UK-based carbon reduction and sustainability consultants, AdGreen, centralized global user engagement and saved weeks of reporting time with Bigin

The company

AdGreen was founded in 2014 with a simple idea: Reduce the environmental impact of advertising production. What began as an internal effort to tackle waste on shoots has grown into a recognized sustainability initiative supporting the wider industry. Now part of the Advertising Association, AdGreen provides a free carbon calculator, sustainability training, and practical guidance to help production teams measure and lower their carbon footprints. 

Today, a team of four supports around 2,000 companies using the carbon calculator, with activity recorded across more than 40 countries in the last year alone. 

With a growing global user base and multiple touchpoints including calculator users, training participants, webinars, and downloadable resources, managing community engagement was becoming increasingly complex for this small but mighty team.

The challenge

AdGreen is not a traditional sales organization; its focus is education and sustainability, rather than deals and revenue. However, as awareness and tool adoption increased, the team realized they lacked a cohesive view of how their community was interacting with them.

Before implementing Bigin, AdGreen's contact management was fragmented. They pulled data from various event tools, website download exports, training reports, and other systems, which they then combined and managed manually in spreadsheets.

Answering simple operational questions required huge manual effort.

Without a centralized system, they couldn't see the full picture of each user's journey. They needed a simple solution suited to an SME, yet powerful enough to connect multiple systems behind the scenes. To address this, AdGreen partnered with Zoho implementation specialist Target Cloud, who helped deploy Bigin and integrate it with the Zoho ecosystem.

The solution

AdGreen implemented Bigin as the central hub of its operations. As a small team managing a global community, their priority was simplicity on the front end and strong, sophisticated connectivity behind the scenes.

At the core of their setup sits contacts and company records. Every interaction flows into these records, whether it's a training enrollment, a webinar registration, a website download, or usage of the carbon calculator. For the first time, the team could see a complete history of how a person or company had interacted with their tools.

One of the first operational improvements was connecting their website to Bigin using Zoho Flow. Previously, when users downloaded annual reviews or other resources, that data remained in the website backend. Now, when a visitor downloads a resource, a note is automatically added to their contact record in Bigin, specific fields are updated to show what they downloaded, and newsletter preferences are captured instantly. This ensures that no engagement elements are lost or disconnected from the wider user journey.

A major breakthrough came when AdGreen synced the backend of their carbon calculator with Bigin. This sync enables AdGreen's team to segment users with the help of tags.

AdGreen also integrated Zoho's Trainer Central platform to manage sustainability training. Enrollment and course completion data is now automatically logged against individual contact records, including notes and status indicators. This gives AdGreen insight into who has completed training, how long it took them, and where blockages might be occurring—all of which enables them to step in and provide support where needed.

They use Bigin's events module to log webinars, in-person events, and account management meetings. Custom fields help track registrations versus attendance, donations received from training sessions, and overall reach. This gives the team measurable insight into how their initiatives are performing across different activities.

To reduce dropoff during the carbon calculator onboarding process, AdGreen implemented Zoho Marketing Automation journeys. If a user signs up but doesn't complete setup or proceed to create a project, automated reminders are triggered. As a result, dropoff rates have significantly decreased. They also created custom views in Bigin to identify users who are stuck at specific stages, which enables the team to offer assistance proactively.

Finally, using Zoho Analytics, AdGreen connected its carbon calculator data, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn insights into one reporting system. This has enabled them to create a live annual review dashboards that updates in real time. Previously, compiling the annual review required exporting data into Excel and spending weeks analyzing it manually.

By bringing website data, calculator usage, training activity, events, and analytics into one connected system, AdGreen used Bigin to construct a centralized operational engine that supports both daily operations and long-term reporting.

Benefits and ROI

• Gained complete visibility into how users engage with training, events, and the carbon calculator.
• Eliminated fragmented spreadsheet management.
• Automated the syncing of website downloads and backend tool activity.
• Significantly reduced onboarding dropoff through automated journeys.
• Gained access to faster reporting and real-time dashboards.
• Saved an estimated one to two weeks of manual reporting effort annually.

Looking forward

The team plans to build more automated journeys to guide users from training to calculator adoption and deepen their analytics to better understand user behavior globally.