Ep. 5: Navigating the uncertainties of sustainability storytelling, with Allison’s Whitney Dailey
Sustainability storytelling is more important — and complicated — than ever. With so many changing expectations and regulations around sustainability storytelling, knowing how to effectively social and environmental impact is a top challenge for companies across the globe. In this episode, Mike brings in the expertise of a fellow sustainability communications expert — Whitney Dailey, Executive Vice President, Purpose at the global public relations firm Allison Worldwide — to better understand how companies can navigate sustainability storytelling in 2024.
Read the full transcript of the conversation below. You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.
TRANSCRIPT
Mike Hower: Greenwashing, green hushing, green bumbling — oh my. With so much at stake in 2024 with sustainability communication. I need to bring in some reinforcements.
Hey everybody. And welcome to the sustainability communicator. The podcast exploring the intersection of corporate sustainability and storytelling. I'm your host, Mike Hower, a sustainability communication nerd with more than 15 years of experience on both sides of the podium — as a journalist for media outlets like GreenBiz and a communication strategist for major global companies. During each episode, we explore interesting sustainability communication challenges, risks and opportunities facing folks in the business community and beyond. If you're ready to talk your walk, then you've come to the right place. Time to get to it.
Hey, everybody. I'm here with Whitney Dailey, EVP of Purpose at Allison. Thanks for being here today, Allison. Oh, [expletive]. Start over.
Whitney Dailey: You’re not the first person to do that. You're welcome.
Mike: Why did I call you Allison? Okay. Ready? Hey, everybody. I'm here with my friend, Whitney Daly, EVP of Purpose at Allison. Good to be here with you today, Whitney.
Whitney: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike: Yeah. Whitney is a fellow sustainability communications extraordinaire who has been in this business pretty much as long as me — and has worked in a variety of roles, working with lots of different types of clients. So today, uh, Allison — I keep calling you Allison. I'm just gonna leave that in and not edit it out. It's weird when you have a name of a company that's a person and then I'm like, yeah, I know your name's Whitney. Anyway.
Whitney: You can say Allison Worldwide if you want.
Mike: It's fine. It's fine. So, Whitney, it's the beginning of the year. I know everyone's putting out their 2024 predictions, which we all know in this space are not necessarily useless, but they're not the most helpful — but it's still a fun exercise. So I'd love to hear, you know, what are your thoughts on sustainability comms in 2024? You know — what should we expect, what's keeping you up at night and what are you excited about?
Whitney: Yeah, we actually just did a webinar, which we titled “Planning for the unexpected” because — to your point — how do we actually predict the year ahead beyond knowing that it's going to continue to be turbulent? It's going to continue to bring the heat literally and figuratively. I think, so you know, we're going to do our best to kind of navigate through that.
Can you hear my dogs?
Mike: Yeah, but it's fine.
Whitney: Are you sure?
Mike: Yeah, don't worry about it.
Whitney: So, I think some things that we can expect in the year ahead is the continued rhetoric around anti-ESG — I don't think that is going to go away. I think companies are still going to be grappling with looking at hush and green hush and purpose hush — whatever you want to call it, which I think is a reality of our industry right now.
You probably saw the Wall Street Journal article calling ESG the latest corporate dirty word in corporate America. But the reality is the work is not stopping. And in fact communication is not stopping. It's just how we communicate. I think as practitioners, we really need to double down on the nuance of being incredibly specific about our communications and being specific about, who we're communicating with and why we talk about the right message — the right stakeholder. And I think that is incredibly important right now, as well as just stripping it down to the issues and the impact and the work that's happening, not using jargon, not using these, you know, words and phrases that can be interpreted differently by different people — but just stripping it down to simple language and talking about the great work that we're doing and will continue to do in the year ahead. I think that's number one.
Number two — I think we're going to see an increased emphasis on corporate response. We have an election year here as well as in other countries globally, and it's going to cause many issues to bubble up again. And stakeholders are going to be looking for companies to respond. I think the difference now, when we were in — you know 2018, even 2020 — it was every company kind of signaling their commitment to various issues and getting credit for that. It's much more complicated today. I still do believe that issue response is important and really looking at your priority stakeholders and what they care about.
However, today we need to really look at: “When is it appropriate for us to speak out and when is it not appropriate?” Both of those options are okay. As long as you continue to lean in on your purpose and your values as an organization. So we're going to see more of that kind of real time issues response than expectation from stakeholders for brands to potentially have a POV on issues that are going to be hot buttons in our society.
The other thing I think we're going to see — no surprise to anyone in this world — climate disclosure is just being super top of mind. You might hear my dogs barking again.
