Our App, Your Brand: The Benefits of White Labelled Waste Software

At Routeware, we white-label all of our community products. This takes care of all the backend work while letting you take all of the credit. Today, we’re going to tell you more about why we do this, including how white labeling keeps you in control of your own brand while allowing you to tap into our proven platforms and shared knowledge to easily communicate and engage with your audience base.

Building a Strong Recycling Brand

Your recycling brand is your best friend. It offers credibility, consistency, and control over messaging. It allows you to build trust, share strong messages, and experiment with programs. 

A strong recycling brand delivers results with compound interest: the more you work with it, the stronger it becomes.

To help your brand, you can use white labeled technology and make it your own. White labeling, the act of taking technology and branding it as your own, helps build a strong connection with residents.

Is White Labeling Important?

We’re often asked about white labeling and why it matters. If you need software, you have three options for getting it:

1. Build it Yourself: Work in collaboration with your IT Department
2. Off the Shelf: Use someone else’s tool with their brand and messaging
3. White Label: Use a vendor’s tool but call it your own and control how it looks and what it does

White labeling, the act of outsourcing only the underlying technology you require, is the most powerful way to benefit from your branding efforts. It does all the things you need, without taking away the thing that matters most: your brand.

When you need an app, you can get it in one of three ways: 

• You can build it yourself
• Subscribe to a full-service application
• Subscribe to the technology that allows you to control your brand and messaging

For each of these services, there are pros and cons. 

Let’s discuss those next.

Software Considerations

The easiest way to get great software is to get specialists to build it for you. 

But, don’t just evaluate for the initial build: software and hardware technology changes fast, and you’ll want to keep up with changes. Whether you’re looking at building software in-house or getting it built or provided to you, you’ll want to make sure the developers can maintain the software.

You Want to Own Your Data

To communicate with residents, you often collect information about them. It’s important to make sure you own this data. This allows you to change vendors at any point without disruption. But most importantly, it means that the vendor cannot share this data with third parties.

Manage Your Brand

Recycling professionals understand that the economic and market realities of recycling are highly localized. Rules on what gets recycled vary, even within a county or regional district — this is central to the challenge of communicating MSW services.

Residents are accustomed to hearing communications from their service providers directly. And for good reason! You’re the local expert. If your goal is to reduce waste stream contamination, white labeling gives you the credibility you need to reliably convey this information.

However, we know multiple groups of recycling activist groups, businesses, and technology companies are trying to offer information to the public about what goes where. Without a managed communications strategy, messages quickly become watered down, or worse, conflicting.

Thanks to many years of cultivation, your recycling brand offers accountability where it matters. How much more difficult would it be if you had to rebuild that relationship every time?

It doesn’t matter how many types of education programs you develop. You can update your messaging, your programming, your software — but if your brand is on it, then residents will recognize your work, the program will belong to you, and you will be responsible for it. This is a powerful way to maintain consistency and trust over time.

Without the ability to clearly distinguish where information about differing rules is coming from, confused residents can make contamination worse. 

The good news is that there’s a solution.

When vendors offer white label products, you have full control over the tool.

Take a look at an example of white labeling in action here, where you’ll see how the Region of Waterloo has made  Routeware’s app their own.

Your Brand Gives You Control

If it’s your brand, no one else can control what you say and do with it. Your brand, your messaging, your timing, your events, and your brochures carry the weight of authority.

Your brand gives you the flexibility to do what you need to keep up with changes.

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, nobody knows what the future holds. A strong brand allows you to easily switch programs should a vendor or third-party fail to live up to your expectations. If your program depends on a white-labeled service provider, your still-strong brand means the barriers to exit are lower.

With white labeling, your communications can reflect all of the complex considerations that go into your organizational branding. That means…

• The colours
• Logos
• URLs
• Even the data associated with the tool

…are all yours! And yes, even if you change vendors.

When that or other changes happen, residents will see an “updated” app instead of having to download a whole different app or go to a different website. From a resident’s perspective, you have just improved the technology. It taps into your knowledge about local recycling regulations and the authority you have to speak about them.

This is important because it respects regional differences and appeals to local users.

“Our IT Team Could Build This”

Many organizations consider building their own solution for many of the reasons outlined above, but more often than not find eventually that the cost of an effective solution arrived at this way is prohibitive. The third way is that of the white labeled service.

By adopting a white label approach you can get on with the task of doing what you do best, crafting the message for your residents and building upon the deliberate branding efforts of your organization and the trust built over years.

Now that you know more about white labeling — the most powerful way to benefit from your branding efforts — it’s time to get started! Remember, with Routeware, it might be our app but it’s YOUR brand!

Learn more about the different products we offer to provide you with the things you value most, Credibility, Accountability, Control, Industry, and Knowledge:

• Mobile App: Communication and information in the palm of your hand. We build it and custom brand it for you!
• Collection Calendar, Waste Wizard, and Waste Sorting Game. These are all custom branded for you and embedded directly into your website. Help people never miss a collection day, reduce contamination and wish cycling, all while teaching a wide audience how to recycle properly.