Better Business Challenge: Blue Moon Diner
BlueMoonDiner (click PDF)
Fall 2011
Team members: Claire Hitchins and Carlin Tacey
The objective of this project is to assist Better World Betty with the Charlottesville Better Business Challenge through our concierge service to challenge participant, Blue Moon Diner. As concierges our function is twofold – to sustain momentum and excitement for the Better Business Challenge and to collaborate with this local restaurant as it implements practices and earns points in the areas of energy, water, waste, transportation, purchasing, and leadership. In an initial meeting with Laura Galgano, manager of Blue Moon Diner, we assessed the diner’s level of sustainability using the Better Business Challenge Scorecard and created a plan of action for Blue Moon to implement additional sustainable practices. As concierges we identified and accomplished five “Action Items” to assist Better World Betty and advance Blue Moon’s success in the Challenge.
Our first Action Item was the creation of the “Blue Moon Goes Green Competition Timeline” to keep Laura organized and on track with her efforts. This document includes important dates, deadlines, and objectives and helps ensure Blue Moon’s continued success in the competition beyond the scope of our involvement as concierges this semester. For our second action item we created a series of signs that encourage sustainable behavior of diner patrons and staff. We shared these signs with Laura to post in Blue Moon and with Better World Betty to make them available to other businesses in the competition. In order to showcase Blue Moon’s unique sustainability efforts and provide a video “Spotlight” for the Better Business Challenge website, we created a short video as our third action item. Our fourth action item is product research on reverse osmosis water filtration systems for Blue Moon to reference for future purchasing decisions. We have made this resource available to other businesses as well through the Better Business Challenge website. Our fifth and final action item is a graphic highlighting Midtown businesses’ participation in the Better Business Challenge to be used by the BBC and Blue Moon. This map is useful for promotion of both Blue Moon and the Better Business Challenge. Through these five action items, we successfully helped Blue Moon move forward in their pursuit of sustainable business practices and advanced the efforts ofBetter World Betty’s Better Business Challenge.