Mike: It's okay. We all love dogs here on this channel.
Whitney: Uh, yeah, they're even louder now.
Yes, obviously the new CSRD disclosure requirements are coming down the pipeline. We think soon and those are all going to impact communications, but I think it will add a level of rigor to our work that I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, um, especially as we have seen heightened calls around greenwashing. We really need to be buttoned up in our communications — and disclosure is going to be a part of that.
The last thing I just want to touch on is Gen Z and climate activism. I think David Gellis in his climate forward newsletter talked about climate action in 2024 actually increasing this year. And I think one of the things that we really need to think about as communication practitioners — and especially brand practitioners — is how do we bring Gen Z into the fold of what we're doing from a sustainability perspective? This is not an us against them. Like, let's come together. Climate activists are also your consumers and in some cases, and I think that there can be a lot of opportunity to listen to the messages that we're hearing and even co-create. I actually found this example recently of a campaign or a project that Puma did, where they actually brought in five youth climate activists to help them co-create some of their sustainability initiatives.
I thought that was really interesting. Like, we need to band together and really use feedback and point of views from different areas of society in order to really make progress on our sustainability goals. And no one will be more affected by our sustainability progress now and in the future than Gen Z.
So, those are just a few things that I'm seeing on the horizon. But obviously we can't really predict with too much certainty what we're going to see in the year ahead.
Mike: Yeah, everything you said — I definitely see that as well from where I sit. And I think it's interesting when we talk about Gen Z because you and I are, we're millennials, I guess, we are “elderly millennials” now, but you know, a little over a decade when we started on this path, everyone was talking about us the way we're talking about Gen Z now. So I often think like, is this a cycle where, you know, you start out as the young idealistic people like ourselves, and then now we're not — well, we're not the oldest, we're not the youngest — but are we spending sometimes a little too much time worrying about different generations and age when there's lots of people that are older than us that really care and want to get engaged too.
So I often think about — like one of the cop outs I think a lot of people have is that caring about the future is a young person's game. But I know plenty of older people who have grandchildren and they want them to live in a good world too. So I definitely think also, “how can we bring in the new generation”, but also there's plenty of people that have been around for a while that definitely want to engage too. And how can we reach them as well?
Whitney: One-hundred percent and learn from their life experiences and build on that.
Mike: And I tried Tik Tok and I just, I can't do it. I'm sorry. You know that you're old when you get to that age where you're not into all the social media platforms anymore and you're like, “wow, Facebook is for old people now.” I don't even use that much anymore either, but I'm just a LinkedIn old guy now, I guess.
I just have one more question for you. What advice would you give companies right now? And I guess I'm kind of asking you for free consulting advice here, but, um, you know, companies that are really worried about telling authentic stories or, you know, maybe they have good intentions and they, they have a good story to tell, but they're really afraid of getting a pushback or blow back for greenwashing. What is some high level advice you would give them on how to move forward on that front?
Whitney: Yeah. It's a good question. I think the example you gave, this is a company that's probably already doing the work, you know, they're being robust about how they approach their sustainability goals and commitments and progress and and I think that is 100 percent step one. I think step two — especially in this kind of age of skepticism and calls of greenwashing — is bringing your stakeholders in early and often so that they can engage with what you're creating, engage with how you're talking about it and and provide some feedback probably before you go through a big campaign process or external announcement. And that can really help not only create buy-in with your stakeholders and activists and partners and nonprofit partners, but also to ensure when it goes to market.
It's something that really resonates with the people that need to hear it. There's obviously a lot of great organizations that do this kind of work with stakeholder engagement. But I do think that that's a really important part of the process right now. As we continue to communicate this really important work. And then, as I said earlier, just just to tie it back, be exacting in your communications. What you're saying, say it in simple and clear and plain language that, you know, can be really understood in terms of the real impact it's having on humans and our planet. And again, not using jargon, but really leaning in on impact.
Mike: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for, uh, sharing your expertise with us today. Whitney, not Allison, Whitney, who works at Allison. Everybody, if you're interested in learning more about Whitney's work, follow her on LinkedIn. She puts out some great content and she writes some great articles as well. Um, and that's all the time we have for today. Thanks, Whitney.
Whitney: Great. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: And with that, we've reached the end of this episode of the sustainability communicator podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you like what you heard and you'd like to hear more, stay tuned for future episodes that cover a variety of topics in sustainability storytelling.
To stay in the know of future episodes and other content. You can follow me, Mike Hower, on LinkedIn, or you can follow us on our newsletter. You can sign up for that in the show notes. And you can visit us on our website.
Wherever you are in your sustainability journey. Good luck. And keep at it.
We need you out there.
