What to Avoid When Telling Your Sustainability Story
We’ve seen it time and time again. A company decides that it would be a great PR move to make steps that will help their business become more sustainable (or at least appear to be). However, these moves can often become more harmful than helpful. Let’s take McDonald’s for example, when they once decided to remove plastic straws from their locations in the UK and Ireland, and replace them with a paper alternative. On paper, this seems like a fantastic idea. After all, we’re saving the turtles here, right? Wrong.
The plastic straws that McDonald’s had once used could actually be recycled, whereas the new “and improved” paper ones cannot. More importantly, we’ve all had an experience with paper straws, and it’s no secret that those things are virtually unusable. Let it sit in a new coffee for 10 minutes and you now have a caramel macchiato mixed with small pieces of paper and now, a straw that doesn’t work.
On an even more hilarious note, we all heard of when Frito-Lay had managed to create ground-breaking technology that allowed the packaging of their Sun Chips to be biodegradable. Awesome, right?! Well, not exactly. While yes, this is a very cool and sustainable implementation to their product and brand, the packaging was loud. Like, REALLY loud. In fact, opening one would register as over 100 decibels. If you’re unfamiliar with how loud 100 decibels is, that’s louder than a motorcycle. Sales of the product declined 11% and Frito-Lay had no choice but to pull the packaging.
The bottom line here is that you really need to think your plan through before executing. Are there possible repercussions? What effect will it have on your consumers? Could there be adverse effects?
Here’s what you should avoid when preparing to execute your sustainability story.
Focus on the Outcome
Many companies tend to think that their sustainability stories are just a PR effort to make themselves look better. As if they’re the star in their own film. Yet, that’s not what they should be aiming for when releasing it. Yes, it’s a great accomplishment and a step in the right direction in your efforts, but is it necessary? Is there a good reason to make this change? Did this solve anything? These are important questions to ask when thinking about implementing your strategy.
The Numbers > The Story
Numbers don’t lie. You need to give concrete data when implementing your strategy. Rather than just stating “The amount of plastic in our oceans is increasing by thousands of tons annually”, show your evidence through your research by saying “There are over eight million metric tons of plastic in the oceans at this moment. That's about 17.6 billion pounds — or the equivalent of nearly 57,000 blue whales — every single year. By 2050, ocean plastic will outweigh all of the ocean's fish.“
Find a good balance between telling the story, and giving evidence to support your claim. This will make your efforts significantly more reputable.
Don’t Just TELL The Story, LIVE it
There’s a difference between telling the story and living it. Anyone can make up a sappy story or a reason as to why a change is being made, but it hold no weight if you aren’t actually living the story, or your company contradicts this change with another business practice.
Take Starbucks for example, when they decided to forego plastic straws and replace them with a “more sustainable and environmentally friendly lid”. Well, that didn’t pan out very well for them, as people began to discover that the new lids that they were using actually included significantly more plastic than the straws used prior.
Involve Stakeholders
After all, the stakeholders are the backbone of your organization. Feedback and criticism are a large part of any plan, let alone a large move like this. It’s likely that different stakeholders will have differing opinions and feedback on your plans. So it’s important to hear them out and take their comments into consideration when developing your plan.
Stories by Committee
You can’t please everyone, that’s just a fact of life. When developing your story, it’s important to keep in mind that too many stories can hurt your release. You need to pick and choose what stories will have the greatest impact and find a reasonable balance between conflicting stories.
Where is it?
Alright, the moment you’ve been waiting for, release day! Now we’re going to upload it 6 pages deep onto our website that makes it incredibly hard to find! If this story is such a big deal, then you need to make it a big deal! Put it on the front page of your website, create an entire page outlining the plan (not just a PDF or Word Doc), send out an email, etc. Doing so will help people find your page easier, help search engines index your content, and just make it overall more accessible to your website visitors.
Nobody Cares
Well, we hope this isn’t the case, but it is entirely possible that you have just spent hours, weeks, maybe even months working on this release and… nobody cares. Don’t take it personally, sometimes that’s just the way things go. Yet, you can still keep making strides in order to create a bigger picture.