« LoudSauce is a Changemakers WeMedia Finalist | Main | A few weeks in, the daily choice »
Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, Part 1
February 20, 2010 |
As people and brands begin their long term journey towards becoming truly sustainable, what are appropriate and effective ways to use digital to share data and engage stakeholders? Overall, even award winning brands are still over-spending efforts on static sustainability reports that are relatively useless to the digital generation. Below are some opportunities for agencies and brands willing to lead.
Last June, I attended the 2009 Sustainable Brands conference on behalf of a client. The experience talking with brands, sustainability consultancies and agencies confirmed two things:
- While major brands are slowly making progress, most are embracing digital engagement and sustainability strategies in separate silos with different teams and different agencies.
- While sustainability consultancies and marketing agencies are both serving clients, there is an opportunity for digital agencies to proactively develop platforms for engaging customers, employees and shareholders to accelerate the evolution towards sustainability.
These lessons got me interested why agencies weren't more aggressively exploring these opportunities. So after completing a major project with Nokia and Rihanna in November, I chose to leave my job as an Account Director at R/GA in London, spend the month of January in India, and move to the Bay Area to further explore opportunities to apply lessons of digital marketing to sustainability.
Social media's influence on sustainable brands is already well documented by sources such as the Gort Cloud, and I won't spend time here discussing that in depth. Instead, I will focus attention here on opportunities for digital agencies and brands to drastically improve the way they create digital experiences for their customers, shareholders and employees.
From Sustainability Reporting to Data Storytelling
Due to the nature of sustainability, most major brands have rightfully focused their energy on evaluating the social and environmental impact of their products and services. Particularly for manufacturers and distributors of physical goods, the vast majority of the improvements they can make are in the physical life cycles of their products. Therefore, the question from a digital perspective is: How can digital media engage stakeholders to share progress more dynamically, and also accelerate the momentum of those improvements for the company and its stakeholders?
As part of the 2009 Ceres/ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards, which highlight best practices in reporting on sustainability issues by North American organizations, the General Electric pdf report won top prize for how it communicated the strategic alignment between their sustainability and overall business strategies. And Seventh Generation received a special award for making their report a flash based e-book with links and videos.
However, comparing these prize winning reports to even basic digital user experience expectations in 2010, the reality is that sustainability reporting is still extremely poor on interactivity and utility. In a joint research project by the Global Reporting Initiative and Radley Yeldar evaluating trends in online sustainability reporting, they were similarly unimpressed:
"Few companies are taking advantage of the more innovative uses of technology. No company in our survey used XBRL to tag data; none used Web 2.0 technologies to create engagement and dialogue with users of their primary report; and even where other online functionalities are being used, these tend to focus on 'design' rather than functionality."
There is a major opportunity for brands and leading digital agencies to make a step change that goes from simply reporting to long term dynamic storytelling. Instead of static pdfs and e-books with lots of photos and text designed to impress advocacy groups and shareholders, imagine amazing data visualizations of historical, current, and future projected social and environmental impact based on tangible, implicit data. Some early explorations of life cycle storytelling at the product level are Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles, and so many creative opportunities are yet to be explored. Also see TED International speaker and friend Manuel Lima's post on the subject of data visualization and sustainability.
The Need for a Strong Sustainability API
Beyond being product and brand specific, useful sustainability data eventually also needs to be intelligently shared through APIs that enable stakeholders to visualize, compare, and innovate on the data. In order to gain wisdom across products, companies and sectors, brands will need to become comfortable opening up their data, some of it proprietary, for customers and even competitors to build on and mash up effectively.
One of the most forward looking projects has been the GreenXchange project with Nike, Creative Commons and other partners, which opened up some of Nike's patents for innnovators to build on. I am curious to see what results are created out of the open innovation, but the long term strategy is spot on.
Similarly, some smart technologists have been working on open standards on environmental impact data to enable the kind of innovation we've seen in web 2.0 in the green economy. Walmart's efforts to create a Sustainability Index have major potential, and it would be great to see the UK retailers like Marks & Spencer build on their already strong leadership to formalize standard data sharing through an API.
According to Programmable Web's API Directory, for example, there are some noteworthy independent APIs such as the Carbon data measurement standards AMEE, Open Eco, and Carma. Of the three, the UK based AMEE, which stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine, seems the most aware of its potential role in driving innovative mashups for sustainable choices.
While independent organizations may be in a better position to gather and process data, sustainable brands and the agencies that serve then have an opportunity to be pro-active about leading or participating in these platforms, and will improve their brand reputation strongly by doing so.
In the second part of this series on Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, I will evaluate some of the best digital sustainability experiences that brands and agencies have produced to help people and communities to improve their life and buying choices, and live more sustainable lives.
Posted by Colin at February 20, 2010 1:16 AM
