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U.S. Green Building Council, Washington, D.C.

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: U.S. Green Building Council, Washington, D.C.
Company Description: The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is committed to a prosperous and sustainable future through cost-efficient and energy- saving green buildings. USGBC works toward its mission of market transformation through its LEED green building program, robust educational offerings, the annual Greenbuild Conference, the Center for Green Schools and advocacy in support of public policy.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business-to-Business Products

Nomination Title: LEED Dynamic Plaque

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

The LEED® Dynamic Plaque™ scores and displays a building’s near-real time performance in energy, water, waste, transportation and human experience. These insights engage building visitors and occupants in the sustainability conversation, and enable building owners and operators to continually optimize building performance and comfort, saving money and resources.

LEED is the world’s most prevalent green building rating system, with 11.4 billion+ square feet of LEED commercial space. USGBC sought to evolve LEED to measure ongoing green building achievement, instead of at a single milestone (achieving certification). Measuring performance and transitioning the quarter trillion dollar industry that LEED helped to establish in the direction of greater transparency and accountability represents a tremendous opportunity to expand LEED’s triple bottom line positive impacts. In 2011, USGBC’s Scot Horst assembled staff, mathematicians, artificial intelligence leaders, software engineers and renowned design firm IDEO to craft the solution. The concept of a “live score,” making building performance accessible to all and enabling engagement, guided the product development process. The team generated hundreds of ideas before ultimately settling on the pioneering model of community engagement offered by the LEED Dynamic Plaque. This achievement marked the first time a building performance score of this kind has been introduced to the market.

The LEED Dynamic Plaque transforms complicated, dynamic building performance data into a beautiful, simple display making it possible for anyone to understand and engage. The LEED Dynamic Plaque marries the concept of an advanced building performance data management system with a corresponding, public-facing display. More stand-out features: the software provides local and global performance scores, as well as past building performance, drawing on game theory to foster a sense of collective problem solving with the built environment.

The plaque is shifting the building sustainability conversation from short-term to long-term. Sustainability is an ongoing journey. The LEED Dynamic Plaque expands the positive outcomes of LEED over the life of the building, and addresses industry demand for accountability. There is nothing like it. The backend is designed for analytics savvy building staff, and the beautiful, frontend display synthesizes and simplifies complex operations and performance data for the building’s occupants into a score that’s updated when new data enters the system. The LEED Dynamic Plaque drives critical education and awareness. It spurs behavior change, making building staff and occupants more cognizant of how their actions impact overall building sustainability (with ripple effects to community, state, country, and planet-level sustainability, too). No other product makes building performance so accessible to all.

The plaque pays for itself via the performance improvements it enables: plus, it’s a means to achieving LEED recertification. At USGBC headquarters, it helped decrease 2013 energy consumption by 30%, equaling ~$40,000 savings.

The LEED Dynamic Plaque is available to all LEED buildings at leedon.io. USGBC received more than 12,000 expressions of interest in 2014. More than 50 buildings worldwide have purchased subscriptions with many more in the sales pipeline. USGBC established a partnership, the first of many, with Honeywell regarding distribution and linking Honeywell’s integrated building automation technology to the plaque’s interface to simplify data collection and aggregation. All marketing surrounding the plaque mirrors the product’s key tenets: simplicity and beautiful design.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service.

• Continuously improve performance: Tracking performance with the LEED Dynamic Plaque allows users to identify areas for improvement on a perpetual basis. It removes the guesswork and provides users with real trends and insights that they can turn into meaningful actions. Owners and building managers can view trends to make informed decisions to optimize the building, benefitting people, planet and profit.

• Educate and engage: The LEED Dynamic Plaque’s interface and design are eye-catching, sleek and easy to understand. It’s an immediate point of engagement for building visitors and staff, broadening the green building performance conversation – educating more stakeholders. Visitors can "see" performance and occupants can provide feedback on their experience.

• Keep LEED certification current: An investment in the LEED Dynamic Plaque includes LEED recertification costs, providing a streamlined pathway. Plus, it automates data and streamlines documentation toward receiving annual LEED recertification, further underscoring the user’s commitment to sustainability and performance.