Sustainability Strategy & Communications
If your company is new to sustainability, we can work with you to develop a strategy that is consistent with your company’s values and business goals. After we gain momentum, we’ll help you develop a communications strategy that engages your employees and informs your customers of your successes. This can include press releases to traditional and green outlets, setting up speaking engagements, providing data for CSR reporting and developing content for your website.
Sustainability Strategy
In order to successfully engage your entire organization in improving your social and environmental performance, it is critical to have a comprehensive sustainability strategy. Our Zero Waste, Energy Management and Green Merchandising programs can serve as the core of any company’s overall strategy, but there are other areas that need to be addressed as well if you want to become an industry leader.
We assist you in developing a strategy by:
- Helping you select your internal leadership team
- Conducting a strength and weaknesses analysis to identify opportunities
- Educating the leadership team on sustainability trends in retail and their respective departments
- Holding a strategy session to develop a vision, mission and strategic priorities consistent with your companies culture and values
- Developing action plans within each department to address strategic priorities
- Enacting a management process to track and report results
Government Partnership Programs
Public/private partnerships are a valuable way to bring credibility to the reporting and publicity surrounding your sustainability initiatives. ESE Solutions has experience in working with the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a contractor for its Retail Industry Portal. Part of our responsibilities is to inform leading retailers about the voluntary partnership programs the EPA offers in order to increase participation.
We help you navigate through which programs are right for your company, set baselines and manage the reporting requirements of the programs. Below are some popular EPA programs for retailers that ESE Solutions can assist you with:
Waste Reduction
Energy & Climate Change
Green Merchandising
Internal Communications
Engaging your employees is critical to the success of sustainability initiatives, not only to drive execution, but because gaining feedback from employees can provide practical suggestions to help achieve your goals. We:
- Organize employee led “green” teams at your corporate offices and your facilities to drive strategic priorities and also have a little fun
- Manage environmental and social ideas from your online suggestion box by not just sending a canned response, but by providing the resources required to assist employees their suggestions a reality
- Coordinate internal messaging by drafting articles for your company’s intranet and planning events to bring to light your successes and where you might need a little more help driving execution
External Communications
Once you have your strategy in place and are successfully executing, ESE Solutions helps you share your message with external stakeholders including your customers, shareholders, regulators, peer retailers and non-profit organizations. We:
- Compile content and organization for a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) compliant sustainability report
- Draft content of press releases focusing on environmental efforts and release to alternative “green” media outlets
- Identify speaking and panel opportunities at leading sustainability and industry conferences for your executives
- Develop ad-hoc reports as required for sustainable investment funds and groups
- Develop content for your website highlighting your strategy and accomplishments
