Compelling: Telling sustainability stories that move stakeholders to act
This article originally appeared on The Sustainability Story Substack. Subscribe here.
What makes a sustainability message compelling? The answer might surprise you.
(As Buzzfeedian as that hook was, it’s fitting nonetheless.)
When many think about sustainability communication, they picture clever copy, creative activations, or even slightly shady marketing spin. Some would even define sustainability communication as “the art of making stakeholders care about a company’s sustainability performance.” But that’s only half the job—plenty of stakeholders care about sustainability yet fail to prioritize or do anything about it.
To be compelling, sustainability messages need to do more than just dazzle—they must move stakeholders to act. For a consumer, it might mean purchasing from a perceived sustainable brand. For an investor, it might mean directing capital at a company managing material ESG risks. For an employee, it might mean choosing to work at a company that aligns with their values. For a regulator, it might mean leaving a company alone.
Many organizations have attempted to engage stakeholders with more information delivered through sterile reports and disclosures. While data can tell stories, it’s not usually enough to make many people truly care. It’s narratives, not numbers, that move people—and the problem is motivational, not informational.
Last time, we looked at context, the cultural and reputational forces impacting how sustainability messages are received. Today, we’ll explore compelling, the second of The Four C’s of Effective Sustainability Storytelling.
Our brains aren’t wired for sustainability
To have your sustainability messages resonate with humans, you need to understand what makes us human.
Despite humanity’s technological advancements over the past 10,000 or so years, our brains remain largely the same as they were 300,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology teaches us that our brains evolved to deal with immediate, tangible, hyperlocal threats. We’re talking tigers within the perimeter we had to evade, or ensuring there was enough food for the winter.
Sustainability challenges, by contrast, are painfully slow, distributed, probabilistic, and often distant. Climate change is case in point: invisible carbon emissions slowly pollute the atmosphere from a million different places, and the impacts are subtle and diffuse enough to make it feel at best disconnected—or at worst, someone else’s problem.
Sustainability lacks the quality that makes information feel urgent and impossible to ignore—this is called the salience problem. The tiger is a clear and present danger that is incredibly salient, but gender pay equity isn’t so much for those who have learned to treat it as background noise.
To make sustainability messages compelling, you must make them salient to your stakeholder audiences. And that’ll differ depending on who you’re talking to. For investors, salience often comes down to material risk—climate exposure, regulatory liability, supply chain vulnerability. For employees, it’s purpose, pay, and belonging—the sense that their work is valued and contributes to something larger than a quarterly earnings report. For consumers, it’s tangible, personal benefit—healthier ingredients, lower energy bills, products they can feel good about buying. For regulators, it’s transparency and compliance—clear evidence that a company is managing its impacts responsibly.
The same sustainability story, told through different lenses, lands very differently.
Why facts don’t always change minds
Anyone who’s tried to communicate sustainability has learned that simply providing more information doesn’t necessarily help. It can even make things worse.
People don’t process new information in a vacuum. They filter it through the worldviews, identities, and beliefs they already hold—and when new information threatens those things, they tend to reject it. That’s why climate denial is often less about the science and more about the solutions. People aren’t necessarily afraid of climate change—they’re afraid of what addressing it might mean for their jobs, their communities, or their way of life. And counterintuitively, studies show that scientific literacy actually increases polarization rather than reducing it. The more informed people are, the better equipped they are to find reasons to dismiss evidence that conflicts with their existing views. If someone’s identity is tied to rejecting climate science—even if they’re quite smart—they’ll bend over backwards, often subconsciously, to ensure their pre-existing worldview isn’t disturbed.
This leaves serious implications for sustainability communicators: the problem you’re solving isn’t always a knowledge gap, but a motivation gap. And a data dump can’t close it.
How the information environment makes it harder
Even if you could get past the evolutionary wiring and the motivated reasoning, you’d still have to contend with the information environment your audience is swimming in—or, dare I say, drowning in.
The media landscape has fractured in ways that make compelling sustainability communication genuinely harder than it was a generation ago. Where people once shared a common information diet—three network news channels and a local paper—they now self-sort into ideological silos, choosing outlets like Fox News or MSNBC that confirm what they already believe, while algorithms feed audiences content that confirms what they already believe. Pew Research reports that one in five American adults—and more than a third of those under 30—now get their news primarily from social media personalities rather than traditional journalism. You can no longer assume your audience is starting or ending with the same set of facts.
