Welcome to BusinessGreen Plus

Today marks the launch of a ground-breaking new service from BusinessGreen that will take our already award-winning coverage of the green economy to the next level. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to BusinessGreen Plus.

For more than five years BusinessGreen has strived to meet two complementary goals: to provide up-to-date news and analysis on the green economy and to offer senior executives the information and guidance they need to ensure their organisations are able to exploit the opportunities presented by the global transition towards sustainable business models.

The way in which our audience has continued to expand in recent years - reaching around 250,000 hits a month, a newsletter subscriber base of over 15,000 users and nearly 25,000 Twitter followers - suggests we have been pretty successful at meeting these goals.

However, just like the wider green economy, there is always room for improvement.

We recently surveyed our audience and it revealed you are broadly very happy with the service BusinessGreen provides, confirming you tend to use the site daily or weekly as your primary source of information on the green economy, and are consistently impressed by the timeliness, accuracy and relevance of our reporting and analysis.

But many of you also suggested we should offer more content that can practically aid sustainability and other green-minded executives in their jobs. You wanted to see more case studies, how-to guides, detailed policy and technology briefings, industry-leading opinion and analysis and in-depth research. And that is precisely what BusinessGreen Plus will provide.

For example, this week we're kicking off the service with a series of features on how to develop an effective climate risk strategy, an in-depth analysis of why businesses want to see the government properly analyse resource shortages, an exclusive interview with author and campaigner Tony Juniper, and a series of investigations on how Iceland is emerging as a low carbon economy to watch. 

By definition, this kind of high-value, in-depth content has value and requires depth - depth of experience, knowledge and research. It also requires investment, and that is why we have decided to make BusinessGreen Plus a paid-for service.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly, and because we want to continue to ensure as many people as possible are kept abreast of developments in the green economy our daily news coverage will remain freely available. But in return for access to an array of richer, highly informative and exclusive in-depth content, all of which requires investment to deliver, we are asking that you, our loyal readers, make a small financial contribution to support BusinessGreen's continued development. We like to think we play a role in informing and promoting the green economy, but we do need support from our readers if we are to continually improve our ability to play this crucial role.

You can trial the new BusinessGreen Plus service for free, but a year's subscription costs £399 (or £299 for NGOs). To get the new service up and running, anyone taking out a subscription over the next three months can take advantage of a launch offer price of £349. We are confident this represents excellent value for money. Even at the full subscription price it works out at less than £1.10 a day - less than the cost of a cup of coffee, or, more pertinently, less than a copy of the Financial Times or the Guardian. The price is also highly competitive when set against those green business titles that already charge for access to their content.

In addition to getting access to our new in-depth content and full, unhindered access to our archive of thousands of stories from the past five and a half years, BusinessGreen Plus members will receive priority invites to all BusinessGreen roundtables, breakfast briefings and networking events, as well as special rates for BusinessGreen Leaders Awards tickets and our new BusinessGreen Intelligence reports.

We're also offering businesses and other organisations the opportunity to become BusinessGreen Plus corporate members, providing groups of five or more people with access to BusinessGreen Plus content and services. Priced from £999, a year's corporate BusinessGreen Plus membership also gives your organisation the opportunity to host and promote blog posts on BusinessGreen, and offers access to special rates for advertising, sponsorship and lead generation activity, providing your organisation with the most cost-effective route to reach our growing and influential audience.

Over the past five years BusinessGreen has won awards and plaudits, while playing a small but important role in the creation of a community based around the UK's leading sustainability executives, green business leaders and politicians and civil servants. BusinessGreen Plus will allow this community and our content to evolve to the next level, through the provision of the high-value news, information and analysis green executives want and need.

We hope you enjoy the new service, and we look forward to welcoming you as BusinessGreen Plus members.