sapgreen

What seems to be simple in theory is sometimes tough in practice. Delivering trees to homes is an extremely challenging job. We have planted a few trees till now at people’s homes and every time we found the task extremely satisfying. But we need to fine-tune our method of doing this. In the current method of tree planting, we interact with only the owner of the house who wants to plant the tree. Moreover the cost of saplings, transportation, laborer charges etc is just enough to meet the expenses (Due to lower numbers).

The best solution for both cost-efficiency as well as better reach is to get communities to plant trees. For example, residents of Gokulam 3rd stage could form a community and decide to plant trees on a certain date. From our side, we could provide an online forum for the community as well as arranging for planting and maintenance of the trees. An offline community also needs to be in place for better participation. The community members could then decide a date and plant trees all at once.

• This has other benefits as well.
• Large numbers of trees creates news locally and hence creates further interest.
• The price for planting could be decreased even further.
• Some residents who are interested in raising saplings could do so as a hobby and get rewarded for it too.
• The forum would serve as a place for discussing the larger issues of global warming and climate change.

Your feedback on this post would trigger us to create such a forum. I hope the above writeup was clear enough. In case of any doubts please comment.

Although much remains to be done on the operations end, we felt that the marketing part was even more important. So, we thought of some ideas for reaching out to a wide online audience. One way is through emails and forwards. And we do not like spamming people. So, our best option was to create emails which catch the attention of readers so that they forward them themselves. Spoofs of ads is one such attention grabber (Sprite’s Khabristan spoof ad for Pepsi’s Youngistan ad). Although we don’t have the ridiculing motive of the usual spoof ads, we just are trying to piggyback on the popularity of some of the recent ads.




More such ads in the making…

Well, after all the efforts from the three of us, the website was up and running and it was time to let MORE people know of its existence. I say MORE because it is already familiar to quite many of our close ones who have been encouraging, motivating and supporting us.

Yesterday night, I started out composing the mail from outlook and wanted to send it from my Gmail account. All the formatting was lost with Gmail. The quick option I could think of was to have a picture of the content to be sent. I ended up doing it but the size of the image was quite high [ 1MB ]
Sent it to a few friends and Ashwin’s mail id was also involved with it. He noticed the size & notified me. Helped me get a JPEG version of the image which was just around ~60KB

So, I set out again on the mission to spread the word. Orkut CSV file download option came handy with this task of collecting the email ids of all the people I know.

I was 70% done when I could not proceed further as GMail popped up an info msg telling that I am done with the limit of 500 emails a day.. :-/
Had to wait till today to finish the rest.

Importantly :- What needs to be spread is neither the content of my email, nor about Sapgreen, Its the message about saving our environment, caring and protecting it.

We are faced with a list of questions here which need to be answered in our website. The problem with answering in the website is that it takes a lot of time. In a website, all the information should be told in as less space as possible and it should be visually appealing too. No one likes to see a plain text-website. Until we update in the website, here are the Q&A.

Ques 1: How do you justify charging Rs.300 for a tree you grow in a public place?
Ans: Trees are not just about planting and forgetting them. To know this best, ask a farmer how he looks after his trees. Trees require care and watering at least until they see 2 rainy seasons. Pruning also becomes necessary to avoid branching at a very early stage. Hence, maintenance is a must for every tree. Although just 10% of the cost goes towards procurement of the sapling, upto 60% of the cost is required for planting and maintaining the tree itself. 5% of the cost goes towards insuring the tree. Another 10-15% is required for the website and other information media. An even more fine breakup would include tree-guard costs, transportation costs etc.

Ques 2: We know of other organizations who plant for even lesser amounts. How do they manage?
Ans: Yes. Even we know them. The only difference between us and them is that we can assure you that you tree is taken care of until it is self-sustainable. We bring a personal touch by sending you a card with information about your tree. We even provide the status of your tree on our website: http://sapgreen.com/index.php/findmytree.html

Ques 3: Why a business rather than an NGO?
Ans: We love trees. And we want more people to love trees. An NGO brings along with it the notion that by planting trees you are doing charity. A business on the other hand brings the concept of value for money spent. When you spent Rs.300, we want you to see value in the money you spent. By spending on trees, we want people to get a sense of attachment with the tree. Such sort of an attachment slowly but effectively makes more and more people care about trees.

Ques 4: Could you make the card more personalized by maybe including photos as well?
Ans: Yes. We would like to do this if we somehow get to solve the logistical problems involved with this. Following are the issues that need to be solved:

• Printing a card is a pretty costly affair if each card has to include a photo of the sapling as well. However, the price can be reduced by decreasing the size if the photo maybe. So, not much of an issue here.
• If each card has to be printed with a separate photo, we need to wait till the day of planting, take the photo of the sapling, then send the image to the printing shop and wait till he prints it. All this takes substantial time. This much time may not be accepted by all.

Our tree planting process is getting streamlined these days. This has to be so. Otherwise, many details are obvious of getting missed out. For example, without a proper process and a workflow, there is no guarantee that we will have actually planted the tree after we have received money from our “tree friends”. One such process involves tagging the ‘planting ID’ to the sapling.
This serves the purpose of identifying the sapling by anyone when many saplings of similar type are at the same location. Following Pictures describe how we tag the saplings.

