Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

One tree makes 8,333 sheets of paper. So says Yahoo! Answers.

So I’m estimating that our nearly paperless diocesan convention earlier this month saved, drum roll, please, … one tree.

And maybe a thick branch too.

At 2-cents a copy, we saved about $166.66 in printing costs, plus the cost of nearly 17 reams of paper. Not pocket change, but also not big-budget change either.

We promoted the nearly paperless convention as good stewardship of the environment and finances. And that is true, to a degree.

But the real value for me was the creation of space for something new. 

It is a challenge to think about how to share information without using the easy medium of paper. 

Commissions and resolution proponents have long published fliers and double-sided, single-spaced reasons to support one position or another. Fundraising groups pass out postcards with pictures of sweet but poor children to play on the heart and wallet strings. Diocesan groups, including and especially the communication office, print 50-page booklets with reports, agendas, budgets, all information that has been available online for a month and in e-mailboxes every fourth day. 

By setting a standard of “nearly paperless,” we were required to re-think all of these practices. In many cases, we found new ways to promote the same information. Instead of a flier that pushed the diocesan social media elements, we created stickers with pithy sayings: We like you. Like us (on Facebook). Find out what a little bird told me (Twitter). 

We created a special convention electronic newsletter so that all of the event information was collected in one space, and we utilized a special module created by our website gurus that aggregated the content and pushed it out to diocesan users. 

We used our diocesan newspaper to print all of the information (resolutions, nominees, budget, reports) and asked folks to bring their copy (and we had some extra, just in case). Sure, this was paper, but it was recycling the right medium in a new way. With three laptops and a switcher, we projected almost all of the content on two large screens so people could follow along. 

We also built a special page with pdfs of all the needed documents so folks could download them onto smartphones, tablets, or laptops. And we widely encouraged folks to bring their electronic devices to convention. We crafted a QR code that led directly to the download page and posted it throughout the facility and on stickers that we wore. And we set up a charging station so people could easily re-juice. 

Despite all of these different ways to communicate, we deliberated with each piece of content. What is the best way to share this information? In most cases, we were able to find that a paperless solution was optimum. But print didn’t leave us entirely. 

We do a lot of singing at convention. And some people actually want to see the notes in addition to the lyrics. We quickly dismissed using the projector and screens, knowing it wouldn’t be clear or big enough for folks to follow. We thought about other alternatives but ultimately returned to paper (and a downloadable pdf). We made three copies per table, which required music-lovers to share. In the end, those who wanted to belt out the right notes could, those who wanted to hum along were able to, and those who mouthed “watermelon” instead of singing were just fine. 

It was easier to explain to people that this was a nearly paperless convention was a matter of stewardship. As justice-minded Episcopalians, they could easily grab hold of that to (mostly) offset any inconvenience. 

But for me and other planners, it was also an opportunity to stretch, a chance to re-think our long-held practices and discover new ones. And, save a tree.