As Chairman of the Softwood Lumber Committee’s (SLB) Program’s Committee, I am proud to be associated with an organization that develops and executes effective programs that benefit the whole industry. As mentioned in a previous blog post highlighting the SLB’s recent impact report, the SLB and its programs have delivered better than a 15-fold return on your investment.
These results prove that the SLB’s funded programs are having the positive impact that was intended.
- The American Wood Council has indeed created new opportunities for wood’s use through standards and codes; innovations in tall wood seeded awareness and excitement about what is possible when building with wood.
- reThink Wood and Wood, Naturally generated both widespread and targeted interest, and leveraged their outreach tools to generate leads and increased sales of our products.
- WoodWorks was effective in converting 220 projects from competing materials to wood, generating over a 426 million board feet of new demand.
Although not surprising, the SLB’s independent program evaluator showed that more engagement on the part of an individual or company yields a higher rate of lumber usage. The SLB uses a marketing funnel that inherently taps into this dynamic by segmenting programs and messaging to create opportunities for engagement for everyone in the building industry.
For example, the middle part of the funnel is proving effective in motivating older, more established architects to increase their lumber usage by upward of 23% on average. Most of these architects already have outstanding skills, but reThink Wood and our tall wood programming have captured their imagination and helped them achieve their sustainability goals as no other material could. Meanwhile, WoodWorks provides the technical support needed by the younger generation of architects to build with wood, often for the first time.
The integration of our programs as presented by the marketing funnel works as intended. With industry’s support, our programs will continue to identify and capture new growth opportunities to the benefit of the entire industry.
