The Thin Green Line: Sustainability beyond the sales pitch
Agencies must hold ourselves accountable for sustainability - Group Event Director, Cressida Slater
Clients might love it when we talk sustainable practice in pitches and tenders - but once we get into delivery, convincing them to make good choices can be a constant battle. Perhaps it’s time agencies started holding ourselves more accountable.
Business leaders and their procurement teams are aware of mounting external pressures to adopt more sustainable practices, and you’d be hard pressed to find a live events pitch or tender opportunity that doesn’t include sustainability in some way, shape or form – or an events agency pitch deck that doesn’t address emissions tracking and environmental impact reduction measures.
There’s a genuine desire in our industry to be a force for good, so more often than not, those agencies walk the walk on their claims. Most of us have done a ton of work to raise our game in recent years.
Agencies like ours have upended our entire way of working to accommodate the new drive towards net zero
Where up to 80% of carbon emissions are tied up in supply chains, unpicking the individual contributors to an event’s environmental impact is a fiendishly complex task - but now we have tools like TRACE by Isla, enabling sophisticated end-to-end measurement and reporting across projects, from audience travel and catering, to materials, waste, and more.
With accurate data, we’ve become surgical in our carbon cutting recommendations. Environmental considerations impact every decision. Our teams are trained in sustainable design and delivery. We’ve built networks of sustainable suppliers, circular economy partners like Event Cycle, and can suggest a thousand different ways for clients to reduce the impact of their events.
“You can lead a horse to water – but is it thirsty?”
Our new capabilities elicit the right ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ at pitch time; CMOs nod appreciatively, tender assessors tick the box and move on. We embark on each new project full of optimism - but often we get into delivery and see sustainability slip down the agenda.
“We don’t have the budget.”
“We want the event to feel premium.”
“We don’t want the sustainable option.”
This ‘sustainability slippage’ (as we’ve termed it) isn’t confined to the events industry, and it’s not an insidious greenwashing conspiracy; It’s just what happens in high-pressured environments where project teams focus on short-term delivery objectives like ROI and sales leads.
I always talk about how we need to get more radical on sustainability, so here’s a radical take – the problem isn’t clients; it’s us. It’s agencies.
Looming, intractable live event deadlines mean sustainability considerations tend to slide down clients’ list of day-to-day priorities - so let’s show a bit of empathy and stop trying to force these decisions on them when they’re time-poor. Their stressed ambivalence shouldn’t let us off the hook for the promises we made. We have a responsibility as an industry to make our proposals sustainable by default, without compromising on quality or cost.
The client may not know or care how hard we worked with caterers to source seasonal veg, locally produced meat (or plant based alternatives), with low food miles and a low carbon rating. The important thing is that delegates require a delicious meal: is what we present more sustainable? Yes. Is it still tasty? Yes.
There are hundreds of nudges that make no difference in price or quality. Like lanyards sourced in fully recycled rPET plastic or maybe bamboo - premium products with like-for-like price points.
We’ll target and measure the local economic impact of our projects; not because clients ask us to, but because part of our job is to help them tell a better story about the difference we’ve made together. Post-event, when everyone’s feeling warm and fuzzy - that’s when we can all shout about our wins. But making them happen, that’s on us.
Today, upwards of 70% of our client projects incorporate sustainability elements as standard. Delegate travel still makes up the bulk of live event emissions, so we mitigate where we can, choosing venues close to transport links and accommodation within walking distance. Project ‘green travel plans’ ensure delegates are given the option to make better choices, walking, public transport… even bike rental.
Plant-based catering, lanyard recycling, seed paper menus, and recycled stand materials make a small difference on paper, but they’re examples of the soft influence we can exert, and moments that add up to shifting industry perceptions.
Many of our clients are totally on board with investing in TRACE, and together we’ve set benchmarks that are driving genuine performance improvements year on year. Our job is to help clients futureproof their events strategy for a world where environmental impact is more strictly controlled, reporting is legislated, and options are sustainable by default.
If net zero is a mountain, we’re still in the foothills and the summit is so far away, we can’t even say for sure what it’ll look like when we get there. But there’s one thing we can say with certainty; the pressure to improve sustainability isn’t going anywhere - and we can’t keep shifting the responsibility to clients forever.
