Guest blog post by Leigh Tymms, Clarity Sustainability

Every day, a greater range and number of organisations are joining the movement towards more sustainable practices to gain a slice of the £43 billion pound ethical consumerism market.

A new, free to attend webinar series, starting on Thursday 17 May, will help these companies further their objectives.

A group of expert speakers from leading orgainsations including E.ON Sustainable Energy, Cranfield University, IEMA, WRAP, Liz Male Consulting, Eurostar, Ideal Standard and 3663 are offering up their experience in sustainability communications, green marketing, CSR and environmental management in the upcoming Sustain-affinity series.

Sustain-affinity is a phrase we coined at Clarity Sustainability to describe the engagement that can be built by brands by driving the responsibility agenda successfully.

Dial in at 4pm for 5 consecutive weeks:

• 17 May – Driving Sustainability - 30 ways to reduce your impacts and initiate engagement
• 24 May – Improving the Sustainability of Offerings - Innovative product and service design methods
• 31 May – Effective Green Marketing - Tools to focus communications, reduce waste, boost ROI and eliminate greenwash
• 7 June – Broadening the Marketing Message - Applying PR and social media to sustainability communications
• 14 June – CSR People can Engage With - How to make sustainability resonate with your audience

Throughout the webinar series, there is also the opportunity to share experiences and network using the hastgag #sustainaffinity on Twitter and through the webinar portal.

There is a staggering amount of experience held within this group of speakers. We recognise  that managers often require support to collaborate cross-functionally between marketing, environmental or CSR teams because of the different language, skills and targets of each. We hope these webinars will deliver insights to truly integrate these efforts, to the benefit of all their stakeholders.

Register for free before 17 May 2012.

The Sustain-affinity webinar series is developed by Clarity Sustainability, a green marketing and sustainability communications agency based in Woburn, near Milton Keynes.  Clarity’s mission is to drive engagement with sustainability and help people to play their part in this challenge.

Are you going to Ecobuild next week? 

If so, please do pop over to Stand S1102 to say hello. We're right next to the S4 entrance to the South Hall.

We often advise clients on their exhibition plans, but actually booking an exhibition space at Ecobuild ourselves is a very exciting project for us. It has involved a whole team of environmentally-friendly suppliers (many of whom are donating their materials, time and expertise free of charge) and our first working collaboration with the excellent team at commercial interior designers Grigoriou Interiors.

Grigoriou Interiors is one of London’s most forward-thinking consultancies on all aspects of sustainable interior design and architecture, predominantly in the commercial sector.

It is run by two sisters, Elina and Angeliki Grigoriou, who have worked with renowned global brands such as Virgin Atlantic, Marks and Spencer, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Regus.

Elina Grigoriou is one of the UK’s leading experts on sustainable commercial interior design - you may also have seen her named this week as one of Building magazine's Top 50 Rising Stars of Sustainability.

Consequently, our exhibition stand at this year’s Ecobuild will become the first built in the UK to be formally assessed for its environmental impact under the RICS Ska Rating scheme.

Building on the success of the original office fit-out version launched in 2009, Ska Rating for Retail was launched by RICS in February, and can be applied to exhibition spaces.

It is an award-winning standard assessment method that allows businesses to measure the environmental impact of their fit-outs and to set benchmarks for improvements.

Our joint stand with Grigoriou Interiors will be designed and built according to Ska Rating good practice measures. Consideration has been given to the whole lifecycle of the stand and, once built, it will be formally assessed for its environmental impact, including where appropriate energy efficiency and the CO₂ emissions from transport, waste and material use.

I can't wait to see the stand - Elina tells me that it will be a fun and friendly space. Nothing too corporate. And as she always reminds me, ‘fashionable’ and ‘green’ need not be mutually exclusive.

For me, this stand also demonstrates what can be done through creative collaborations between liked-minded businesses, where genuinely sustainable spaces can be well designed and built very economically.

This is a first, and our success with Ska will depend on how much can be verified once the stand has been built, but we are confidently aiming for a silver Ska Rating (we will know for sure by the end of the show and will get the certificate to show for it). And of course we also gain a robust benchmark to improve on next year.

This is no gimmick. Exhibitors at any show with ‘eco’ or ‘green’ in its title will inevitably come under scrutiny for the environmental sustainability of their stands, and we felt very conscious of that. Without any form of accredited assessment, we all run the risk of being accused of greenwash.

