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Sustainability


How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

There’s a well-worn saying in business that the only certainty is change, and these past few years have proven that to be true by exponential levels. Entire industries have found themselves faced with the need to plan and transform their businesses in the face of tremendous unknowns including COVID-19, rising inflation, and a troubled economy. Now, as we enter September of 2022, with the world still in flux, what does it mean to look ahead, and begin planning for the future? Business transformation matters now more than ever and agility and forward-thinking scenario planning have never been...
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Why Your Brand Needs to Be a Sustainable Brand

Why Your Brand Needs to Be a Sustainable Brand

Being a Sustainable Brand Is Now An Expectation What does it mean to be a sustainable brand? Sustainability measures have become table stakes for Fortune 500 companies. People now expect every reputable business to have a sustainability department and as a result, some level of corporate sustainability reporting is the norm. More and more companies are becoming B Corp because they believe in the inherent value of using business to solve social and environmental problems. A shift is underway to make sustainable business something every department needs to get behind. But Where’s The Brand?...
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Why Integrated Reporting is Inevitable

Why Integrated Reporting is Inevitable

Integrated Reporting These days, integrated reporting is a corporate dog everyone loves to kick. People will tell you it’s a bore, a chore, a snore. It’s another corporate cost center, a straightjacket on corporate communication, a full-employment program dreamed up by do-gooders to give jobs to bean counters. To its harshest critics, integrated reporting is not even a dog. It’s a tail that wants to wag the dog. A dozen years ago, people said all these things about the Global Reporting Initiative, known as GRI. The first time I wrote a corporate sustainability report, one of the client’s...
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Sustainability Reporting Trends

Sustainability Reporting Trends

Keeping on top of sustainability reporting trends is not easy. The field of corporate sustainability reporting is maturing and evolving, making it important to keep up with the changing standards and expectations long after you complete this lesson in Sustainability 101. As you get more experience in this discipline, continue to watch what the leaders do. Keep up with issues on the horizon through the conversations on blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. And, attend conferences to hear from the experts when you can. At Emotive Brand, we strive to keep our finger on the pulse of the industry in order...
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Sustainability Reporting: Preparing Your Organization

Sustainability Reporting: Preparing Your Organization

Preparing for sustainability reporting Our advice before starting sustainability reporting, is to prepare your organization before you do anything else. First things first. Before setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to write outlines or strategies or any text at all, there are a few important steps that will help build the foundation for a quality corporate sustainability report (CSR). Most people won’t see the report’s foundation. But, just because you can’t see it, doesn’t make it any less important. Any builder (or homeowner with a leaky basement) will tell you how critical it is...
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Top Ten Sustainability Acronyms

Top Ten Sustainability Acronyms

Several years ago, I got a new assignment at work and suddenly found myself immersed in sustainability reporting. As I set out to learn my new job, I discovered an alphabet soup of sustainability acronyms that made my head spin on a daily basis. I tried to make sense of what the experts were saying, but the language seemed to barely resemble English. So, one of my first orders of business was to learn the key acronyms of this new discipline. It was clear to me that if I didn’t understand these, I would continue to be lost and confused a good bit of the time. In this field, there are...
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Five Company Experts You Need for a Good Sustainability Report

Five Company Experts You Need for a Good Sustainability Report

Producing a corporate sustainability report (CSR) is a team sport. The stronger the team is, the stronger the sustainability report will be. Each player needs to bring specific expertise that is complementary to the team as a whole. So, it is important to recruit and rally the key experts that can deliver what you need to make the company’s report a success. Choose carefully and look for people who already demonstrate some passion about sustainability. In most organizations, there are one or two departments that lead the sustainability report. Those functions will likely be a reflection of...
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Numbers Don’t Lie

Numbers Don’t Lie

Ask any writer or reporter who deals with the real world, and they will tell you that language is not the thing that quickens their hearts. It’s numbers. In a world that’s awash in words, subjectivity, and spin, hard data is the ladder back to dry land. A few revealing numbers can instantly provide a clear context for everything around them, enabling us to understand things better, faster, and more usefully. For example, a lot of people thought it was crazy for Angelina Jolie to get a double mastectomy to prevent cancer. (You can find her announcement here.) But once you get a few relevant...
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Five Sustainability Report Formats

Five Sustainability Report Formats

The pros and cons of five sustainability report formats What format will your corporate sustainability report (CSR) take? Determining how to present the final product is one of the key decisions to make as you develop the strategy and project plan for a CSR. The format not only has budget and timeline implications, but it also impacts the way your report is organized and written. For example, writing for the web requires a very different approach than a long-form printed copy. It wasn’t too long ago that most companies simply prepared printed documents and/or a downloadable PDF of the same...
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Five Not-So-Obvious Ways External Experts Can Improve Your Sustainability Report

Five Not-So-Obvious Ways External Experts Can Improve Your Sustainability Report

Producing a Corporate Sustainability Report (CSR) is a big job that requires significant time and expertise. It’s easy to underestimate the full scope of resources that reporting requires. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of consultants and agencies available that can help handle many parts of the workload – from strategy, to writing, to data management, to graphic design, as well as agencies that can do it all. Typically, reporting teams only consider hiring a consultant or agency in order to fill obvious gaps in internal resources or expertise. But, hiring the right experts will also...
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