Effectively communicating your environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights through content marketing is now an essential requirement for companies of all sizes.
However, there are currently three key ESG trends you should be aware of:
- The first is the politicization and controversy surrounding ESG as a term despite general recognition of the underlying values, leading to “greenhushing,” particularly in the US.
- The second reason is changes in sustainability reporting requirements, particularly in the EU.
- The third trend is changes to greenwashing legislation to improve consumer protection.
The “anti-ESG” movement may seem distant, but it can have a domino effect and create distrust of the term and the actions associated with it. This can create a discouraging and difficult atmosphere for ESG communication.
While the CSRD requirements currently affect large companies, it is likely that they will also trickle down to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
How does this apply to content marketing?
People typically associate greenwashing with misleading statistics or words, but it’s important to remember that the Green Claims Code applies in all contexts — including visual contexts like graphics, images and videos.
When marketing sustainability and climate claims, it is important to consider tone and context as well as all written content.
Use an impact report to market your ESG efforts
An annual report focuses on the organization’s business performance that year, while an impact report focuses on the impact the organization has on people and the planet.
In general, an impact report communicates your ESG goals and strategy and reports on your progress towards these goals. You can tie this to your organization’s mission and culture. For example, if your goal is to reduce Scope 3 carbon emissions by 20%, you can describe how you aimed to achieve this and list your actual Scope 3 carbon reduction. To achieve this, you may have used a company culture initiative, such as introducing a bike to work program or a travel policy.
Transparency about your results is important – remember the anti-greenwashing rule about selective omission! If you haven’t achieved your goal, honesty will build trust, and accountability of the impact report will encourage your organization to rethink its strategy.
It is important that these are part of your company’s business strategy. For example, if your organization is focused on SDG 3 “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages,” you might focus on revising workplace or sickness well-being policies, or providing gym membership as a work perk, as well as corporate donations this year went to global healthcare charities.
You can then look at the impact: Did your employees feel more motivated by focusing on health? Were there fewer sick days? How was her mental health? Have you received feedback from the charities you donated to? You can include any quotes from your employees or other stakeholders. Embedding compelling stories into your data points makes it more interesting and increases authenticity.
Another part of the impact report, as with any content, is data visualization. Clear and attractive graphics help readers understand your data and statistics.
How to market an impact report
As this is a publicly available document, it is important that your impact report complies with anti-greenwashing guidelines and the Green Claims Code.
Therefore, any assets syndicated from this central report should also be reviewed, especially in the context of a social media profile. For example, only posting about the “good” parts of the report or sharing only certain goals could be perceived as selective omission. It is also important to ensure that you always link to the entire impact report so that the reader can find further details.
You can maximize the value of your impact report by breaking it down into social media assets. For example, you can convert the key highlights into an icon graphic for LinkedIn titled “Our top three impacts this year.”
Any data visualization or image can be used as a visual element for a LinkedIn post along with a link to the full report.
Tick tock
Video footage of volunteer projects, employees cycling to work, etc. can be turned into a lighthearted TikTok post. You could create a highlights reel from the last year with positive impacts, or even create a TikTok asking your employees if anything surprised them about the impact report.
Blogs
There is a lot to write about the concept of an impact report: why are they important for SMEs? How did you carry out yours? What have you prioritized? What problems did you encounter?
A blog is also an opportunity to dive deeper into a topic from the report, such as why your organization chose a particular charity. Or perhaps a team member would like to make a personal statement about something from the impact report – an intern could share their story and steps they have taken since leaving the internship.