That’s why we chose to work with Grigoriou Interiors and use Ska Rating.

I think this exercise – as with all good PR and marketing in this field – is about a journey, a learning process, and a commitment to responsible promotion.

It is also providing us with a very special meeting space, a quiet place at Ecobuild for journalists to meet up with our clients who will be attending the show. That's its primary purpose. So I hope you will stop to say hello if you're passing by, and I can introduce you to some great people.

Our very grateful thanks go to the other collaborators on the stand, including:

Stand Manufacture & Construction: Mast Displays - http://www.mastdisplays.co.uk/

Paint: Earthborne - http://www.earthbornpaints.co.uk/

Furniture: Mark Product - http://www.markproduct.com/

Lighting: LSLCo – www.lslco.co.uk

Loving this!

Check out more comic book brilliance at xkcd.com (and thanks to Dr Neil Cutland for the tip off - we clearly share a similar sense of humour).

I’m going to be redoing my website soon.

In fact, I’ll be redesigning it and changing it time and time again over the coming months and years because the damn thing keeps going out of date.

But so it is for all businesses, including yours.

A website is never ‘finished’. Never out of beta testing. Never safe to let it rest on its online laurels.

It’s unbelievably annoying, especially when we are all so busy and the marketing budget is tight as hell.

So I thought you might be interested to see my tips for how to approach a website brief and how to go about appointing a good agency to do the job for you.

Actually, it’s the latter that bothers me the most. 

Most good marketers and business owners have clear views on their communications and business development objectives, and many know what they need to achieve.  (See the questions below if you want a bit of help with that).

I find that the trickiest bit tends to be finding the right people to help, because there are all sorts of options out there and no shortage of web wizards prepared to blind you with science and bore you with technobabble.

Other than a few shining examples of excellence, my experience is that the market broadly divides into three. 

So at the risk of upsetting everyone with hugely unfair generalisations, you can end up with a choice between:

1. The freelance programmer who can build you a fully functioning site quickly based on some simple templates and an impressive love of HTML, XML, SEO and MySQL. Often the cheapest option, but unfortunately programmers usually make very poor designers and some use some really dire templates. Needs a lot of supervision.
2. The graphic design agency which puts visuals first, turning your website into a thing of beauty which gets you envious looks. But a bit too fond of Flash and other user-unfriendly gizmos, and don’t think enough about a structure of a site or the back-end stuff. Needs a lot of supervision.
3. The digital marketing consultancy which does it all, integrating and optimising your every online and offline move. They’re usually very thorough in their analysis of your business needs, but it’s a pricey service. They’re happiest talking Web 2.0 and will try to sell you all sorts of other services afterwards. Needs a lot of supervision.

Which to choose? 

Well, much depends therefore on your budget, preferred outcome and how much time you’ve got to manage the whole project. Did I mention supervision?  Yes, you’ll need to set aside plenty of time for this.

Generally I look for a team which has the right balance between heart-stopping visual creativity, bottom line business pragmatism and nerd-like obsession with technical programming and SEO. Oh, and great client handling skills too. I have found some really good teams like that, but sadly it’s not a mix you find that often.

Second, I now put my greatest trust in agencies which don’t try and tie me in to their bespoke content management system. I’ve heard the arguments on both sides, but sorry guys, my mind is increasingly made up these days that a future-proofed, portable, scaleable site needs to be built using Umbraco or a similar mainstream open source CMS.

Third, the Achilles heel of almost all agencies is their writing skills. Writing for the web is completely different from other sorts of copywriting. I look for a team who understand that, and which demonstrates brilliant attention to detail. More often, I do it myself.

Finally, I take up references now about after-sales service. Once the technical specification for a website is signed off, too many agencies just churn you through the sausage machine. They’re off finding the next client. 

I want to be nurtured, proactively contacted with ideas for ongoing tweaks and simple improvements that won’t cost much, and no nasty surprises in the maintenance contract. I want evaluation and regular metrics built in from day one, with hands-on help and free advice on how to measure things ourselves using tools like Google Analytics.

Like most consultants, I’ve neglected my own website for far too long. And I'm no digital guru, by any means. But I regularly project manage and supervise the creation of new websites for my clients, so these tips (and prejudices) are based on real life experience. 

What has your experience been? If you have any other tips, I’d be glad to hear them.

