B Corp comms leads share their ESG and impact communications advice
To celebrate B Corp month this year, we spoke to three B Corp communications experts to get their tips on how best to communicate values and impact in the sustainability and ESG space in 2025.
- Rosalind Holley is Director of Communications & Marketing at B Lab UK
- Alessandra Sabellico, Global Corporate Communications & Reputation Director at Davines Group
- Kristen Fuller is Marketing and Communications Manager at Toast Brewing
The changing face of ESG communications
We’ve come a long way since the days when sticking the word “green” in front of a product name was enough to convince people that buying it was good for the environment. Today the sustainability agenda has a hard won – if tenuous – seat in many boardrooms and governments the world over, as we face the realities of climate change and social injustice.
Few have observed this journey more closely than those tasked with communicating sustainability efforts and impact. Over the last 15 years, Rosalind Holley has worked for brands including UnLtd and JustGiving, and is now Director of Communications & Marketing at B Lab UK. When she started her career, the sustainability space was very different to what it is today.
“In the early days, people considered that you could either be a charity with a social mission or you could be a big bad business making a profit – it was challenging to get across the message that you could be a business and make a positive impact,” she says.
“Today it’s easier to be a business that considers people and the planet – there are a lot more of them, they’re better known. And increasingly people want to hear what brands are doing in this space, so there’s more of an open door for brands to talk about the work they’re doing.
“At the same time, the explosion of businesses trying to communicate impact means that it’s hard sometimes for people to understand what is true, what can be trusted, which does make it more difficult for brands in that space.”
Alessandra Sabellico, Global Corporate Communications & Reputation Director at Davines Group, has been in communications management for over 20 years. She has also seen enormous changes over that time, and believes that the role of sustainability communications is being redefined.
“The role of the sustainability communicator today is to help companies engage stakeholders by telling the whole story of sustainability,” she says.
“This means talking about the difficulties, setbacks and failures on the path to becoming a better company. This is very different from the traditional mindset of corporate communications and marketing, which has been until now to spin the story to make the company look as favourable as possible.”
Sustainability legislation and compliance
Part of what is driving the need for greater transparency within sustainability and ESG comms is the increase in legislation.
“With a series of new regulations coming from Europe (and in the United States as well), the stakes of communicating sustainability are becoming higher and higher,” says Alessandra.
“Greenwashing, in addition to being a huge risk to a company’s reputation, comes with steep fines and threats of legal action, and effective sustainability communicators must learn to balance compliance with a compelling narrative.”
At Davines, this is driving greater teamwork between communications, marketing, sustainability and legal teams.
“This teamwork allows us to figure out what are the things that we can talk about, what are the ones that we’re not ready to talk about and then what do we need to do to change the substance of our sustainability program so that we can make the claims that engage our stakeholders while telling a truthful story of progress.”
Engaging with cynical, overwhelmed audiences
Of course, legislators are only one of the many stakeholders that ESG communications professionals need to consider. And each audience type needs something different.
“The starting point for any communications strategy is who are your audiences, and why are you trying to communicate this with them?” says Ros.
“You might have a specific focus of trying to attract future employees, or you might be more focused on your customers or your communities or other stakeholders like investors, or policy makers.
“If you’re really clear on which of those audiences you’re going after, you can then think about whether you need to tell a story on your product or on your website or through social media. There’s not a one size fits all method. People will want different levels of depth.”
At Davines, engagement means communicating with everyone, starting with employees and ending with clients.
“That’s why internal communication and communication aimed at our community of hairdressers and estheticians is increasingly crucial for us,” says Alessandra.
“This is because those who work in the Group, those who choose its products and those who buy them are not just earning a salary or buying an effective product but are part of a larger project that affects us all and is aimed at generating well-being and value for the planet and for people.”
The challenge for engagement though, is that people are becoming ever more cynical with the increase in sustainability messaging, making it harder to cut through the noise. And it may be that your ESG credentials aren’t the thing they care about the most anyway.
Kristen Fuller, Marketing and Communications Manager at Toast Brewing, says that in the first instance, you have to remember that you’re a business that is trying to sell a product or a service that people need.
