Marketing By Design

n my previous post, you can find here, I mentioned that each Leadership Sacramento class has a community service class project. Every year dozens of nonprofits apply to have their project selected by the Leadership class. (It’s not too often you get the energy and expertise of 35 diverse professionals focused on helping your cause.) Our class made our selection based on a few key criteria: regional impact, accomplishable within a year, ongoing impact beyond a year, that it wouldn’t have gotten done with our help, and that it is a nonprofit with enough capacity to be a good partner.

We reviewed many worthy projects and in the end I am quite proud that our group chose what I think was the most challenging project. It’s not too hard to sell ‘helping to feed children’ or ‘to save puppies’, but we chose to create a new program for the Sacramento Tree Foundation that retrofits old parking lots by adding trees, and to launch that as a pilot project at Florin Road Bingo. A very worthly cause, but not very sexy. Luckily we came up with a good name: Cover Your Asphalt.

Cover Your Asphalt delivers serious environmental and business benefits as the trees mature.

Business Benefits

The trees protect parking lots from the harmful effects of the sun, extending their lifespan by up to 10 years.  Adding trees also lowers the ambient temperature, reducing surrounding business’ cooling costs up to 40%. Another study found that customers spend more time and will pay more at businesses with shaded parking lots. All of these benefits, as well as aesthetic benefits, increase property values.

Environmental Benefits

By shading the asphalt, ambient temperatures are reduced, which is especially important in urban areas covered with black asphalt. High temperatures also expand the gas in the gas tanks of parked cars, causing them to emit pollutants even while they are turned off. Shading with trees reduces emissions from parked cars by 18%. It can lower temperatures in parked cars by 60°F. Trees capture water in their leaves, trunks, and roots, limiting and cleaning storm water runoff. By capturing particulate matter directly from the air, trees improve air quality.

The Florin Road Bingo Hall in South Sacramento (24th Street and Florin Road) is the pilot project for the Cover Your Asphalt program, enabling us to quantify the true costs and benefits of creating shade in older parking lots. We will be planting all 25 trees this Saturday, December 10th, along with volunteers, sponsors and local elected officials who will be showing their support. 

I’m quite proud to be a part of this project. It has taken a lot of energy and effort, but my dedicated classmates have continually risen to the occasion. The planting is this weekend, but it doesn’t stop there. That’s just phase one! Up next is to launch and sustain a brand new program for the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

Learn more about the Cover Your Asphalt program here.
Learn more about Leadership Sacramento here.
Learn more about the Sacramento Tree Foundation here.