That is not all. You can still find the trees in the park using our map shown below. Every new map will be updated in the http://sapgreen.com/index.php/findmytree.html page also. With all of these, I hope finding your tree will be as easy as it can be (All you need is your planting ID). For example, in the below map, you can find 102 at the lower left corner. This is the tree with planting ID KA0901102. You can type the same ID and click on submit in the findmytree section to know the status of the tree. The status page also shows a photograph of the tree when it was planted.
The only thing I am wondering is “How do we provide the same features for offline people?” Please comment if you can think of a method.
Oh, and by the way, our payment gateway is up and running beautifully. So, we are now able to say that tree-planting can now be completely online.

http://greenpreneur.blogspot.com/2008/04/am-i-still-away-from-trees.html

During the software days, this was the most common sentence to be heard. Today, the same happened again here. The delivery date of our website (Payment gateway and Tree-Database) was postponed by one day. Testing the website, we encountered a few problems (no access to database, security issue with gateway, validation of form-fields etc.) Apart from these, the tree-database has to be updated with proper data.
New delivery deadline for website: April 19th 2008 2300Hrs.
When we did software for someone else, we never even thought how much delivery dates could affect the company. Now, we know.

After a few days of lull in our outdoor activities, we plan to plant some more trees this Sunday. A few people now understand the concept of trees as commemorative gifts and hence this activity.
Apart from that, we are still busy fixing our website. Things that are now 80-90% in place are:

• Payment gateway (Testing under process and will be open today. Once open, credit card / debit card payments will be accepted by us)
• Find my tree (A simple form for entering the planting ID will display the status info. Testing under process and will open today)
• A new page explaining the concept of tree gifts: http://www.sapgreen.com/index.php/giftatree/66.html

When I was 7 years old, people asked me what would I want to be when I grew up. I always used to answer that I would be an engineer. There was one reason for telling that. No one questions you further. If you say “I’ll be a businessman”, immediately you are asked another question “What type of business will you do?”. This is an extremely difficult question to answer. If you say “I’ll be a scientist, people would start asking me how much I get in physics, chemistry etc. Again, 99 out of 100 was too less for them. Ever after, I always answered using the same technique. Engineer, electronics engineer, then software engineer. New answers to evade more questions from people.
Unfortunately for me, it took 23 years to understand that evading questions leads to nowhere. So, I know now how to answer if someone asks me “What do you do?”. I say “I plant trees”. They ask me “How do you make a living by planting trees?”. I say “No one really knows, so I am finding it out so that more people can make a living by planting trees and thereby plant more trees”. What is more? The job involves business, engineering and a lot of science as well. Someone told me “Why did you have to study so much if you wanted to plant trees? Even an uneducated can do that”. I ask, how many uneducated do that except for a few greats like “saalu marada thimmakka”. Moreover, if the educated don’t talk, then why is the education for? Only education can tell you the real importance of trees.
Now coming to the importance of trees. Most people talk of the day to day use of trees. Timber, paper, firewood etc. Some others talk of the trees’ ability to reduce pollution, their ability to bring rains, their importance to ecology etc. I just see them as fellow living beings, as friends, as silent beings without whom the earth would be a dull place. Yet, we keep killing them as though their life is of no importance at all. If you can’t stop the killing, atleast bring more to life.
Suppose you have a tank full of water left in your home and the water suddenly stops flowing in the tap. You would stay calm for the first day. The second day, when the tank is half empty, you would be concerned. The third day, you would start finding a way to get water from some borewell or a water tanker. In terms of forests, we are in the second day. We need to act now. If we wait for the third day which is fast approaching, there would be nothing we could do. Because unlike in the water example, we have only one earth.

3 complete days after the inauguration day I am finally back in form. The reasons were many although I wouldn’t want to elaborate on them.
The event in itself was an experience. There were hundreds of issues to take care. Giving equal importance to each and every tree-enthusiast who had attended the event, taking care of our trees, handling over-enthusiastic children, listening to differing opinions of experts, answering queries and a lot more which I have now come to consider as trivial. We have now gained a sort of experience which we can now use in our next event.

Although I got a lot of compliments for the event, I for myself was not satisfied at all. I felt that the event lacked professionalism. Although everything happened till 4 PM as per a clear plan, we lost control over the event in the crucial few moments. But we now know what has to be done the next time. The result of these uncontrolled events was that we had to rework on the whole planting the next day. I have not yet clicked the photos of the reworked planting. Will try to do it tomorrow.
Another learning from the event was that water is a scarce commodity. I set out to get the water connection in place. After long hours waiting at MUDA offices, I have finally got the contractor who has promised me that the pipes will be laid tomorrow (11th Apr) according to my requirement (which I think is a great victory on behalf of our trees).
Today, in fact I and Anil were in for a shock when we saw almost all the Spethodia plants pale and almost dead. Then we found from our Venkateshaiah that these plants always undergo what is known as “root-shock” due to change in soil conditions.
Apart from the tree-planting, there was much more. It was a time for us friends to meet and talk nonsense like at college. And no ceremony goes without an award. We had the ‘enlen’ board as an award.