The three main barriers to creating more sustainable events are, where to start, identifying the biggest areas of potential and measurability.
Measurability is the essential element in all three areas but hard to achieve. Plus, the definition of excellence is relative. Reducing your water consumption by 5% might seem impressive until you realise that everyone else has made 20% reductions.
Sustainability is a key topic for many clients and can be a significant part of the tender process or company ESG commitments but how do you prove that you are making genuine impact and not just patting yourself on your back or, worse, greenwashing.
Measurability is critical for both clients and shareholders. It is also an important goal for staff incentives and motivation. Many teams will have ESG goals within their KPIs but identifying the progress they are making is tricky.
UK-based event strategy and sustainability experts, event:decision has launched a new tool that will revolutionise your approach to event sustainability.
Impact assesses, benchmarks and certifies events in a wide-range of environmental, social and governance factors. It also allows planners to submit responses relating to environmental, social and governance (ESG) elements of events. This data is assessed, benchmarked and certification issued to confirm assessment.
Operations teams and planners can then understand how successfully they are addressing each element of ESG, against the rest of the industry, on an event-by-event basis.
“Impact was born of a direct result of clients asking us ‘Where can we start?’ and ‘What should we be doing?’ Impact supports planners across the whole range of ESG factors, not only carbon footprints,” says Matt Grey, director at event:decision.
“For the first time, event professionals can start to put some numbers and comparisons against their wider sustainability efforts. Not only can you ensure that you are considering the full range of factors within ESG on each and every event, but we’ll show you how you compare on each against the running industry average,” Grey adds. “We’re also very proud to be partnering with a range of sustainability-focused partners, to whom you can be referred if you need support with any individual elements within the assessment. We don’t ask for any commission or referral fees from our partners, the objective is collaboration.”
Grey notes that, as an industry, we’re often good at delivering great events, but says we can see if we’re great at delivering events that do good. event:decision will be publishing insights on a quarterly basis, so that planners can see the progress that is being made across sectors, globally.
Impact is already in use with multiple clients and events in the UK, Europe and the US. Sitting alongside event:decision’s Track service.
