BetterWorld Voice — January/February 2008 Issue
Welcome to Our Premier Issue of The BetterWorld Voice eNewsletter
From the entire BetterWorld Telecom team, we would like to wish you all the best for a healthy and successful 2008. We very much appreciate and value the trust you have placed in BetterWorld as your communications provider and look forward to serving your needs for the coming year and beyond.
As part of our Environmental Impact Plan, we decided to phase-out our paper newsletter and billing inserts in 2007, and instead, electronically distribute a more interactive, environmentally friendly monthly eNewsletter. The goal of The BetterWorld Voice eNewsletter is to keep you abreast of our products, partners and other customers doing great things every day. Remember: our primary goal in serving you is to help your organization optimize its operations, lower overhead, and provide you with the uncommon opportunity to work with a like-minded partner that is aligned with your mission and desire to make the world a better place. We look forward to your comments and hope you find this regular communication informative and helpful.
BetterWorld Telecom Certified as First Carbon-Neutral Telecommunications Carrier in North America
BetterWorld Telecom has received Zerofootprint's certification as the first telecom provider in North America to achieve carbon-neutral status. Zerofootprint, based in Toronto, Canada, is an organization that provides information, products and services to people and businesses working to reduce their environmental impact.
A new voice in the $900 billion US telecom services market, BetterWorld Telecom is strongly committed to the environment in its own daily internal business operations and actively helps its customers follow suit by offering a menu of service solutions to help organizations and businesses maintain sustainability.
"BetterWorld Telecom is now the first carbon-neutral telecom carrier in North America," explains BetterWorld President Matt Bauer. "We have teamed with Zerofootprint to calculate and offset our carbon emissions and we couldn't be more pleased with earning this very important distinction from this very innovative organization."
"We take our commitment to the environment so seriously that we have made every effort to minimize our carbon footprint to the fullest extent possible," continues Bauer. "The carbon emissions from all the paper we use in our office, for our newsletter, for billing purposes, as well as the carbon emissions associated with our office electricity, heating and employee travel have all been mitigated through offsetting. These impacts will be balanced out using ISO 14064-part 2 reforestation carbon offsets, which will help revitalize degraded ecosystems and soak up the CO2 we've produced."
"I couldn't be more proud of our team for their dedication and hard work by achieving this special certification through a combination of our web-based infrastructure, environmental offsets and proactive environmental business practices. By engaging in these activities, we will reduce our environmental impact, help limit BetterWorld Telecom's contribution to climate change, and hopefully encourage others — whether within or outside the telecommunications industry — to join us in this global fight to save the environment."
Bauer explains that achievement of the carbon-neutral status was only the first step in an ongoing commitment towards environmentally sustainable operations. Future goals include working with the US Green Building Council to develop telecoms as a LEED certification component, developing a "telecom offset" for all of our customers' usage, rolling out an employee home/personal offset program by 2009, as well as becoming 100% environmentally neutral through core business practices and offsets by 2010.
Zerofootprint combines the best financial engineering, environmental engineering, social networking tools and business intelligence to create products and services that help large corporations, organizations and individuals significantly reduce their environmental footprint. To learn more, please visit www.zerofootprint.net.
Customer/Partner Highlight: The National Center for Family Literacy
We are pleased to highlight one of our great ongoing customer and donation partner relationships, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL). Literacy is the change agent that inspires families and communities to raise the achievement bar. Family is the conduit for long-lasting, meaningful change.
Working together with families, communities and dedicated partners, NCFL's services bring about change to ensure that parents and children achieve their goals for success. NCFL pioneered the approach that puts family at the forefront of educational reform.
Since its inception in 1989, NCFL has provided the leadership to solve our national literacy problem. Through groundbreaking initiatives, NCFL fuels life improvement for the nation's most disadvantaged children and parents. More than one million families throughout the country have made positive educational and economic gains as a result of NCFL's work, which includes training more than 150,000 teachers and thousands of volunteers.
Family literacy is proven to break down other barriers to success — poverty, unemployment, poor health and inadequate housing. NCFL believes when parents struggle with literacy and life skills, their children have fewer chances for success. Family literacy reverses that cycle by teaching the families of today in order to impact the generations of tomorrow. Led by founder and president Sharon Darling, NCFL champions a cause that promises a brighter future for all families. For more information, visit www.famlit.org.
The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is proud to partner with Better World Books to help families who struggle with low literacy. Since 1989, NCFL has been encouraging families learn, interact and succeed together, working towards creating a literate nation by leveraging the power of the family.
From March 30 to April 1, NCFL will hold the 17th annual National Conference on Family Literacy, the largest and most comprehensive event dedicated to family literacy. The conference offers educators, community leaders, philanthropists and government officials access to the leading experts in education, family involvement, literacy research and policy.
NCFL is proud to announce that Anna Quindlen will be participating in this year's conference. Quindlen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author and current Newsweek columnist. And more exciting speakers to be named soon! The Conference is a premier activity of NCFL, an organization which has impacted more than 1 million families and trained more than 150,000 practitioners in 19 years.
Green Products Highlight: BetterWorld Virtual PBX, Unified Communications and VoIP
Throughout most of 2007, BetterWorld successfully rolled out its full-service line of Virtual PBX and VoIP products that many our customers have already begun taking advantage of nationwide. These services allow much greater flexibility in the organization, especially those with multiple offices and distance workers, with less impact on the environment: less wires, less equipment and less power utilization. We call it BetterWorld Business VoIP.
BetterWorld Business VoIP provides a wide range of options to meet the needs of today's organizations. You're at the home office in San Francisco. Your colleague is sitting in a café in Atlanta. With BetterWorld Business VoIP, you can conference, transfer a customer, track calls, and so much more with just the push of a button. The flexibility and features are infinite, but are always easy to use. BetterWorld Business VoIP runs with plug-and-play simplicity and unmatched reliability. In days you can have a phone system with enterprise grade features and all you need is a broadband connection. More information.
Let us know your thoughts and talk to you soon.