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Our ESG
The 181st Street team has been highly active in the ESG space for over a decade and offers a suite of ESG advisory services developed through tangible business experience, beyond the buzzwords. We’re also committed to making our own business as responsible and regenerative as possible.
Our environmental commitments
- Our website is powered by renewable energy: hosted by Krystal who use Ecotricity for their power and have achieved a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of at least 1.2 at all their data centres. According to Website Carbon Calculator, 0.81g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits our site (well below the average website which produces 1.76g per visit!). Based on 10,000 monthly page views, we would produce 0.2 tons of carbon per year. We have already offset 1 ton per year by supporting a forest protection programme in the Gola Rainforest, Sierra Leone (through Stand For Trees), where our Managing Partner Sian worked on sustainable development and microfinance projects - and we will continue to monitor our monthly page views and increase our amount of offsetting as required.
- We are a Climate Friendly workforce with Ecologi. Every month we pay to offset the carbon footprints of our full-time staff and contractors.
- We are working to develop our Net Zero targets through SME Climate Hub and strategy and will be publishing this shortly.
- Due to the digital nature of our work, we rely on some cloud-based technology from large multi-national providers, who use renewable energy credits rather than energy direct from renewable sources. Many have pledges to move to direct sourcing, but have not completed this yet. Whilst we cannot control how these providers power their servers, we have committed to reducing our own digital carbon footprint through 6 monthly data purges. This includes deleting old files from cloud-based servers and deleting and archiving emails to minimise our storage needs and therefore our energy consumption from these sources.
- To demonstrate our commitment to reducing our digital carbon footprint, we have signed the Sustainable Web Manifesto.
- We have a sustainable procurement policy in place to inform our choice of suppliers and the purchase of any goods and services we require for ourselves, or our clients.
- We work with our clients to ensure that any sustainability claims they make in their marketing and communications are compliant with the Green Claims Code.
- We don't do 'climate doom'. Although we recognise the seriousness and urgency of the climate emergency, when we produce copy and campaigns for clients, we avoid triggering eco-anxiety. Why? Because it's not good for people's mental health, it stops them taking action, and it's against our solutions-focused ethos. Plus, selling the idea of climate utopia instead of climate doom is proven to get better results. It's behavioural science.
Our social commitments
- Our leadership board has a 50:50 gender balance.
- We pay all our staff, contractors & freelancers at least the real living wage, and are an accredited Living Wage Employer with the Living Wage Foundation. We also operate a profit participancy model so all staff and associates who work for us within the year get a fair share of the profits to reward their hard work.
- We offer all our staff and contractors flexible working arrangements, including working from home and adjusting their hours around unpaid caring commitments.
- We don't offer any unpaid internships.
- We recognise we need to bring more diverse voices into our team and leadership. When we have vacancies, we pro-actively work with recruitment partners and platforms to advertise these to a diverse candidate pool. We also use a blind hiring process to evaluate candidates on their relevant experience only and ensure we recruit based on the best talent, without bias. Our team works remotely to ensure we have access to a diverse pool of skills from around the world. When it comes to invisible diversity, we don't push for disclosure.
- We have made The Mental Health At Work Commitment to promote an open culture around mental health and provide all our staff and contractors with mental health resources and support.
- We actively promote our employee's "right to disconnect" with a policy against sending emails, using digital communications or making work calls out of hours.
- We provide all employees and contractors who work 20+ hours a week for us with a subscription to a music or mindfulness app of their choice, to support their wellbeing.
- While most companies do paid volunteering, we want our team to take time off from changing the world to recharge their creative batteries, which is why we offer 5 paid duvet days per year.
- We have signed the Employer With Heart Charter in support of The Smallest Things premature baby charity. Parents facing the worry and uncertainty of visiting their premature baby in hospital should not spend that time as maternity or paternity leave. We understand that premature babies need more time; time to develop, time to grow and time for parents and babies to bond at home after neonatal intensive care. That’s why we've extended paid parental leave by the number of days a baby is born before their due date, or stays in NICU. We pay extended leave as full pay and class this as compassionate leave so it doesn't eat into Maternity, Paternity or Shared Parental Leave. It is particularly important to us to ensure that our staff are fully supported through premature birth and NICU, as our Managing Partner Sian has lived experience of this with her daughter.
- We regularly speak at industry events and conferences, provide media training and events communications to our clients, and send our employees to training events. We have signed the Diversity Charter to show our commitment to ensuring diversity at any conferences and events we speak at, work with or send our employees to.
- When we create copy and campaigns for clients, we refer to the Conscious Style Guide during the editing process, to ensure that our work is inclusive.
- Every month, we invest a percentage of our revenue into microfinance loans for entrepreneurs in developing countries through Lend With Care. When they make repayments, we use the money to fund more loans.
Our governance commitments
- We are accredited by the Good Business Charter, recognising responsible business practices. This measures behaviour over 10 components: real living wage, fairer hours and contracts, employee well-being, employee representation, diversity and inclusion, environmental responsibility, paying fair tax, commitment to customers, ethical sourcing, and prompt payment.
- As a signatory of the Prompt Payment Code, we have committed to paying all our suppliers and partners promptly.
- When working on social value creation projects, our work sometimes involves working closely with vulnerable people, to ensure that projects are inclusive of all stakeholders and design is informed by lived experience. Our staff are DBS checked, and we have a safeguarding policy and procedure in place which is signed by all staff at the start of any project involving vulnerable people.
- We have committed to producing an annual Client Disclosure Report to be transparent about where our revenue comes from and highlight any climate conflicts. Our first report will be published in December 2022 and made available on our website. We will be transparent about any high carbon clients (as defined by creativesandclimate.com) and the nature of our work with them.
- We recognise that ESG is a journey. We don't expect our clients to be perfect (we're not either!), and we're happy to support them to take more steps in the right direction. But we're not here to help brands greenwash. All potential new clients are screened by our board before any pitches are sent, to ensure that we can make a tangible difference to them, and that they're a good values fit for us.
Need support with your ESG journey?
We have an extensive team of expert associates specialising in sustainability, ethical business, governance, finance and compliance, who can support you on your ESG journey. If you need help writing your strategies and policies, embedding your values, measuring your impact or communicating your efforts, we can support you.