Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Communications

Climate change, biodiversity, carbon footprints, ethical purchasing, eco-labels, human rights, living wage, animal welfare, sustainable agriculture, community empowerment, recycling, waste, food miles, ‘embedded’ water, energy efficiency………………

Developing and communicating a robust sustainability strategy, whether for a single product or an entire company, can be a stressful exercise. The world is full of individuals and organisations that will challenge assumptions, uncover awkward facts and question motives. Finding the best way forward that satisfies customers, external stakeholders and internal audiences while staying true to your values, is a demanding exercise and genuinely expert help and advice is hard to find.

Many agencies who offer to help with sustainability often can’t field genuine experts or practitioners and few have access to both practical skills in delivering organisational work programmes and the policy and campaign knowledge that drives so much of the public debate.

Hill & Knowlton can offer a groundbreaking combination of experienced practitioners in the sustainability arena.

Flic Howard-Allen led the team that was responsible for the now legendary Plan A initiative at Marks & Spencer  – probably the most famous retail sustainability initiative in the world - and is an expert in developing and implementing sustainability strategies. Flic’s hands on experience in creating and delivering large and complex corporate sustainability programmes, makes her one of the leading agency experts in the field.

Blake Lee-Harwood is a professional NGO campaigner and self-confessed member of the ‘awkward squad’ who has worked for many of the world’s most effective campaign groups and was recently Campaign Director of Greenpeace. He has 25 years of high profile campaigns to his credit and is one of the most sensitive greenwash detectors in the business.

Coming from very different backgrounds, Flic and Blake don’t always agree; but together they are a dynamic team that can offer an unrivalled breadth of experience, knowledge and contacts. As well as approaching every problem from two directions, Flic and Blake also think about issues both as experts in communication and also in policy. The importance of integrating policy and communications – two sides of the same coin – is central to the H&K approach.

The third crucial component of any H&K sustainability team is sector expertise because every industry has its own set of unique issues. For example, the specific challenges faced by the energy sector are quite different to those of consumer goods, although the overall approach can be the same. Every sustainability project at H&K includes a sector expert with a thorough understanding of every aspect of the industries they cover.

And H&K sustainability expertise is not just confined to the UK – we are part of the H&K worldwide network, with experts in offices around the world.

H&K can offer a wide range of skills including:

  • Applying our ‘Greenwash Detector’ to your sustainability communications, so you can see how you are viewed by NGOs and the media
  • Issue identification and analysis – a full sustainability health check for an organisation which will identify the main issues and recommend some innovative approaches to dealing with them
  • Building frameworks for sustainability strategy and helping organisations to fill in the detail
  • Internal workshops and campaigns which will challenge staff to think about sustainability in new ways and encourage them to act
  • Product, brand and corporate campaigns (across traditional, digital and social media) to reach out and tell your story to the people who matter to you, whether they be customers, consumers ...
  • Stakeholder mapping, engagement and networking – Flic and Blake have two of the best contact books in the business and can access the organisations and individuals you want to talk to
  • Monitoring the ever evolving political and regulatory landscape and understanding and advising on the implications for your organisation
  • Issue management – we can create a management strategy for any sustainability challenge that you face
  • Media outreach

...along with the award winning approach to communications which you would expect from a world class agency like Hill & Knowlton.

If you would like to chat on the phone or organise a meeting you can contact Flic and Blake on 020 7413 3403