By all accounts when communicating about green practices, it must be done well. More and more, as customers want to buy brands that demonstrate a responsibility towards the environment. The communicator’s role is becoming pivotal in communicating how our companies/clients inform the public about green efforts, products, and services. Although these are early days and more work needs to be done, some leading edge best practices are already emerging.

It’s a relatively new field. Because of this fact, experienced communicators remark that leadership has often come from within the corporate communications team. Their collective advice:

• Resist getting trendy. Stay on a message that’s tangible and real, backed-up with facts
• Work with and keep NGO’s onside by including them in the information loop
• Harness everything you’ve got and leverage different media and channels, different styles to find the right mix for your audiences
• For the best PR results, work locally and keep your environmental messaging honest and meaningful
• Get your executives out to media events
• Align with sector benchmarking that goes beyond industry regulation
• Do involve others in your sector who don’t have an environmental track record
• Internally, use impact and influence. Make your S.W.O.T. count with an environmental argument that’s relevant to improving the bottom line
• Listen to employee’s ideas, specially when they call you on wasteful practices towards the environment

When communicating, keep in mind that environmental values embedded within your company’s culture count more than any aspirational messaging with customers and employees.

There’s some important work yet to do on greening our communications practices. We need to influence the mainstream media on running more stories about environmental responsible action. We must find effective ways to open up channels and harness the power of social media to talk to customers about our environmental report card. And we must ensure that the environment isn’t the wonder child of any particular department, that there’s consistency throughout a company. Finally, we have to find ways to reward employees who bring their passion for environmental sustainability to their place of work, as well create an awards system, validating companies that are making a difference to sustaining our earth’s environment.