“People want to know that we make great beer,” she says. “We’d love to believe that people think about sustainability first but we’re all human, people want a product that tastes great or that works or whatever the reason is that they’re buying something. They want it to deliver on whatever it’s supposed to deliver on.
“What we’ve learned is that you’ve got to convince people in the first instance that the beer tastes great and then they’re open to hearing the impact message.”
Make it relevant, tangible and easy to understand
So what else can communications leads with a sustainability message do to engage their audiences without falling foul of regulations and drawing accusations of greenwashing. At Toast, the answer lies in combining factual data with storytelling, to make impact both tangible and relevant to their audience.
“The thing that our sales teams often focus on is the fact that every pint saves one slice of bread from being wasted,” says Kristen. “So when someone’s drinking their pint, they can think, ‘Great, I’ve saved a slice of bread’ – it’s a small but tangible win.”
In a similar vein, the team recently dug into the relative carbon footprints of drinking a pint of Toast beer on draft, from a bottle or from a can. They shared the results using a simple graphic on their social channels, which clearly showed how draft had the least negative environmental impact and bottles had the most. The post had exceptional engagement.
“That’s the kind of comms where people went, ‘Wow, great, when I’m buying my beer, I can choose a can over a bottle now and I know I’m making a good choice.” Again, it’s something tangible and that really got people engaged. It’s about making things easy for people to understand.”
B Lab UK’s Ros agrees that simple, straightforward communication that people can understand is key.
“It’s really easy to blind people with science – and it can be tempting to do that to prove the impact we’re having – but if it’s hard for people to understand, it’s not meaningful, then that can start to slide into greenwashing,” says Ros.
“Try to get specific about what you’re doing without resorting to too much jargon, try to make your language human, try to show what it really means in practice, and acknowledge that you’re on a path rather than finished. Because it’s not like you’re ever done with sustainability so don’t try and say that you’re done. Telling the story of the journey as well as the destination is really important.”
Show the how and build community
One of the easiest ways to help people understand your sustainability journey is to let them experience it for themselves. That means sharing it consistently, giving them behind-the-scenes glimpses that show rather than tell them about the work you’re doing.
“It’s the snippets, like Pizza Pilgrims sharing an Instagram reel of where their ingredients are locally sourced from, or Riverford giving over their newsletters to talking about the seasonal impact of their work,” says Ros.
“They allow people to get under the hood of what they’re doing. And that consistent, honest ‘working out loud’ is something people respond really well to because they can see that it’s not about using a superlative once every three years and then never talking about it again. It’s about making it part of the ongoing drum beat of how we tell the story of our business.”
But sustainability comms doesn’t start and end with showcasing your own impact. There are many other ways to engage your audience in the wider conversation, to educate people and encourage them to make better choices.
The Toast team recently got involved with the No Mow May campaign, led by PlantlIfe, encouraging their audience on social media to share pictures of their unmowed lawns and linking it to product giveaways.
“At Toast we believe that food is nature and if we waste food, we waste nature, so getting involved in No Mow May felt authentic to the brand and the people behind it,” says Kristen. “It got a lot of really positive engagement and user generated content.
“It’s about building that community and encouraging people that we can make a difference if we work together. You’ve got to try to get people to engage with the message and spread it, but also not guilt trip them.”
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable
Sustainability communications is an exciting place to be right now, but there’s no doubt it has its challenges. And it’s likely that this space is only going to get more complex as we move ever closer to 2030 and beyond.
We’ll almost certainly see more businesses entering the arena with sustainability messaging, legislation and regulation will shift and tighten, audiences will grow more knowledgeable and demands on us will increase.
In the face of this, it would be easy to shy away from communicating sustainability and impact at all, retreating into ‘greenhushing’ rather than risk being called out for falling short. But that’s not the way to make progress.
“If you’re the spokesperson or the person leading on a sustainability initiative or issue, you have to be willing to engage with it,” says Ros. “It’s a two-way street. If you’re putting communications out into the world, you can expect your stakeholders to have an opinion on them.
“But don’t immediately feel like, ‘Oh no, we’ve been criticised so that’s it, no more communicating about our sustainability efforts!’ Those opinions might actually be constructive, they may give you some interesting pointers as to where you want to go next. As communications professionals, we have to keep the conversation going.”
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