Ep. 3: Why your sustainability story sucks

With the stakes of communicating sustainability higher than ever, it's important that companies get their story straight. But many continues to fail to tell authentic and engaging stories that resonate with their key audiences. In this episode of The Sustainability Communicator, Mike explains common reasons why businesses struggle to tell good sustainability stories - and how to do better.

Read the full transcript below. You also can find this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

Let's face it. Your company's sustainability story sucks. But don't worry. There's hope for you yet.   

Hey everybody, and welcome to the sustainability communicator — the podcast, exploring the intersection of corporate sustainability and storytelling. I'm your host, Mike Hower, a sustainability communication nerd with more than 15 years of experience on both sides of the podium — as a journalist for media outlets like GreenBiz and a communication strategist for major global companies — during each episode, we explore interesting sustainability communication, challenges, risks, and opportunities facing folks in the business community and beyond. If you're ready to talk your walk, then you've come to the right place. Time to get to it. 

Communicating sustainability has become more critical than ever as all manner of stakeholders — from investors to customers and employees to regulators — demand information about corporate environmental and social impacts. With each passing day, it seems like stakeholders are getting savvier, competitors are upping their strategy and storytelling games and regulators are getting stricter. The stakes of getting it right are higher than ever. But many businesses are failing to tell engaging and effective sustainability stories. Maybe yours is one of them.  

That's because sustainability storytelling isn't stagnant — it's a living, breathing creature that's always evolving. What was a good story 10 years ago is pase today. Communication that was compelling and groundbreaking even months ago might be table stakes today. If your company is struggling to tell effective stories around your sustainability strategy, don't worry. Most are right there on the struggle bus with you. Nobody's perfect, and even the world's worst sustainability comm strategy can get better. The first step is to recognize what's off so that you can get to work on making it better. 

Today. I want to talk about a few reasons why your sustainability story might be lacking. And how to do better. 

One of the biggest reasons companies fail at communicating sustainability is because they have no substance to talk about. In recent years, as more investors pressured companies to cough up ESG information — or else — it led to a mad dash to push out sustainability reports before companies had anything meaningful to report. According to a Capital Group study, in 2020 about 89 percent of investors considered ESG issues in some form as part of their investment approach. And between 2010 and 2021, the number of S&P 500 companies publishing ESG reports increased from 35 to 86 percent. That is no small number.  But just because companies are disclosing more doesn't mean that they're creating meaningful, positive impact on the world. Having your storytelling get ahead of your strategy means risking greenwashing and all the blow back that comes with that. And greenwashing can now cost you more than just your reputation. It can tie you up in time-consuming and expensive legal battles and regulatory fiascos. And nobody wants that. 

The bottom line is that before you can develop an interesting and authentic sustainability story, you first need to create the substance through a meaningful strategy. This means making sure that your company has set science-based targets and hopefully net zero targets, that you've conducted materiality assessment, that you've got a clear strategy for decarbonization and addressing other social environmental challenges. 

The second reason that many companies suck at sustainability storytelling is that they are trying to make things that are already table-stakes sound groundbreaking. So, you've heard of greenwashing and green hushing and — after thinking long and hard about what to call this phenomenon — I'm trying to coin a new term called green bumbling. This is when a company makes a sustainability claim that is truthful, but boring.  

In a rapidly changing sustainability ecosystem, what it means to be a leader is constantly in flux. Fifteen years ago, if your company was issuing sustainability reports, it might've been seen as leading the pack, but today it's business as usual. Likewise, even just a few years ago, announcing that zero commitments would have been seen as impressive. But today it's not going to turn that many heads. 

Often, when companies engage in green bumbling it's because they lack communications teams that have sustainability expertise. And without that deep understanding of the complex and rapidly evolving sustainability ecosystem that we all operate in, it can be difficult to know what is actually interesting and to what audience. So what intrigues one audience may bore another.  

Now I'll preface this with the fact that not every company can or needs to be a leader in sustainability. It's really okay if you're middle of the pack, or if you're just working to get from zero to hero. That's better than nothing. Instead of worrying about being the best, worry about being the best version of yourself when it comes to your company. 

