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AMP: the Starting Point for Sustainability Professionals

its hard to find the business sustainability information you need

Planning a special meal out with the spouse or partner? No doubt Yelp or another restaurant review site plays a part in that planning. Got a trip coming up? You probably head over to Tripadvisor to see what others have said about the hotel in which you’re planning to stay. Did the boss assign you projects on your company’s energy efficiency, waste disposal, and use of water? Since they’re all sustainability topics, you’d think there might be a service like Yelp or Tripadvisor for sustainability professionals: somewhere where information is gathered and curated, and other community members chime in on its usefulness. You’d probably be disappointed to discover that there’s not a site like this… yet.

Sarah McKinney would’ve loved a service like this when she was working on her MBA in sustainable management at Presidio Graduate School. Sure, there were the well-established editorial portals, the non-profit and government data sources, the CSR-focused news wires, and even social media sites with a heavy green presence… but nothing that pulled all this together, sorted it out, and pointed a user to the resources that would be useful for his/her current project. So Sarah and several colleagues decided to create such a site – first as a grad school project, and, now, as a full-fledged start-up company.

Part Delicious, Yelp, and DocStoc, Sarah envisions AMP as a “a directory and content marketplace whereΒ busy sustainability professionals can quickly pull the information they need to influence progressive action.” Like the services mentioned above, Sarah’s looking to create a starting point for sustainability professionals. I’ll let her explain more fully:

The beauty of a service like this is that it can be started on a relative shoestring: Sarah and her partners need $50,000 to get a beta version of the site up and running. Like many other entrepreneurs these days, they’ve taken the crowdfunding approach: AMP’s campaign on Indiegogo has already raised over $15,000. So, they’re well on their way… but they only have two weeks left to raise the remaining $35,000.

Can you help? They’ve got some great rewards for contributors, including a t-shirt made from recycled water bottles (at the $50 level). More importantly, though, this is a resource that could really benefit the broader sustainability community: both grad students and chief sustainability officers could use a more efficient way to find the information that serves their needs.

Let us know what you think, and if you decided to help out.

Image credit: Screen capture from “AMP: Sustainability’s Starting Point” video

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