Over the past 130 years, the National Geographic Society has used the power of science, exploration, education, and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. For 10 of those years, National Geographic has used BlueJeans Meetings for their internal and external video collaboration needs.

This week, National Geographic’s Audiovisual Operations Supervisor, Marcus Manderson joined BlueJeans on a webinar to discuss their use cases and positive impacts on the environment. Read below for a recap of the presentation.

Watch the webinar recording here!

Q: As a BlueJeans customer of 10 years, what were your primary business objectives when we first began this partnership?

Although I was not part of that technology decision at the time, these areas contributed to our interest in BlueJeans:

  • International collaboration and communication
  • Remote participation and presentation sharing
  • Save time/money (travel cost, environmental impacts, etc.)

Q: Why was BlueJeans chosen over other solutions?

BlueJeans is a great platform that offers a lot of features not found with some other conferencing products. National Geographic’s big use is Command Center analytics which helps our Green Team maintain our LEED Certification.

Q: Before mandatory work-from-home policies, can you please share success metrics regarding travel and environmental savings?

In just the last few days, we have had over 1,500 minutes of meetings. This has saved us nearly $10,000, over 50,000 in mileage, and over 10 tons of carbon emissions. This information is great as we are a LEED certified organization. We share this data with our Green Team on a frequent basis.

Q: Please give an overview of the BlueJeans implementation at National Geographic

We have staff on our profit side who use BlueJeans for their meetings. In addition, we have a Conference Center that supports both the profit and non-profit side. We utilize BlueJeans in both of those spaces. There are some executive spaces (Executive Conference Rooms, Board Rooms, etc.) where we also have BlueJeans connections set up. We also host the annual National Geographic Storytellers Summit with breakout sessions and workshops with virtual participants via BlueJeans.

Q: How has your use of BlueJeans made an impact across your business (and the world)?

As the Supervisor of Audiovisual Operations, I have spent the last several years creating and building relationships with various teams and stakeholders. As the main point of contact for all conference room and videoconference needs, I have been a champion of BlueJeans since we started using the platform nearly 10 years ago! As one of the early adopters of BlueJeans, our staff grew very familiar with the workflow. Adoption and implementation, even nearly a decade ago, was seamless and comprehensible. As a majority of the new profit side of our organization will begin to adopt and implement BlueJeans into their workflow, I have started setting up training sessions and Q&A sessions so that all necessary stakeholders and users can get the most out of the platform.

January 13 – 17 is our annual National Geographic Storytellers Summit. This 5-day educational workshop brings together influential photographers, writers, filmmakers, illustrators and journalists to celebrate the art of storytelling and its ability to connect us and inspire change. We host most of the working sessions in a large auditorium space as well as meeting rooms to enable on-site and remote collaboration. BlueJeans video meetings makes it possible for our network of partners to share thought leadership and best practices on capturing the most unknown, interesting, and coveted natural environments. For those unable to attend the in-person conference and workshops, we use BlueJeans to connect internationally located experts with aspiring contributors and storytellers. In this sense, BlueJeans has helped National Geographic and industry experts communicate their creativity and lessons from the field — ultimately improving public awareness by spotlighting the people, places, and wonders of our world.

Visit our customer page and see how other global organizations use BlueJeans to increase productivity and collaboration. Try it out for free today!