To avoid green bumbling, you must ensure that your sustainability and comms teams are working together to identify and deliver authentic, relevant stories that actually stick with the audiences. Many sustainability professionals lack strong communication expertise. While corporate comms practitioners don't usually have sustainability know-how. So finding a way to bridge this expertise gap — either through internal hires or bringing on external consultants — can ensure that your company is telling the right stories in the right way at the right time.   

The third reason that many companies fail at communicating sustainability is because they are trying to talk to everyone, everywhere all at once. Most smart marketers and communicators know to segment audiences so that they can tailor messages appropriately. For some reason, many companies think that they can spit out the same sustainability message to all their different stakeholders from investors to customers, whoever. And you see this more often than not in sustainability reports, which are stuffed with every piece of social environmental information that can overwhelm everyone and impress no one. This results in bloated, boring documents that make pretty much everybody miserable, including those people who write them. That's me I'm talking about. So, rather than taking a one-size-fits all approach to sustainability storytelling, it's smart to think about your core audiences and what matters most to them. Investors tend to care more about your ESG data than case studies about human impacts of sustainability strategy — while customers and employees love the ladder. So everyone's heard the saying “Know your audience” — apply this to your sustainability communication strategy, sit back and enjoy the show.

But also know that sustainability reports are just one tool in your communications toolbox. There's so many other mediums for communicating your sustainability strategy to whatever stakeholder you're trying to reach — your consumers are more likely to read your social media content, your blog posts, and maybe look at your website while investors are definitely looking at your website, they're looking at the report and they're more interested in the data-driven stories. And your employees — they're going to be reading your internal newsletters, they're going to be looking at social media and possibly blog posts that you publish about your sustainability stories. And they're not necessarily going to be diving as deep into the data, but make sure that you have it there in case they're interested in looking a little deeper. 

Now, the fourth and most obvious reason a company's sustainability story struggles is because the company is afraid to talk about failure. No company can ever be a sustainable brand. They just can't. They can only be more or less sustainable. Success and failure are two sides of the same coin. And focusing only on your wins is leaving out half the narrative.

But many companies remain rooted in the old school mentality of corporate communications that is marked by emphasizing business success while covering up blemishes. Comms teams exist to spin stories so that the organization looks as favorable as possible. This just doesn't work in today's skeptical, interconnected world where the truth is always going to come out and stakeholders assume greenwashing until proven otherwise. The stories of perfection are inherently boring. 

Nobody wants to hear a story about a hero that was perfect and never overcame any challenges — we want to hear about flaws and mistakes and how people and organizations learned and overcame them to be better. And having the courage to talk about your company's sustainability struggles — it'll generate empathy and facilitate understanding that ultimately earns the respect of your stakeholders. 

Now, I'm a realist. And I know that companies aren't going to say every little secret that they have — and that's fine. You don't have to talk about every little mistake you've ever made. But the key here is just to make sure that you're not telling a story that is so clean and scrubbed, that it just has no heart to it and be willing to tell a little bit about your struggles along the way. Don't just talk about your wins. And honestly, your most interesting stories are about when you faced a challenge and then you overcame them.  

The world's greatest sustainability strategy is only as impactful as the company's ability to communicate it well enough to spur stakeholders into action. So, companies have to translate their sustainability strategy and authentic, effective stories that inform and inspire all stakeholders from investors, to customers, to employees, regulators, and others in the service of social, environmental, and financial goals.  Nobody ever said this was going to be easy, but with a little help in hard work. I know you got this.

And with that, we've reached the end of this episode of the sustainability communicator podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you like what you heard and you'd like to hear more, stay tuned for future episodes that cover a variety of topics in sustainability storytelling.  

To stay in the know of future episodes and other content. You can follow me, Mike Hower, on LinkedIn — or you can follow us on our newsletter, which comes out not as often as I'd like but at least once a month. You can sign up for that in the show notes and you can visit us on our website. At www.howerimpact.com 

Wherever you are in your sustainability journey. Good luck. And keep at it. We need you out there.