10 Key Questions to Help You ACT on Your Environmental Impact

With the UN last month declaring a code red for humanity due to the climate crisis, the time has well and truly come for marketers to reckon with their environmental impact. Yet as floods and fires level communities across the globe, grappling with the climate crisis can sometimes feel overwhelming.

At Flock, we’re eager to provide marketers with the support they need to shake off the cobwebs and ACT on their environmental responsibilities. A.C.T. stands for Accountability, Collaboration and Trading – a framework of principles that we see as critical to converting the desire to help into genuine action.

To drive such action, we recently released “The Sustainable Marketer”, a whitepaper filled with resources and advice to help marketers work towards being more societally, economically and environmentally sustainable. To find out more about our A.C.T. framework, or to begin taking steps towards Marketing Sustainability, download our whitepaper below:

To get you started, we’ve compiled 10 key questions from our report, highlighting important areas to focus on and issues to consider when aiming for environmental sustainability:

1. Are you communicating your company’s efforts in protecting the environment and meeting net-zero goals to your employees, suppliers and consumers?
2. Are you communicating this in an open and honest manner, sharing areas that you still need to improve upon and how you are addressing this?
3. Do you have a sustainability scorecard, carbon calculator or another tool that enables you to measure, track and improve your organization’s sustainability performance as well as your suppliers?
4. Do your commercial contracts with your agencies, media owners and tech providers include your environmental policies and net-zero targets, and do you have visibility of theirs?
5. Are your marketing activities being produced in a manner that avoids or minimizes environmental impact? For example, eliminating plastic and reducing water usage when producing physical assets or using recycled materials for live events.
6. If your company has a canteen, does leftover food get donated to homeless shelters or underprivileged communities?
7. Do you have a recycling program within your organization not just for paper but also for office equipment, supplies and furniture, providing them to charities, schools, hospitals or start-up businesses who may not be able to afford it?
8. What is the impact your brand has on Biodiversity?
9. Do you have a sustainable travel policy in place, and with your partners, that outlines what is considered “essential” air travel?
10. Do you make it easy for your consumers to be able to act sustainably through the use of your product or service? (example – when you purchase from Nike online the item is delivered in a recyclable and reusable envelope which can be easily re-sealed and re-labelled for returns.)

For inspiration on how to ACT on your environmental impact, please see:

• PG Scorecard Data Results
• Walmart Sustainability Textiles
• IKEA Foundation Renewable Energy
• ISLA – Event Industry Response to Climate Change
• Green Film Shooting
• WARC – Sabre Awards – Doconomy do black

For more resources, advice and research, download our Sustainability Whitepaper above and take our Marketing Sustainability Survey. Please also feel free to contact us about any thoughts you might have on Marketing Sustainability via the contact form below.