This is the last article of our three-part series: Mastering Your Sustainability Story in Turbulent Times. Here's Part I and Part II.
If you’ve read and implemented Janna’s advice — and Sami’s — that means you’ve cleaned up your strategy and simplified your sustainability message. Now you have a glorious (and strategic) pile of content waiting to be shared with the world. So now what?
Now, you share it with the audiences who matter most to your business — but not before taking the time to deeply understand them.
This final part of our Mastering Your Sustainability Story in Turbulent Times series is all about targeting engagement, ensuring the right people hear your story in a way that motivates them to act. Because a brilliant strategy and crystal-clear message mean little if no one sees, understands, or cares about them.
This is the part where we shake up the status quo, challenge tired assumptions, and throw a little spaghetti at the wall. Because if you want to actually engage your audiences, you can’t just check boxes — you have to start playing.
In the past, many corporate communications strategies were rooted in adjusting the message for different channels. Quick fixes — like rewriting the first line of an email, depending on whether it was going to a factory team or a regional office. Or swapping a couple of slides in a deck and calling it a day.
Today’s business environment is overflowing with distractions. Stakeholders pay attention for an average of 8 seconds and audiences are hyper-segmented. That’s why your communications plan needs to do more than exist — it must engage.
This is the part of your old-school comms playbook that still matters. If you don’t deeply understand the people you’re trying to reach, your message won’t land.
Broad messages lead to vagueness. Vagueness leads to inaction.
Here are three essential — and interconnected — rules of engagement that we use to deeply understand our clients’ audiences and ultimately build engagement plans that actually excite and move stakeholders.
1. Own it
Your simplified sustainability message isn’t stationary. Once it’s crafted, it needs to move throughout your organization. Getting your people — from top, down — aligned around what the message is, why it matters, and how to talk about it will be essential for any external activations to work.
2. Niche down
Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead of tweaking messages for a long list of audiences, narrow your focus to a few key groups and learn everything you can about them. It might feel uncomfortable, but understanding the human behind the decision-maker will do wonders for how you think about your engagement tactics.
3. Break things
Sometimes, the best way to be bold is to break the rules. Take creative risks. Try something new. It doesn’t need to be something dramatic; it could be as simple as questioning why you’re doing something a certain way. Remember: the OG comms playbook isn’t getting you very far. You need to figure out what "being bold" looks and sounds like for your company, which means you probably need to start testing, learning, iterating, and occasionally getting it wrong to figure it out.
Think back to Janna’s focused strategy recommendations. What are your business goals? Which categories or groups of people will help you achieve those results?
This is the top of your audience funnel. Once you’ve figured out your category (e.g. customers or investors), it’s important to dig deeper. It’s time to prioritize these groups, understand deeply, and curate your tactics to their preferences.
Here’s what the funnel looks like as you get into more detail:
By narrowing down into these levels, you start to uncover psychographics that will help you tap into people’s human interests and behaviors. Your engagement tactics for the pretend person above are going to look very different than if you are trying to reach a new graduate who wants to feel moved by a compelling, beautiful story.
Once you’ve narrowed your audience focus, ask yourself: What do I actually want this person to do? Picture that perfect interaction, no boundaries. Now work backward, mapping what you want them to feel and think. Reverse engineer these interactions to come up with engagement tactics rooted in the action you want people to take.
You want employees to champion your message? Don’t just send an email. Hand them a coloring book for their kids that tells your sustainability story. They’ll bring it home, talk about it in their own words, and see others’ start to use and engage with the content. That’s sparking more of a memorable interaction than any plain email.
The more effective sustainability communications aren’t afraid to focus in on a topic — they’re about saying the right thing to the right people in meaningful ways.
We want you to have a focused strategy and a simplified message — but without engagement, those tools stay in the toolbox. If you want your sustainability story to drive real business value, don’t forget to make it come alive.
If there’s one thing you take away from this series, it’s this: Know your audience. Own your message. Be (your version of) bold.
Communicate sustainability confidently — download our ebook here.