And then there’s manufactured outrage. AI-powered bot networks can simulate the appearance of massive stakeholder backlash around corporate sustainability announcements within minutes. Executives who mistake that noise for genuine sentiment might pull back from commitments—which only reinforces the cycle where greenhushing gets rewarded and bold action gets punished.
None of this makes effective sustainability communication impossible. But it means you can’t assume good faith, and you can’t take every wave of viral criticism at face value.
The two narrative traps
This is where many companies go wrong. Confronted with stakeholder indifference or outright hostility, they tend to fall into one of two traps.
The first is doomerism—leading with catastrophe in the hope that fear will motivate action. But this rarely does because fear without a sense of agency leads to paralysis, denial, or tuning out entirely. If your sustainability communication leaves people feeling like the situation is hopeless, you’ve lost them.
The second trap is bright-siding—a term coined by author George Marshall to describe the tendency to project relentless optimism and innovation narratives that downplay the real challenges. This might feel better in the short term, but it erodes trust when the breakthroughs don’t materialize on schedule (and they usually don’t). Stakeholders who feel they’ve been sold an overly rosy picture become skeptical of everything else you’ll say.
Both extremes fail for the same reason: they leave people feeling powerless. Compelling sustainability storytelling lives in the space between—honest about the scale of the challenge, but grounded in a genuine sense that meaningful action is possible.
Seven strategies for making sustainability stories stick
So what does compelling sustainability communication actually look like in practice? In Sustainability Storytelling, I go deep on seven strategies that work with human psychology rather than against it.
Here’s the Cliff Notes version:
Make it tangible: Connect global challenges to real people and visible outcomes rather than abstract statistics.
Lead with values, not facts: Frame your message around what your audience already believes rather than trying to convince them of something new.
Use stories to bypass cognitive blocks: Narrative transports people and lets them feel before they judge.
Earn trust through radical transparency: Show your work, including the setbacks and the gaps, not just the wins.
Balance hope with agency: Acknowledge the severity of the challenge while demonstrating that meaningful action is both possible and underway.
Design for multiple entry points: Different people process information differently, so pair emotion with evidence and offer multiple formats.
Navigate the fragmented media landscape: Pressure-test your messages before they go out, build redundancy into your communication, and learn to distinguish genuine criticism from manufactured outrage.
Each of these deserves more than a sentence, which is why I dedicated a full chapter to them in the book. But even at a high level, the pattern is this: compelling sustainability communication isn’t about being louder or more creative. It’s about being more human.
The limits of sustainability storytelling
Compelling communication isn’t a silver bullet. You can’t message your way past broken systems—if a company’s sustainability performance doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, no amount of storytelling will save it. And if the macroeconomic incentive structures rewarding short-term thinking over long-term logic remain intact, even the most motivated stakeholders will struggle to act on what they believe.
But the reverse is also true. You can’t fix broken systems without effective communication. The public pressure, market demand, and cultural momentum that make structural change possible all depend on stories that move people.
Compelling sustainability communication is what makes sustainability strategy salient for your stakeholders. It's what gets employees behind a commitment, convinces investors it's worth backing, pushes customers to choose differently, and builds the public pressure that makes systemic change possible. Without it, even the best sustainability work goes unrecognized—and unrewarded.
That’s why compelling sustainability storytelling isn’t some feel good side project you activate once a year on Earth Day—or when your sustainability report is published. It’s foundational work that deserves proper care.
And it’s why consistency matters more than any single campaign—what makes stories stick over time is the alignment between what you say and what you actually do.
The Four C’s of Effective Sustainability Storytelling is the framework at the heart of Sustainability Storytelling: Communicate Trust, Brand Value and Better Business—where I go deep on each strategy with real-world examples, tools, and practitioner insights. Available for pre-order now.
Join me for Sustainability Storytelling LIVE
If you want to go deeper on these ideas in person, I’m bringing sustainability communicators together across four events this May—one virtual and three in-person in New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco—for Sustainability Storytelling LIVE. We’ll work through the Four C’s framework together and have some real talk about what’s actually working in sustainability communication right now. Learn more and register here.
