Jon On Tech

Come and go with me, my pretty little miss,
Come and go with me, my honey.
Take you where the grass grows green,
You never will want for money
- BLACKJACK DAVEY

It’s good to win something every now and again. We recently walked away with the best B2B Award at the 2009 Revolution Awards for British Gas’ Generation Green site. Now this happens fairly often as there are many digital marketing awards. However, I am really happy about this one because it is a site that has a whole boatload of cool technology behind the scenes.

Generation Green Home Page

For those that what to read about the marketing side of things, read this press release. The general idea is to help schools to be greener by performing various tasks, teaching Green lessons, recycling their mobile phones and more. The numbers behind the site (from the press release):

The campaign has been successful – more than 8000 schools (35%) have registered with Generation Green to date and teachers have downloaded more than 13,000 lesson plans and hosted more than 750 ‘green’ assemblies. This means that 3,168,515 children across the UK were potentially impacted by the programme. The popularity of the Green lesson plans with teachers has resulted in British Gas providing over 303,000 hours of learning in UK schools.

For those that are interested in the technology, this little site contains:

• EPiServer 5 CMS with many custom extensions
• A 5 level Flash platform game with WebORB framework to allow the Flash to talk to the EPiServer based server side code (for login, leader boards and more).
• Integration with britishgas.co.uk to generate secure tokens for leaf donation,
• SOAP web services for integrations with order placement at the fulfillment house, the external carbon calculator, and recycool leaf integration to allow schools to earn leaves by recycling their mobile phone and printer cartridges.
• Google Map mash-up for school location and postcode search.
• SQL Server Integration Services used for placing product orders and updating order status.

So, in summary, I think this is a really good idea which has been beautifully designed, and brought to life using a number of technologies. And the site saves the planet. Which is why I wrote this during #earthhour.

Eco-Rangers Platform Game