Prezi as a company continues to grow and we remain aware how important our commitment towards environmental protection must be. We’ve reached the end of our second consecutive year in which we did our best to compensate for Prezi’s increasing carbon footprint, so we’d like to share some of the things we have learned throughout the year:

1. Inspiring your team is important. Keeping up-to-date and informed on our various projects challenges and successes throughout the year encourages us to exceed our goals and find new ways in which we can improve.
2. Routinely track your carbon usage – you can see how we have been doing in the chart below. We’re happy that Prezi’s footprint hasn’t kept pace with other aspects of the company’s rapid growth (see here) yet we know there’s more we can do in 2012! Our estimated figures show a moderate increase from last year’s 150 tons to this year’s 215 tons, with the majority impact coming from business trips.
3. We still strongly believe that the projects we work on should match the following criteria: a) the ability to easily contact the people who are running the project, b) the project should jointly create social change and economic development in addition to CO2 offsetting.
4. Based on our criteria we decided to continue to support this stove project. It’s a project we’re devoted to as it works toward long-lasting change: a) families who get a stove can benefit from dramatically improved health, b) local entrepreneurs and the families receiving the stoves are fully involved in implementing the project, and c) each stove can last for about 10 years and each stove can save about 2-3 tons of CO2 / year.
5. To put a figure on this in terms of carbon offsetting, the math is as follows: 215/(2.5*10)= about 8-9 stoves = $2,200 USD