You have a cool company. You made sure your eco and social values are deeply rooted into your organization. You are just getting ready to launch your next environmental challenge. How do you get the word out?

EcoApprentice. EcoApprentice helps businesses, non-profits and individuals promote their eco challenges by crowd-sourcing sustainability challenges. What does this mean?

The EcoApprentice.com model is pretty straight forward:

1. Businesses share their environmental initiatives, or EcoChallenges, on EcoApprentice.com. The goal is to crowd-source reliable solutions to their particular issue.

2. University and MBA students work to resolve those EcoChallenges with specific solutions (EcoSolutions), gaining real world experience and, in many cases, credit from their University for the project.

3. Businesses select their favourite EcoSolution and give the prize (if one is provided) to the winner.

One of the things I like the most about EcoApprentice is its potential for EcoChallenges to go viral. I’ve always been a strong supporter of using social media to communicate corporate environmental initiatives (check out this post). When a business posts an EcoChallenge, it has the ability to engage customers, partners and the whole community on its environmental initiatives and learn how it can take them to the next level.

EcoChallenges can be categorized in 8 areas: Buy Green, Carbon Offsets, Green Shipping, Light Less, Recycle, Reduce Waste, Reuse and Think Local. Check out some of the recent challenges on EcoApprentice.com to get a better feel on how they leverage these categories.