To enable you to focus your efforts and ensure you’re making changes in the right areas of your business, it’s vital that you identify the issues that are most important to your agency.
In sustainability circles, the process of prioritising sustainability topics is called a materiality assessment. Within the sustainability strategies of agencies that are leading in this space, the top five most common environmental sustainability issues mentioned in their materiality assessments are:
1. Climate change – this incorporates:
2. Sustainable value chain – this incorporates:
3. Consumer environmental education/awareness (driving sustainable consumption and behaviour)
4. Circular economy (including waste and resource use)
5. Nature and biodiversity loss
You can use these lists as a starting point, but it’s important that you do your own evaluation with your stakeholders (internally and externally) to decide which issues are important to your agency. Internal stakeholders include your employees and independent board members. External stakeholders might include your suppliers, clients, partners and local community groups.
There are various approaches that you can use to do this. At a high level we recommend:
1. Drafting a list of all the sustainability topics that are relevant for your business. To help you craft this long list you can use Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting frameworks, investor indices and recent materiality assessments published by other agencies – see links below.
2. Once you have a long list, score each topic from 1 to 4 (where 1 is low impact and 4 is high impact) in terms of the impact your agency has on the sustainability topic through its operations (e.g. relatively speaking – do you consume a lot of energy in your operations or in the delivery of campaigns? Do you generate a lot of waste through your campaign materials? etc.)
3. Run back through the list and apply the same scoring methodology (where 1 is low impact and 4 is high impact) in terms of the economic impact of the topic on the business (i.e. the financial impact on the business – going forward, will the issue help you make more money or cost you money?)
Note: Performing these first steps is what’s called ‘double materiality’ – you’re assessing both the financial impact that, say, climate change will have on your business, as well as the impact your business has on climate change.
4. Now ask your key stakeholders (internal and external) to score each topic for how important the issues are to them. Ask them to score each issue from 1 to 4 (where 1 is low importance and 4 is high importance) in order to ascertain the influence on stakeholder assessments or decision making (e.g. do your clients care about this issue? Are your investors asking for information about this issue? Have employees highlighted this issue as being important?)
It’s up to you to determine who your key stakeholders are. Many companies do skip this step, but if you miss a topic that’s crucial for one of your key stakeholders it could lead to future loss of business or a higher employee turnover – which will itself increase the economic impact of that topic. Engaging suppliers, clients and employees in this process can help to strengthen relationships and set you up for collaboration opportunities down the road (see step 4: Grow the movement in this guide).
5. Finally, add all the scores together – the highest scoring topics are the ones you need to pay closest attention to. It’s up to you as an agency to decide exactly how many issues you prioritise.
Once you’ve your prioritised your topic areas, the next phase before taking action is to set targets for each of these topics – this will form the basis of your sustainability strategy. A whole guide could be written just about this topic – so we have linked to a few below. As we run through step 3: Take action, we will cover what targets might look like for each area, as well as recommend some key KPIs that every agency should be tracking.
These are some helpful guides to use as a starting point for identifying your hot spots (priority areas) and setting targets: