Balancing the conflicting requirements of people, profit and planet

As suggested by an earlier post, Boots has got into difficulty in its attempts to balance social needs with planetary needs.

This conflict is something I'm studying at the moment as part of a course on evaluating sustainable projects. Or perhaps that should be, evaluating projects for their sustainability, balanced with the sometimes conflicting demands for projects to also show a profit and/or be good for society.

How you trade off these conflicting requirements (sadly it's not always win, win, win) is something that appears to be a formula that the Rainforest Alliance appears to have got a good handle on at the moment.

The organisation requires farmers producing certified products to meet ten criteria:

1. Social and Environmental Management System
2. Ecosystem Conservation
3. Wildlife Protection
4. Water Conservation
5. Fair Treatment and Good Working Conditions for Workers
6. Occupational Health and Safety
7. Community Relations
8. Integrated Crop Management
9. Soil Management and Conservation
10. Integrated Waste Management

Farms must score 80% across the board and 50% on each criteria. (There's more here)

So, the scheme has a straightforward criteria for assuring both the people and planet minimum standards.

What about profit? Well, they must be getting something right, given the flurry of big names like Kenco, Costa, McDonalds and now even Nestle that are getting involved. (If you are as old as me you will understand 'even' getting italics.) This article suggests there's a 5-10% sales increase to be experienced once using the Rainforest Alliance branding.

So is there any bad news? Two pieces:

This review of the difference between Rainforest Alliance and the rival Fairtrade certification scheme suggests the Rainforest branding is the cheaper option to go for (although there's also an interesting counter-debate about whether CSR should be based on a business or charitable model).

This blog points out that only 30% of the raw materials needs to be from certified farms. Which means that 70% of the coffee I'm about to go and drink might not have come from farms with decent minimum welfare and environment standards.

So in a scheme looking at the P for planet and the P for people, the P for profit appears to be happily catered for too.

Boots fail to spot flak?

Boots the Chemists, as I still like to think of them, appear to have failed to spot the flak they'd get pulling out of an ethical alliance.

This blog entry is perhaps among the more frank on the topic, but similar to many with an ethical focus.

The alternative view is set out here.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of whether the new project Boots has entered into to replace the old one is better or not, one thing is clear. The story was framed negatively by ETI because it wasn't framed at all by Boots. The company website is silent.

It's all about behaviour

I've been attending a conference about non-profit marketing where the keynote speaker was Alan Andreasen. He has written extensively (sometimes alongside the marketing textbook guru Philip Kotler) about what social marketing is and how to do it.

Given that the room was full of specialists looking at non-profit marketing, cause-related marketing and so on, his identification of the differences between them all was, I found, really useful.

Here are my notes of it...

Marketing's bottom line is sales, market share and corporate growth.
Social marketing's bottom line is indicated by the subjects of it being better off, society being better off (and the organisation mounting the campaign being successful). Social marketing is about behaviours (especially behaviours seen as problematic for society, e.g. obesity, preventable increased cancer risks, deaths from drink driving)
Social advertising is socially responsible advertising
Social network marketing is ordinary marketing which makes use of social networks
Non profit marketing is marketing as applied to non-profit organisations

He didn't mention PR. The cross-over of whose territory it was to change behaviours used to exercise me but doesn't any longer because in the great scheme of things it's a detail of the process. However the stuff I'm interested in at the moment did feel more at home at this conference than it does in the agendas of those covering issues central to PR.

Effectiveness of Act on CO2 campaign

A bit old but I've just come across this useful analysis of the launch of the Government's Act on CO2 campaign.
Interesting insight into how, if your online and offline work is well co-ordinated, you can successfully steer people towards information they can use to change behaviours.
If you want more on the campaign the organisers have published a toolkit for communicators who want to align their campaigns with it.

Communication insight

The Trafigura story told on Newsnight last night made me curious to visit the firm's website and look at its CSR claims.

I also looked at what it had to say about how a cocktail of its chemicals ended up being dumped in West Africa.

There's an interesting study of language to be had from comparing the two pages. Those about the company generally are easy to read, the stuff about the chemicals wrapped in complexity. Calling something a 'legal update' doesn't give an organisation an excuse to communicate badly. If there is nothing to hide - spell out the position in clear language.

The fact that this story isn't making more headlines is probably explained by the fact that - it's a long ongoing one, it's complicated to tell, and it involves poor people, who we appear to be much less interested in than rich people. Is it also explained by PR's success at minimising it?

Be first - not a follower

If their antics weren't funded from the public pocket, the current sight of MPs falling over themselves to give us our money back would be better than any current reality TV show.

What the party leaders are aiming to do is demonstrate leadership - being the first to sort it out and set a new course.

The Greenwasher column of Ethicalcorp offers a similar case study of the potential for leadership, in this case squandered.

If a serious-minded PR had been higher at the table perhaps the opportunity would have been picked up.

Information to help people change behaviour

The plans to have every house fitted with a smart meter so that we can cut emissions and save money is an example of giving people information they can use.

There's a lot of criticism in the environment & psychology literature that the 'information deficit' idea (give people information and they will act) doesn't work. And we can all readily bring to mind examples of where this is true - we all know certain behaviours are bad for the environment and yet we continue to practice them. We might find the train simply too expensive or have other pressures beyond environmental concern shaping our actions.

So information isn't always going to do the trick. Where there are fewer compromise dilemmas to a behaviour and a financial incentive to boot, information might just provide the catalyst.

If you look at the story comments, there's one person making the argument for a return of meter readers who can do two things when they visit your home - give you up to date info about usage and also advice on how to reduce consumption. I think that for those who don't like fancy bar charts, that'd also be a useful idea, but probably not as cheap.

(My superviser is one of the people analysing data on the trials of smart meters for Eon.)

Communication needs to be 'bottom-up'

There's an interesting article here sourced from the US, which argues that the job of communicators is to engage people in the climate change issue. The press release about the article is here if you're looking for a short summary.

The argument goes that each of us switching off a light or getting on our bikes once in a while won't be enough to sort the problem - we need to engage in it, talk about it, and be galvanised into helping drive through the structural changes that are really necessary.

In the UK this is a view that's been emerging for a while. Similar thinking is found here in an IPPR report and here in a report on transport behaviour for the Department for Transport.

The new article is by Tim Bowman, who heads a business delivering these kinds of changes. And as a practitioner, he's joined up the link between the ideas and putting them into action. The second of his communication goals, set out on pages 6 and 7 of the longer version is particularly compelling.

To achieve this 'bottom up' revolution, he's calling for business and for communities to be spiked with climate educators trained to enable people to get things rolling.

I think the ideas about changing norms among a workforce as they see their employer taking action is something which is happening right now, certainly in the UK, even if quite small scale.

But I see less of an easy route, in the UK at least, to the community dialogue suggestion. Such initiatives exist, and I'm studying one such project as part of my research.

But getting them going on a big scale will be tricky. It's a brave politician who would give out the funds to set up a group and provide them the matierials they need to make his or her life hell. In a society obsessed with objectives, such projects can potentially be achievement-free at the outset, which is also difficult to make the case for.

The article has certainly provided a lot of interesting further reading for me, and it's great to see similar thinking emerging on both sides of the ocean.

Of interest too is the suggestion that climate communicators need a bigger skill-set than the umbrella skills of 'social marketing' has been used to now for persuasion campaigns aimed at changing behaviour. What's emerging now is that skills associated with stakeholder engagement, more associated with PR, are going to be important.