Creating a sustainability communications plan

1) Why do I need to promote my sustainability story?

There are lots of reasons to tell people about what you are doing to make your business more sustainable. Some of the benefits are:

• Raising awareness that you are a sustainable business

• Letting your employees know what is expected of them

• Making it easier to attract and retain high quality employees

• Building customer loyalty

• Creating opportunities to sell more to existing customers or encourage them to stay longer

• Encouraging customers to change their behaviour to help you meet your targets

• Attracting new customers

• Attracting investment

• Supercharging your reputation

We know that the demand for socially responsible and environmentally friendly business is growing. In the 2022 report from Booking.com, 81% of global travellers confirmed that sustainable travel was important to them. If you’re not telling people about it, you could be missing out on sales. This guide is designed to help you make more of your sustainability story.

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2) Creating your plan
 

This section of the guide works through the following five steps in creating your communications plan (IMAGE 1):

Figure 1: Five steps in creating your communications plan

2.1) Understanding

What are you already doing?
 

Is there work you can build on? You may already be asking customers to switch off lights or use different bins. How can you build on these activities to get your sustainability credentials across to your stakeholders? Sustainability marketing should be integrated into your existing activity, not a bolt on. So as you work through the plan, look for opportunities that already exist.

What are your competitors doing?
 

Take a look around. What are others doing? What seems to be working? Who do you admire?

Look outside your immediate competition to organisations that you admire.

Who is your target customer?
 

To make sure your marketing hits the spot, you need to have a clear idea of who you are trying to talk to.

One way to do this is to create a profile persona of your ideal guest customer. Typically, an SME will try to focus on one to three personas whereas a larger brand or destination can have up to five. You will of course see lots of people who don’t fit your personas but this is about giving you the best chance to get your sustainability message out to the right customer type.

The table below shows the kind of questions you can ask yourself to start to build the persona:

Questions
What is their name?
Where are they?
Why are they visiting us?
What makes it a good experience for them?
Who are they with?
What do they already know about us?
What is their attitude to sustainability?
What do they read/watch/listen to?
What keeps them up at night, gets them excited?

If you already have personas, then it’s simply a matter of reviewing them with a ‘sustainability filter’ on and adding that to what you already know.

Handy Hint: Once you’ve built your persona, you could create a mood board to bring each one to life.

MICE customers and green procurement requirements   MICE tourism is travel and tourism for the purpose of business. MICE stands for ‘Meeting, Incentive Travel, Conferences and Exhibitions’. MICE customers are guided by their corporate purchasing policies which increasingly demand that companies prove how sustainable they are before they can become a preferred supplier. A report called “The State of Corporate Social Responsibility” from Meeting Professionals International (MPI) states: “Adoption of CSR policies and initiatives within top-ranked, multinational companies has generated an expectation of CSR practice in all industries and at all levels.” Request for Proposals (RfP) increasingly are requesting sustainability policies, carbon emissions, employee engagement, training, effect on local communities and human rights issues.

2.2) Goal Setting
 

Where do you want to be?
 

Remember the Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) defined in your Sustainability Strategy (LINK TO 18)? Your sustainability marketing plan must be aligned to these.

What do you want your marketing to achieve? Is it to launch your pledge, raise awareness, increase social media engagement, drive enquiries or change perceptions?

Make sure any goals you set are SMART (Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound).

What do you want your target customer to think or do?
 

To achieve your SMART goals, think about your customer’s reaction after they see your marketing. What is it that you need them to think, believe or do differently?

2.3) Creating
 

What do you want to say?
 

For your sustainability marketing to be effective, you need a few key messages, told well.

A ‘Message House’ is a good way to develop those messages and to guide all marketing communications. Once you create your ‘Message House’ you can ask your colleagues to ‘stay inside the Message House to bring our message home’.

If you have completed your Sustainability Strategy (LINK TO 18) you can use your BHAGs and overall Vision as your starting point.

Figure 2: Blank Message House

Figure 3: Example Message House

How do you use these messages to get your customers to help achieve your goals? One way to do this is to take the elements of your Sustainability Strategy and make it meaningful to them.

• Turn your BHAGs into a sustainability pledge

• Highlight the things you are working on and the things you are planning to do

• Ask for their help. Tell them what you need them to do to help you get there

• Celebrate your achievements – in terms of the impact on the environment

• Celebrate their achievements – let them know what customer action has achieved

How are you going to say it?
 

As important as what you say is how you say it. This means the language, imagery, colours, video and music you use.  Some aspects to consider include:

• Start with and stay true to your brand

• Avoid ‘Stock Sustainability’. You know the ones; photos and illustrations of trees, leaves, wind turbines, dandelion clocks, hands, earth, water droplets. They are overused and will make your marketing melt into the background

• Don’t use jargon or cliches

• Be honest and avoid greenwashing. A really easy way to avoid greenwashing is to use the Green Claims Code. Use it to stress test all your communications material. Not just the words but what the images or overall context implies:

  • What do you want to say?

