Who pays for sustainability?

If you’re in sales, account development, client direction or the owner of an events agency here’s a simple guide to growing your business.

You’re always asking us “Who should pay for the cost of our environmental and social efforts? Should we increase prices so the customer pays, or should we absorb from within our margin?”

The answer is that neither you nor the customer should pay — make your competitors pay.

Improving your own event performance, and making sure customers know that, naturally increases customer preference for your proposition.  We’re always being told that RFPs now include mandatory sustainability sections, in fact we answer a few of them for agencies ourselves.  Now is your chance to turn this section into a bid-winner.

You win market share.

Who pays? Your competition.

Particularly laggards. And there’s plenty of them.

“We’re too busy to look at sustainability” we heard only this week. Good for you & good for now. They’ll get found out. Let’s hope that agency owner sells up while they still can.

“Can you help? All our incoming RFP’s demand proof of sustainability, but when push comes to shove, we don’t actually know what we’re doing”, we were told in Frankfurt recently by a large well-known global agency.

This is exactly as it should be — those who are not keeping up in terms of acting on published responsibility & sustainability values also shoulder the resulting costs.

Global research from PWC shows that big business knows & demonstrates what it’s doing in respect of responsible business practice and sustainability numbers:

• Low carbon products are considered<25% more valuable. And yes, event can be termed low-carbon products, if you engineer it as such.
• Twice as many companies are strengthening sustainability targets as are weakening them (yes, even with macro-political environments)
• 9x more companies have carbon targets than did only five years ago.

So to prove how good you are at delivering responsible & sustainable events (beware, this tool really does sort the wheat from the chaff), try an Impact: Responsible Event Review.

Demonstrate how good your proposal is compared to your peers. Tell the compelling story and accompany with independent, expert, verifiable benchmarking.

Or else it’ll be you paying.