Interviewer:  Hi, I’m Gail Nickel-Kailing with WhatTheyThink Going Green, and today I'm here with Alice Miller who is IT director from Patient News Publishing; and Patient News Publishing was the winner of the second annual WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Award for Community.  In fact, Patient News Publisher is the second time winner for the Community Award.  Congratulations, Alice.

Alice Miller:  Thank you so much, Gail.

Interviewer:  Patient News Publishing has a huge number of community initiatives that you have launched.  How do you come up with a new one?  Because, you know, as you go through all of these, you’re going to have to have something new and different for next year. 

Alice Miller:  That’s true.  We have a really creative company, to begin with, very dynamic.  One of our years was moved with the cheese, so everything changes, just get ready to go with it.  And in this particular year, again, my environmental team met and just came up with all kinds of ideas and really addressed what they would like to see.  So we had some relationship with local businesses where we were able to offer a discount if anybody, any employee bought an energy efficient appliance, they got a certain amount off.  That’s something that’s not asked for, thought that would be great.

The other thing is they wanted to learn more about composting and about different environmental practices that they could apply to their home as well as to a company and we thought that’s a great idea.  We invited the community and we have a great relationship with our local media and we had people come up from the community, our own staff and had experts come in and give a green geek series, which went over really well. 

So it just keeps building on different ideas.

Interviewer:  Exactly.  Now how do you - which ones of those do you think that is - has been the most effective in the last year?  In the community?

Alice Miller:  For us, I think the most effective one has been the green geek series.  That received a tremendous input.  A lot of people came to that.  But the other one was we offered to our clients - we went into partnership with a company that offered templating of green dental practices and dentists are our main client base and we offer that subscription to their product for free for our clients and that’s really taking off. 

Interviewer:  So, not only are you supporting your local community, you’re supporting your client base bringing new opportunities to them as well as taking them on yourself.

Alice Miller:  Yeah.  They are our community as well, so it’s just an extended branch.

Interviewer:  Great.

Alice Miller:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  Thank you so much.

Alice Miller:  Thank you.