Getting your sustainability comms ‘right’ – Part II

Following on from our latest blog on the positives (and perils) of referencing sustainability in your communications, we’re revisiting this with a couple more examples to further explore the importance of organisations – commercial AND non-profit – being able to back up their green credentials!

This time, we’ll start with the good!

‘Who Gives a Crap’ manufacture and sell sustainable toilet paper and, if this is the first you’ve heard of them, you’re surely in the minority, as they’ve been running high impact ad campaigns for many years.

Their bold, mildly anarchic name pushes boundaries and very much falls into the ‘clever’ category, doubling up as a question for our times.

It’s one they answer, as their toilet paper is 100% recycled and, rather incredibly, they donate 50% of profits (yes, that’s FIFTY!) to clean water and toilet projects across the globe, raising and sharing millions of pounds in the process.

The company consistently uses humour to convey how their ethos and philanthropic efforts are helping tackle the deadly serious issues of deforestation and access to clean drinking water.

Let’s face it, with a name like theirs, there’s really no other way to approach it!

They clearly explain how we can do our bit, simply by purchasing an essential item (from them) whilst highlighting that, if you’re buying regular loo roll, you’re really part of the problem.

So, through their humorous, educational comms, Who Gives a Crap really do hit the sweet spot in their marketing, which is no doubt a massive part of their success.

For the bad, rather than taking a potshot at an easy target like we did in our last blog (sorry-not-sorry, BP), here’s an example of how a HUGE environmental NGO opened themselves up to accusations of greenwashing.

And, when it comes to environmental groups, The World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, is just about as big as it gets.

It is known as an important and respected player in promoting sustainable forest management across the globe.

So much so, that tackling deforestation is one of its flagship campaigns.

A large section of their website is devoted to this very cause and, as they put it themselves, “Forests are vital for people and wildlife – we need them, and they need us to act”.

You can read all about that here.

You can imagine how damaging, then, it was to be implicated in stories that it received millions of dollars from its links with governments and business.

In the 2014 book “PandaLeaks – The Dark Side of the WWF” by Wilfried Huismann, he claimed that:

“Global corporations such as Coca-Cola, Shell, Monsanto, HSBC, Cargill, BP, Alcoa and Marine Harvest have all benefited from the group’s green image only to carry on their businesses as usual.”

As far as a list of environmental bad guys goes, that takes some beating. Google ANY of them and their contribution to deforestation and you’ll see what we mean.

At the time of publication, WWF was accused of “selling its soul” to businesses which destroy nature and use the WWF brand to “greenwash” their operations.

Ouch.

It was argued “by setting up round tables of industrialists on strategic commodities such as palm oil, timber, sugar, soy, biofuels and cocoa, WWF International became a political power that is too close to industry and in danger of becoming reliant on corporate money.”

Double ouch.

It got an awful lot worse, too. For the full list of accusations – including that it was secretly run by the wealthy upper classes and tacitly supported the movement of indigenous people for the benefit of “nature” – head here.

For a conservation organisation, this is just about as serious as it gets.

A subsequent scandal over its links to human rights abuses left the organisation in a very dark place and fighting for its own survival.

The obvious question being: how can we trust anything they say in their communications any more?

Years on from these scandals, WWF is still very much alive.

So, how did they recover?

Put simply, they held their hands up, acted and owned their mistake.

WWF commissioned an external review that produced a 160-page report with over 170 recommended changes spanning governance, accountability, and social safeguards.

It adopted roughly 98% of the panel’s recommended structural and operational reforms and established formal grievance mechanisms, risk assessment protocols, and an ombuds office to handle internal and external complaints.

You can read more about that here.

Whether they will ever recover from the reputational damage is difficult to measure, but as cautionary tales go, this is a lesson well worth learning.

DON’T talk about how environmental you are for a quick win with customers/beneficiaries if you have any skeletons in the closet. It will come back to haunt you and your organisation.