Earth Day – Everyone Accounted For, Everyone Accountable

This year’s theme for Earth Day is #InvestInOurPlant and the global organizer is focused on accelerating solutions to combat climate change. This focus calls for everyone to be accountable including governments, citizens, and businesses. The tagline, ‘Everyone Accounted For and Everyone Accountable’, recognizes our collective responsibility to take care of our planet. Earthday.org has an activation toolkit with tons of ideas to create a campaign focused on accelerating action. I pulled out a few things that companies can use this year and for each item I’ll include an activation tip that can help increase employee engagement with your campaign.

1. Read. Watch. Listen.

After employees have a chance to learn something new, encourage them to test their knowledge and take one of the Earth Day quizzes. There are several quizzes surrounding different topics including clean energy, emissions, conservation, plastic pollution, and more!

Employee Activation

Ask employees to share their scores from the Earth Day quizzes in your company’s communication channel. Make it a challenge to see who gets the highest score. Start a conversation by asking employees to share a link to an article, video, or podcast related to Earth Day and ask them to share something they learned from the content.

2. Provide a list of ways to be more sustainable every day.

The United Nations has declared the period between 2020 and 2030 as the ‘decade of Action’. With less than 10 years to go and COVID-19 reversing progress towards the SDGs, it calls for urgency and ambition to deliver on their achievement. It can start to feel overwhelming to hear about the doom of climate change, but we can all take simple steps to change things in our day-to-day lives for more eco-friendly options.

Encourage employees to get out in nature, carpool when they can, recycle, or learn about how to shop for sustainable clothes. I’m on a personal journey to reduce as much household plastic as I can, by looking for brands that don’t use plastic packaging. I found a few different lists with simple ways to be more sustainable, 1 action at a time.

Making the UK Greener, One house at a time – 30 ways to be more eco friendly

• This article is all about how to make eco-friendly choices for your household, from alternative energy sources to biodegradable cleaning products and plastic-free brands.

Marie Claire UK – Sustainable Living: 40 Eco-Friendly Tips from Experts

• This article provides some great tips for choosing sustainable fashion, beauty products, and household products.

University of Houston – Sustainable Living Tips

• This article covers small changes we can make to different aspects of our lives including choosing sustainable products, conserving energy, saving water, minimizing waste and eating sustainably.

Employee Activation

Ask employees to share a photo of at least 1 sustainable action leading up to Earth Day. I know when I start seeing photos pop up in our company’s chat, I feel compelled to share mine and join the fun. This small action will encourage others to participate and learn some tips and tricks on leading a more sustainable lifestyle from their peers!

3. Encourage volunteering in Earth Day specific activities.

• Partner with your employee resource groups to see what events they may be planning around Earth Day. You can lift up their projects, encourage employees to join groups if they haven’t already and even work together to create company-wide engagement opportunities.

• Partner with your local nonprofits to see how your organization can support the Great Global Cleanup®. This is a worldwide initiative to remove trash from neighborhoods, beaches, rivers, lakes and parks.

Employee Activation

Consider offering an afternoon or day off for employees to participate in a neighborhood cleanup or other environmental volunteer event. Use gamification to increase employee engagement and announce a winner for the highest participation rate among departments or number of volunteer hours.

CSRconnect Tips

Use an Engagement Element to feature all your Earth Day initiatives to let employees know how they can get involved right from the home page of CSRconnect.

1. Reward employees that won the Earth Day quiz challenge with an incentive like Cause Cards. Cause Cards are a program within CSRconnect that acts like a gift card and allows an employee to donate on behalf of the company to a charity. This is a great way to show your appreciation for employee participation and use Earth Day as a catalyst for getting employees engaged with giving on the platform.

2. Use the SDG search feature to look for opportunities and nonprofit organizations by cause area.

3. Use the Volunteer Match integration to search for volunteer events and filter by the cause area ‘Environment’. You can narrow the search for virtual opportunities.

4. Ease the search process for employees looking for charities to engage with and link straight to volunteer search results in your engagement element.

Earth Day is a great opportunity to engage employees through education, conversation, and volunteerism. With consumer, investor, and employee expectations continuing to rise around corporate responsibility & sustainability, don’t miss out on the engagement Earth Day can bring!