Over the past few months, CharityVillage’s® Sustainability Series has covered six different aspects of embedding sustainability in a charity. Starting with a broad introduction to the world of sustainability, the series has covered issues of a building a core team, measuring your impact, goal-setting, financing, and now, with this sixth and final article, communications. With some of the key building blocks in place, it is often helpful to get the word out both within and outside your charity. Such messages can be powerful staff motivators and an excellent means of demonstrating to your supporters that you are “walking the talk”.

Communications should begin from the very first day of your sustainability initiative — it is necessary to communicate to get the entire effort up and off the ground. As the sophistication of the initiative increases, thinking about information sharing in a more formal manner can be very beneficial. Even at a relatively early stage, putting together a communications plan, naming the committee (e.g., WWF-Canada called their internal sustainability team “Sustainability@Work”), and creating a small logo or brand can go a long way in helping to unify the team and build awareness.

Internal sustainability communications

There are various mechanisms for internally communicating the efforts and successes of your sustainability initiative. From brown-bag lunches to all-staff presentations, and from an email to a formal publication, there is a range of mechanisms you can use. However, your communications vehicle should be dictated by your primary audience. If you recall the graphic from Article 2 (Figure 1), the commitment curve “framework” provides a good starting point when thinking about internal engagement. More specifically, the following approaches are well suited, though far from exclusive, to each of the levels within the commitment curve:

  1. Contact and Awareness: Informal talks at the water cooler, Intranet webpage, designated go-to person, staff brown bag lunch talk, emails, general staff sustainability newsletter
  2. Understanding and Positive Perception: Formal staff meeting (with leadership statement), Intranet webpage, monthly reports, internal social media (e.g., Twitter), staff sustainability newsletter with more specific topics and information.
  3. Participation, Adoption, and Internalization: External communications products (e.g., annual report, website, blogs, external social media (e.g., organization’s Facebook page), staff sustainability newsletter including case studies of staff involvement.

 

 

External sustainability communications

Rather than getting into all of the details of external communications (see Additional Resources for links to other articles in this realm), the following focuses on a few key considerations that are specific to sustainability communications:

Claims: One of the key aspects to consider when engaging in external communications related to sustainability is the issue of claims. Since terms like “sustainable”, “green”, “socially responsible” and so forth all are subjective terms open to interpretation, the credibility of claims is critical to consider. Failure to consider the claims one makes when it comes to sustainability will put your organization at risk of “greenwashing”. The British government recently published a Green Claims Guidance document for those wishing to consider their claims and ensure they minimize their risk of greenwashing.

The Sustainability Report: A traditional mechanism for external sustainability communications is to create an organizational sustainability report. Such a report can be a great way to catalyze effort within your charity to gather information on your social, environmental and economic performance. Combining or integrating this sort of sustainability report into your annual report has become increasingly common in the business world and should be considered. For smaller organizations who do not have the resources to put together an extensive report, a simple 1-2 page report, with a brief set of dashboard (or colour coded) indicators is a very useful and productive means of communicating simple information in an effective and efficient manner.

The Medium as a Message: When considering formal communications products, the medium of your external communication is important: paper, digital, or something else? Drawing from Marshall McLuhan‘s famous phrase, when it comes to sustainability, the medium sends a message. While there are pros and cons to any given media, thinking through the optics of how a report would be received is important. While numerous charities produce their reports on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) paper, others have opted to cease hard-copy versions and only post PDFs to their website.

Increasing the discussion when it comes to sustainability is critical. Those of us who live and breathe charitable work are not simply seeking to change an organization; we are attempting to change society to be more just, equitable, and sustainable. Much of the effort revolves around communications, which needs to be well considered. Ultimately, walking the talk is an important aspect of being a credible organization and donors make note of such efforts and accomplishments. As you begin, or continue down, your sustainability pathway, I encourage you to continue the dialogue: share your success stories with one another and with CharityVillage®. Let’s do this together.

*Graph based on Patterson, Robert W., and Darryl R. Conner, eds. “Building Commitment to Organizational Change.” Training and Development Journal Apr. 1982: 18-30.

Tips and Tricks: Giving life to your Sustainability Communications

Deborah Fleischer, president of Green Impact, wrote a brief article last year with some good tips. A summarized version has been included below, but the full version can be found here.

  • Tell stories: Everyone prefers stories over dense multi-page lectures, so use humanity’s tendency to communicate through stories to your advantage.
  • Paint a detailed vision, but make a specific request: While providing broad overviews and general trends is helpful, asking both employees and supporters for specific requests is more useful when aiming for behaviour change.
  • Engage people’s emotions with non-controlling, positive and optimistic language: Move beyond analysis, and into emotional language and images. These capture people’s minds and hearts better than numbers and “efficiencies” and using language that is less controlling and more evocative. Using optimism and tapping into people’s sense of playing a role in the big picture can be powerful.

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Some additional sustainability resources related to sustainable communication include:

 

Alexis Morgan is a consultant who has spent much of his life working in or with charities ranging from small nonprofits, to large, international, non-governmental organizations. He has an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University, which focused on sustainability and nonprofit management. He has also spent over a decade actually doing sustainability with both charities and for-profit companies.