Two years in: How Hower Impact is advancing sustainability storytelling

Today, Hower Impact turns two. As the businesses enters its toddler phase, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the stumbles and successes of the past 24 months as we’ve learned to walk on our own two feet. Throughout it all, we’ve narrowed the business focus to align what we love, excel at, and know the world needs: more effective sustainability storytelling. While communicating sustainability is more critical than ever, companies continue to struggle with it for myriad reasons. Chief among these are the fact that often those responsible for communicating sustainability are communication professionals feeling out of their depth.

This is where we come in—Hower Impact’s purpose is to help companies tell better sustainability stories by supplying specialized sustainability communication expertise. As a boutique consultancy, we work with companies to translate sustainability strategy into credible, compliant, and compelling communication that builds trust, enhances positive impact, and creates lasting business value. Here’s how we’ve arrived at this evolution over the past two years.

Client partnership and impact

When Hower Impact was founded in March 2023, we had no business plan beyond throwing proverbial pasta at the wall and seeing what stuck. Meanwhile, several other trends coalesced that made starting a sustainability communication consulting business more viable than ever: the COVID-19 pandemic had normalized the practice of hiring consultants independent of geography, new digital and artificial intelligence tools amplified the capacity of small businesses, and LinkedIn’s rise leveled the playing field for advancing thought leadership.

Over the past two years, Hower Impact has taken on a variety of interesting projects, from embedding with the sustainability communication team at major CPG companies like Mars to creating world-class sustainability reports for companies like Berry Global, Bentley Systems, Westinghouse, BELLA+CANVAS, and others. We’ve also helped electrical vehicle companies position their RFPs to win major contracts, organize sustainability hackathons for artificial intelligence companies like Cloudera, and help chief sustainability officers improve their thought leadership. And there’s my personal passion project of the Writing for Impact Masterclass, where I personally teach writing skills to sustainability and communication professionals.

Having the skills and experience to counsel clients on sustainability communication challenges and opportunities means that we can provide world class services in a high value capacity. Whether it’s a fractional sustainability communication engagement or broader storytelling or reporting project, clients always know that they’re getting my time—there’s no bait-and-switch. It has been a win-win both for Hower Impact and our clients.

Beyond client work

Working directly with clients is only one way Hower Impact advances sustainability communication. Advancing thought leadership allows us to help more people and organizations everywhere elevate their sustainability storytelling abilities.  

We regularly speak our mind on critical sustainability storytelling issues through LinkedIn, this newsletter, The Sustainability Communicator podcast, and at Impact Hour events and sustainability conferences. We’ve also organized community events, including a momentous virtual meeting of hundreds of sustainability and climate professionals to connect and engage in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024.

I’m also excited to announce that I have signed with Kogan Page Publishing to pen a non-nonsense book about sustainability communication aimed at helping communicators and sustainability professionals master the fundamentals of effective sustainability storytelling in a business context. If you’d like to be among the first to learn updates on the book, I invite you to complete the book interest form here.

Refining our focus

Because “sustainability storytelling” is a vague concept, Hower Impact recently created several service offerings to help companies make this more tangible by defining their sustainability communication risks and opportunities, developing clear messaging, and effectively delivering these stories to stakeholders.

One example is the “Sustainability Storytelling Assessment”―a play on the all-too-familiar materiality assessment―which is designed to help companies understand their material sustainability stories and the risks and opportunities of communicating around them. I’m excited to unveil our new approach during a free webinar on March 20. Register here.

The path ahead

Now that we’ve mastered walking, Hower Impact is ready to run. And there’s no time to waste because the stakes mount each day we fail to act. While a better future is within our grasp, too many don’t reach for it because of the false narratives sold by bad actors standing to profit from the status quo. Through better sustainability storytelling, we counter ignorance, fear, and hate with enlightenment, hope, and love for our planet and all life on it. By doing so, we make businesses and communities more innovative, resilient, and prosperous today and in the future.     

Thanks for being on this journey with us. We wouldn’t get far without your business, referrals, clicks, likes, follows, and words of support. There’s a lot more work yet to be done. 

Maybe the “terrible twos” won’t be so bad after all.

This originally appeared in the March 2025 ENGAGE newsletter. Subscribe to have articles like this and other sustainability communication content delivered directly to your inbox each month.