Going Green: Improve Your ESG Score with a Digital Engagement Strategy
It’s spring, which means that many people across the globe are participating in environmentally friendly activities in honor of both Earth Day and Arbor Day. Whether planting trees, creating self-generating water systems (they do this in Spain!), or even just making an extra effort to recycle, these days give us time to think and make a positive and lasting impact on the environment.
But creating a lasting environmental impact takes more than the actions of individuals — it takes a community. And to measure and prove the impact of their sustainable practices, businesses are measuring themselves against something called an ESG score.
What is ESG?
ESG is an initialism used to describe a company’s practices and policies towards three main pillars: Environmental, Social and Governance. It’s often used in an investing context, where investors assess a company’s sustainability based on these three criteria. And there’s a lot of money to be had in ESG. Roughly $8.4 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to US SIF Foundation’s 2022 Sustainable Investing Overview.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the specifics:
Environmental: Deals with environmental risks and natural resource management. Under these criteria, companies are assessed and regulated based on their environmental impact, including pollution and waste management, emissions and climate change, biodiversity and resource efficiency.
Social: Companies map their social impact by their policies and actions to positively impact individuals, groups, and society. The exact criteria of this depends on the industry in question but can include offering fair work conditions, employee development, supply chain labor standards, access to healthcare and more.
Governance: This refers to the responsibility of managers, shareholders, stakeholders and board members to make decisions and policies that uphold the organization’s social and environmental responsibility to the communities they serve.
Why it matters
Besides being a good corporate citizen, there are a lot of reasons why organizations are prioritizing ESG initiatives as part of their larger business models. For one, it’s good for the bottom line.
By embracing eco-friendly, sustainable business practices, businesses can benefit from tax breaks, government subsidies, investor interest and increased popularity among consumers who prefer to “go green.” According to a Nielsen global online survey, 66 percent of worldwide respondents said they prefer eco-friendly products, services and businesses.
Taking the time to embrace “greener” business practices can bring businesses closer to revenue goals and lighten their carbon footprints. The best part is, pulling off ESG practices is a lot less complicated than most may think.
To contribute to these positive and lasting changes, organizations across the globe are embracing digital experiences to expand their reach while reducing their carbon footprint.
Digital experiences scale your impact, reduce carbon footprint
Companies across multiple industries are leaning into webinars and virtual events to cut back on costs, expand audience reach and reduce carbon footprint.
Audiences today don’t want to hop on a plane, eat continental breakfast and consume white papers they’re likely to throw away. They want engaging digital experiences they can interact with to find answers to their questions and navigate to content relevant to their unique needs. These digital experiences include CPE courses, large-scale virtual conferences and symposiums, executive roundtable discussions, curated content hubs or even highly-targeted landing pages.
By offering current and prospective clients the option to complete certification courses digitally, organizations can expand their reach to global audiences and generate real-time engagement data without spending money on travel, transportation, event space or staff.
Think about it: attendees can complete coursework remotely or review your product portfolio all while your team monitors a lead’s progress. Sales reps can quickly and easily get fully-fleshed insights into an account and take action when appropriate — all without having to travel to the office. For companies seeking to improve their environmental impact, webinars and digital experiences provide an easy way to scale their impact and take environmentally friendly actions.
E is for ‘environmental’ — and enabling
Spreading knowledge about environmental best practices is one thing. But there are certain advantages organizations can gain when they take a more environmentally friendly approach. In fact, going green can enable companies to achieve more — more scale, more reach and more growth — while cutting back on traditional activities.
Take Domo, for example. In 2020, Domo had to shift its annual conference — Domopalooza — from an in-person event to a fully virtual experience. One of the side effects of this environmentally-friendly move was that it easily grew attendance to Domopalooza from its usual 3,000 attendees to more than 9,000 registrations and 12,000 viewers. Not only that, but attendee engagement — from resources downloaded to demos and meetings booked — can, through ON24, all be easily tracked and acted on. Going green can actually make your sales force more effective.
This is just the beginning
In some cases, being an environmentally friendly company is a matter of making small changes. Not only is this in the best interest of the environment and the communities we serve, but it also plays an integral role in helping us achieve better business outcomes — especially as digital transformation continues to empower businesses to say “yes” to environmentally friendly activities.