the magic number.

What can we, as a company, do to offset carbon emissions and help fight deforestation and climate change? This was a question we first asked ourselves at Sociabble three years ago. We knew we could just donate money to a cause, or encourage recycling in the office, but honestly, we wanted to do more. Something more direct, that really got employees involved.

That was why we created “Sociabble Trees,” a CSR tool built into our platform that rewards employees with actual trees planted in their names, in vulnerable forests around the world. And after planting more than 40,000 trees and raising close to 115,000 Euros, the initiative has truly made a positive impact!

The Quest How to Fight Deforestation: How Sociable Trees Began

Three years ago, the Sociabble team began looking into ways to get involved in stopping climate change. Obviously, it’s a critical issue that affects everyone, and we saw this as something that was essential to take part in.

The next question, however, was how best to get involved? After research and employee surveys, we decided that the best place to start was with a reforestation initiative, as a component of carbon offset. And as a partner in this CSR initiative, we chose Tree-Nation, a non-profit company that allows citizens and corporations the chance to plant trees all around the world and offset their CO2 emissions.

By collaborating with Tree-Nation, we created Sociabble Trees, a special CSR feature built into our Employee Communication platform that rewards employees for positive actions, and plants trees in their name, with the ability to monitor corporate forests and collect data on how many trees have been planted, and the amount of carbon that has been offset.

Sociabble employees rallied around the cause, and winning trees to help the planet has become a fun activity we are all proud of. The Sales, CSM, R&D, and Marketing teams are all dedicated and involved, creating the materials, promoting it internally, and, as we will soon see, encouraging our clients to get involved too. Of course, this is all non-profit—we offer Sociabble Trees as part of our own Corporate Social Responsibility program.

The Sociabble Trees feature of the Sociabble communication platform gets employees involved in reforestation and boosts their engagement, by making it fun to win and plant trees.

Fight deforestation: Carbon Offset in the Digital Age

As a remote SAAS company in the digital sphere, the majority of our own CO2 emissions are linked to maintenance and energy used to power our data centers, which host platforms and data for our worldwide customers.

From collaborating with Tree-Nation, we learned that companies like ours—and probably yours—can offset the carbon footprint of their workforce by planting 24 trees per employee per year. Essentially, 24 trees can offset about 3.6 tons of carbon. This, multiplied times our 68 employees, is equal to the offset of roughly 245 tons of carbon; according to Tree-Nation,

The total annual emissions of an office-based employee averages between 3 and 3.6 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. This average has been calculated based on the French analysis by Sinteo/ARSEG, and then adapted to the European average.Tree Nation

For our own reforestation efforts for Sociabble employees, we decided to focus this year on a forest in Tanzania, selected together with help from Tree-Nation—however, forests are available around the world for participating companies to choose from, and our own clients have helped plant trees in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

As to the program itself, here at Sociabble we automatically distribute two trees each month to every employee, to cover the 24 trees needed for carbon offset. These are supplemented by additional trees that employees earn through engagement on the platform.

Clients Who Have Also Led the Way to fight deforestation

We created Sociabble Trees to get our own company involved, but also to involve other companies as well. That’s why we offer it as a feature in our Employee Communication platform, so other organizations can reward their employees for engagement and start their own CSR reforestation initiative.

Many have followed our example of giving 24 trees pers employee, while supplementing those with additional trees awarded for engagement or recognition. Clients have given trees as rewards for:

• • Birthdays and anniversaries at the company
  • Sharing or creating content
  • To kick off global launches and events
  • As prizes for contests
  • To welcome new employees And the list of clients who have participated is growing by the day.

Companies like Vinci Energies, Tata Housing Development, L’Occitane International, Nagarro, and ABB Enterprise Software have all joined the cause. If they’ve done it, so can you!

The Results So Far

The Sociabble Trees program has been an incredible success, between the combined efforts of our own Sociabble employees, and our client and partner organizations who have gotten onboard and deployed the program for their employees as well.

To date, more than 40,000 trees have been planted through the initiative, with roughly 115,000 Euros raised for the cause since 2019, and with the rate doubling just in the past year. 53 companies have participated so far, and offered trees to their employees to offset deforestation and climate change both. And the benefits extend beyond just helping the environment.

Through the reward program, employees have become more engaged with their companies, more involved in CSR causes in general, and helped spread information about the program across their social networks, creating awareness of the cause. Honestly, it’s been a win for all, and we couldn’t be more proud of the collective effort.

Ways to Learn More

If fighting deforestation and getting involved with the Sociabble Trees program as a CSR initiative sounds like something your company might be interested in, we’d love to chat.

Or even if you’d like to learn more about employee engagement and communication, that’s our specialty too. We’ve already worked with dozens of companies in over 80 countries around the world to optimize their communication strategy.

Click here for a free demo of the platform and Sociabble Trees.