Five simple steps to inform a website brief
 

1. Understand your business goals and what you want a website to do for you.

2. Understand your priority target audiences.

3. Understand what products, services and areas of expertise will fuel your economic future for the next 12 months, and think about the content which shows this off to its best advantage.

4. Understand your customers’ purchasing journey, the information they need at different stages to help them buy from you, and the other actions you want them to take along the way.

5. Understand what’s currently bringing traffic to your existing website and what people are doing once they find you.

There is also some great advice on website design and creation on the Design Council website (look for the 'Getting a great website' guide on www.designcouncil.org.uk)

I was requested to write a short article for the excellent RIBA Insight e-newsletter this summer.

You can view my thoughts on crisis management in the building sector here, or view it on the RIBA Insight website.

------------------------------

Sadly too many companies are taken unawares by a storm of bad publicity.  

You know for sure that you’re dealing with a serious PR crisis when you are faced with complaints, a wave of social media chatter and invasive and hostile media attention – all usually before full information is available to the executive team.  

You have a choice. You can allow others to shape perceptions of you and your actions, usually by doing nothing until the lawyers say it’s ok and all the facts are known. Or you can attempt to control this by taking an early active role.

Whatever strategy you choose, how you deal with such situations is the acid test of your PR and communications. It will have lasting impact on your reputation and even the survival of your company.  

Our advice is to consider the various stages of your storm and how you will work through them:

BEFORE

• Research into crisis communications proves that success often comes down to two main factors: response time and preparedness.  
• The first 24 hours of any crisis are crucial, and in order to stay in control of a situation you need to be seen to be at the centre of the response.  A speedy, comprehensive and calm response that projects a credible, responsible and caring company can sometimes stop a potential storm in its tracks.  But any sort of delay, complacency or information vacuum can, and almost always will, lead to false reports and reputational damage.
• So plan for the worst. Imagine your worst nightmare and get your crisis preparedness plan in place.

DURING

After many years of handling PR crises in construction, our top 10 tips for managing the situation as it unfolds are as follows:

1. Always be honest and open, but never speculate. Stick to the facts as known at the time. It’s perfectly ok to say “I can’t answer that question because that information is not known at the moment…”. It’s definitely not ok to say “No comment”.
2. Tell people what’s going on now, and what they should do. Talk about what your organisation is doing to mitigate the problem; don’t get drawn into arguments or focus on what’s already gone wrong.
3. Put public, customer and employee health and safety issues at the top of your list of concerns and your messages, closely followed by environment, property and money (in that order).
4. Know when to say you’re sorry. The lawyers will not like this in case it construes responsibility, but you do need to agree a way to demonstrate empathy and compassion.
5. The visibility of the Chief Executive and other senior company spokespeople is going to be extremely important.  Use them strategically to reassure key stakeholders. My strongest advice is that bosses should be exposed to the harsh reality of a crisis before deciding key messages.
6. Put the incident into perspective. A common strategy is for commentators, competitors and critics to take one incident and try and look for/publicise a cluster of other similar incidents. You need to be able to counter this with your own verifiable statistics and facts that prove how rare this crisis really is.
7. Don’t mix your messages, for example saying one thing to the media, another to staff and another to customers. Any variation in message could prove highly embarrassing and fundamentally damaging.
8. Written statements are a good tool to use for most organisations new to crisis management, but these must include relevant content (particularly covering the five ‘W’s – who, what, where, when and why). Go easy on technical detail and jargon. And set up a speedy sign-off system. All your statements should be able to be drafted, approved for use and distributed very quickly in minutes, not hours.
9. Put your statements onto your website, intranet, online PR channels etc. and distribute them to everyone who might be approached for (and is likely to) comment. Don’t just think about the words – visual messages can also be extremely helpful.  Provide your own illustrations, maps, photographs and other visual materials to help communicate what has happened and what you are doing about it.
10. Document absolutely everything.

AFTER

• And when it is all over, take time to discuss what you have learned from handling this crisis.  Think about how you are going to deal with any ongoing recurrence of publicity (such as a later court judgement, HSE investigation, inquest or public inquiry, or the anniversary of the incident).
• Your post-crisis PR and marketing strategy must strike a very careful tone, both positive and upbeat but also emphasising that you are listening. 
• Above all, stay listening. A perfect storm will never take you unawares again.