Why communicate your sustainability journey
There are many benefits to sharing your sustainability journey: Employee engagement and customer retention can go up, for instance. Studies have proven the positive effects that a company’s approach to sustainability can have on employee attraction and retention. When it comes to consumer behaviour, a study by Deloitte shows the increasing trend to opt for more sustainable alternatives.
Additionally, being transparent about your ambitious ESG and decarbonisation goals can
… attract investors
… increase your social media performance and engagement rates
… and foster a culture of sustainability within your company.
💡 Consider reusing these arguments if you need to make a case for your marketing, social media and/or management teams.
When to communicate?
We mentioned it already but think it’s worth repeating:
Every step in your sustainability journey is an opportunity to share your achievements.
To be more specific - here are some of the moments worth celebrating and communicating:
Starting your journey with Plan A
That’s right! The decision to tackle your emissions with the help of a third-party provider like Plan A is worth sharing! Why? Because it’s an important step that involves a lot of commitment and alignment of various stakeholders. Starting your journey is an important milestone which has brought you to where you are today.
💡Here are some resources and inspirations for you to get started.
Collect data
You probably know exactly what a challenge it can be to collect specific data points to calculate your emissions… Reminds you of doing your taxes, doesn’t it? But do you also remember that feeling of accomplishment when you have collected, measured, and calculated everything you needed to? That moment is worth sharing with your community.
💡 Remember how we shared a bit about our own waste data collection in a newsletter a little while ago? That’s an example of how we at Plan A communicated and celebrated successful data collection.
When sharing your milestones on data collection, remember that sharing is caring. For some emission categories, many of your peers may face similar issues. And while we’re used to competing against each other most of the time, emissions management is one of those disciplines where we should actually work together. One way we can help one another is by sharing tips and tricks on collecting data.
Mesure emissions & Report
Once you’ve gone through the exercise of collecting all your data required, it’s worth celebrating! Why? Because you just calculated your Corporate Carbon Footprint - maybe for a particular month or even an entire year. And that is definitely worth sharing with your community. You could even consider communicating your Corporate Carbon Toeprint… that is if you have calculated emissions for some but not all of your relevant emission categories yet. 👉 Kudos for the toeprint association go to Mike Berners-Lee who established this term in his book “How bad are bananas - The Carbon Footprint of everything”.
💡 Here’s a little interactive exercise for you - can you identify on this webpage how we communicated our Corporate Carbon Footprint 2020? Feel free to reuse our way of communication for your own purposes.
Target Set
Besides actually reducing emissions, setting a decarbonisation target is probably one of the most important milestones to achieve - and communicate! Similarly to deciding to get your emissions under control, deciding to do something about them is again a representation of a lot of discussion and alignment with various stakeholders. And it is a great opportunity to share your commitment to sustainability with your wider ecosystem.
💡 A Target Setting report might be a good place to start from when communicating your decarbonisation strategy and target. An example of what this could look like is this section of our Sustainability Initiative page. The Sustainability Initiative is essentially a group within Plan A using our own software and methodology to calculate and reduce Plan A’s footprint.
Reduce emissions
A strategy and a plan is only worth it if they enable you to achieve the desired results. Whenever you reach one or multiple of your previously defined decarbonisation goals it’s time to celebrate - and communicate!
💡 We’ve put together a couple of social media post templates for celebrating and sharing a variety of decarbonisation milestones. Take a look and see if they suit what you need.
If you don’t find what you are looking for and need additional support, please let us know.
Improve
… communicating about something that went wrong? Seriously? Yes! Because it’s perfectly normal that every once in a while things don’t work out the way we had hoped for. And especially in the process of designing a sustainable economy in a short amount of time it is extremely important to share with your ecosystem what did not work so we can all improve and learn from our mistakes.
We hope this gives you a better sense of why and when you should communicate your sustainability journey! As a next step, we recommend you dive deeper into the resources outlined in this article.