We are proud to announce that iPoint’s Plastic Free July® & Plogging campaign was recognized at the 2022 German Stevie® Awards with a Gold Stevie® Award in the category “Communication or PR campaign / PR program of the year – Environment”. Honoring outstanding achievements in over 200 different categories, the German Stevie® Awards are a high-profile business award for the German-speaking European corporate world from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. More than 400 entries were submitted for this year's 8th edition of the German Stevie® Awards and rated by 50 jury members on five committees.
“We are thrilled to have received this prestigious award for our Plastic Free July® and Plogging communications campaign in recognition of our ongoing sustainability work,” emphasizes Dr. Katie Boehme, Director People & Communications at iPoint. “Since becoming a signatory of the UN Global Compact – the world's largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative – in 2017, iPoint's corporate communications team has been dedicated to taking actions to advance the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future.” On the occasion of Plastic Free July®, a global movement to reduce single-use plastic in professional and private life, iPoint initiated its own four-week Plastic Free July® campaign in combination with a clean-up campaign in July 2021. The jury of the German Stevie® Awards 2022 rated the campaign as “praiseworthy, relevant, and not uncomplex”. The campaign was intended to raise awareness among the public as well as iPoint’s employees of the impact of today’s single-use plastic throwaway culture and to promote sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11), sustainable consumption (SDG 12), as well as environmental protection (SDG 14). “Great to see a lot of people participating and raising awareness of the environment,” a jury member of the German Stevie® Awards 2022 praised the campaign.
Highlight of the campaign was an iPoint-sponsored plogging event in July 2021 with three local sports clubs – “plogging” is a trend sport from Sweden that combines jogging with waste collection. As part of the large-scale clean-up challenge “Win Together”, the Bundesliga women's handball team TuS Metzingen, the second league basketball team Tigers Tuebingen, and the upper league soccer team SSV Reutlingen attempted to collect as much trash as possible in the Neckar-Alb region, near iPoint’s headquarters in Reutlingen. The “inventive campaign that gained attention especially by involving local sports clubs,” as a jury member of the German Stevie® Awards 2022 described it, managed to get several hundred people, including iPoint employees and iPoint’s founder Joerg Walden, as well as numerous children and adolescents, involved. All in all, a total of 238 trash bags were collected. The Tigers Tuebingen, as main organizers and winners of the clean-up challenge, were able to mobilize almost 100 people and collect about 300 kilograms of trash. “The event was a lot of fun for all participants and revealed what we can achieve when everyone works together to protect the environment,” emphasizes Christoph Koppensteiner, coordinator of the plogging event and responsible for partnerships and cooperation at the Tigers Tuebingen. “We plan to repeat the plogging event this July and are pleased to have iPoint on board again to sponsor the campaign.” “As a leading provider of software and services for compliant and sustainable products, we are pleased to support this year’s follow-up campaign and thus make a contribution to combatting plastic pollution in our cities and communities,” says Katie Boehme.
