We kicked off July by hosting our fourth annual leadership communications event at The Conduit, in partnership with our creative collaborators, Nice and Serious. Previous years have seen us explore themes including brand storytelling for sustainability comms, and how to ensure action is communicated effectively, whilst avoiding greenwashing. This year we tackled the hard-to-avoid elephant in the room – namely how to stay determined, focused and effective in your PR and campaigns whilst living in extraordinary times.
There is no escaping it, and it hardly needs saying, but the world is an uncomfortable place at the moment. Wars rage, uncertainty and unpredictability reign, DEI is under attack, progressives risk being cowed by financial threats, and the leadership and regulation that the world needs is being diluted. So is it time to pack up and go home? Hell no. This stuff is easy when the sun shines – it’s when it gets tough that we really need to go to work.
John Elkington spoke incredibly eloquently at one of Volans’ London Climate Action Week events last week about how this moment of turmoil could be the moment to seize the day and recement progress and positivity for the future. The fresh growth after the fields have been burnt perhaps. There is something powerful in this – and a reason for hope.
Further hope comes from how business needs stability, and therefore predictability. I referenced this in a recent LinkedIn post after the Financial Times’ Climate & Impact Summit. The instability we have been feeling of late brings risk – and sustainability, not least through energy security, soil and nature health and resilience, and a healthy and balanced world are powerful real-world ways to redress the balance.
The headwinds will not last forever – we will return to feeling the gentle hand on our backs driving us forward at pace again. So hang in there.
And in the meantime, what can be done? This is the crux of what we explored as a group at our event. Working with the metaphor of the winds, we looked at how to hunker down, stay sleek and aerodynamic to stay efficient and steadily moving forward – and the need to find your power. The engine you need to help propel sustainability communications forwards while the winds are blowing.
We took inspiration from looking at case studies of people doing great work on this at the moment, including Decathlon with their resale, repair and circularity focus, and Ahold Delhaize with their innovative protein targets, decarbonisation and support of healthy diets. Hybrid milks that taste great and have the best of both worlds, for example – a world first?
We then shared our guidance on what to power up, and what to power down to stay efficient, focused and strong, summarised here;
Power up
- Align with the organisation’s growth strategy
- Be clear on the commercial gains
- Enable, don’t limit
- Look long term: future proof
- Remove risk and give stability
- Show progress and celebrate wins
- Support customers to go further
- Build trust through transparency
- Speak the language of the audience
Power down
- Making it too complicated
- Being an expensive extra
- Being separate and misunderstood
- Always pushing for perfection
- Being stuck in an ESG echo chamber
- Only focusing on carbon
- Investing in programmes that don’t relate to core impact and purpose
- Greenwashing
Our group work guided everyone to consider what this meant for each of the businesses in the room, how they can help their businesses push forward, and what their internal and external audiences really need from them to get on board.
The groups were then guided through crafting communications that bring their stories to life; finding the right approach and messages to reach audiences, meet them where they are and bring them on the journey.
Every year we have had the pleasure of being able to host a dynamic, creative and insightful audience from a range of powerful brands, and this one was no different. A very big thank you to all who joined us – and of course to Tom and his team at Nice and Serious who we always love teaming up with.
If you weren’t able to make the session and are interested to find out more please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.