  • How can you prove it?

  • How will you get there?

  • Why does it matter?

• No photography is better than bad photography

• Don’t use ‘eco fonts’ like Papyrus. Stick with your own brand typeface.  And if you really want to have a sustainable typeface as part of your brand, try the world’s most trusted (Baskerville), the world’s most accessible (Google fonts), or the world’s most earth-friendly (Ryman eco).

• Think about colour. Green is as associated with environment as red is with sales. Use it carefully with your existing brand colours and try and use brighter shades

• Make sure that any design element fits with your brand. Think about whether you need to update your guidelines to make your brand work for sustainability

Greenwashing and greenhushing
 

From drinks to banks, sports to fashion, media coverage of greenwashing is everywhere. It has become such a problem that the UK’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA) published a new code designed to end greenwashing for good and ensure that organisations breaking the Code face legal action. It sets out 6 key points:

1. Be truthful and accurate
2. Be clear and unambiguous
3. Do not omit or hide important information
4. Only make fair and meaningful comparisons
5. Consider the full life cycle of the product or service
6. Be substantiated

You may have heard of greenwashing – but what about greenhushing? This is where organisations choose to undersell or even fail to promote at all what they are doing to help the environment.  Why does this happen? There are lots of different reasons such as “I don’t want to brag,” or, “we don’t want customers to poke holes in the things we aren’t doing well yet.”

Don’t see sharing a compelling story of your sustainability achievements and goals as bragging, but rather as an inspiration for others to do the same, and a way to connect instantly and deeply with the growing numbers of customers that care. And it’s absolutely OK to let your customers know that you’re not there yet. No-one is.

2.4 Planning
 

This is where you develop your marketing campaign, focusing on:

• What marketing channels are you going to use

• When are you going to use them and

• What resources you have available

Once you know who you are aiming your marketing at and what you want them to know, it’s time to think about where you can promote your sustainability credentials. This is where Customer Journey Mapping comes in.

A Customer Journey Map helps you understand how customers engage with your brand at different times and touchpoints. The diagram shown below uses phases created by Tourism eSchool.

Figure 4: Customer Journey Map

Using sticky notes, think about all the different ways a customer could interact with your brand at each stage. For example; social media, website, booking system, word of mouth, media travel guides, staff.

And if you are a physical venue, don’t forget where they are actually experiencing your offer – frontage, reception, toilets, bar etc.

Once you’ve mapped it all you can then decide which ones to prioritise based on how easy/expensive they are to implement and how much impact they will have.

Resource
 

As with any marketing campaign, take time to understand exactly what resources are available to you. It’s not just about money though. What other resource do you need? For example, is there any activity that requires more people or management time such as PR or social media campaigns? How much of the overall marketing resource will be solely dedicated to sustainability and where can you integrate the sustainability activity into pre-existing activity?

2.5) Implementing
 

This is where the Excel spreadsheets, Word tables, calendars or marketing software come into play. If you can, use your existing marketing planning tool. If you don’t have one, then a simple table like the one below might be a good starting point.

Area	Objective	Tactic	Responsible	KPI	Budget	Timing
						Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May
e.g. Brand, Website, PR,	The overall objective e.g. integrate sustainability into the guidelines, create a sustainability page, launch campaign for sustainability pledge	Break the overall objective into each action required	For each action make sure someone has responsibility	This could be the overall KPI or there might be individual KPIs for each tactic	This could be the overall Budget or there might be individual budgets for each tactic

Plot the tactics cross each month or week, dependant on what works for your team.

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3) Top Tips
 

Awareness Dates

Start by joining in the events that are relevant to the priority areas you identified in your sustainability strategy. ‘Awarenessdays.com’ has an up to date list, but here are some of the key ones:

Jan        Big Energy Saving Week

Feb        Fair Trade Fortnight

Mar        Food Waste Action Week, World Wildlife Day, Earth Hour

Apr         Earth Day

May       Bike Week

Jun        World Environment Day

Jul         Plastic Free July

Aug        Cycle to Work Day

Sep        Organic September, Recycle Week

Oct         National Clean Air Day, No Disposable Cup Day

Nov        Oceans of Plastic

Dec        International Animal Rights Day

Awards and accreditation
 

• Enter Sustainable Tourism Awards either locally, regionally or internationally

• Get accredited with organisations such as The Global Sustainable Tourism Council or Green Tourism

• Become a B Corp

Partnerships

• Develop partnerships with organisations that share your ambition

• Promote local suppliers and other sustainable organisations to your customers