This is where we start: a small-ish graphic with our impacts on from the last year. It’s a snapshot – lacking in a bit of detail; it doesn’t cover a lot. Yet. But it’s a starting point for us that we’ve committed to this year. And it’s only going to get better.
We’ve spent 2021 working on our impact, and really trying to get to grips with the business’s ESG – environmental, social and governance impacts.
You may know us in one of two ways. Wordscape is our agency – we publish Ethos magazine, alongside a variety of client work that falls generally into communicating about good business, net zero and the social economy. Or you might just have seen Ethos, which see as a statement of our values – it allows us to play a role in contributing to a more sustainable, forward-thinking world, and brings innovation into our business by talking to stacks of brilliant, free-thinking people for every issue.
Tackling your ESG is a hard thing to do for a micro-business, but equally we know it’s important and, luckily, it really dovetails with the work I’ve been doing on my MBA at Steinbeis University in Berlin. So I ran an ESG session for the team earlier in the year, looking specifically at Ethos’ impact – we narrowed that down to a long list of impacts, which we asked our readers, partners and subscribers to rank in terms of their importance. That led us to adopt five of the UN sustainable development goals which we support with our work.
We also did a similar thing for Wordscape, as the scope of our work is much broader than for Ethos. As a result we have five SDGs which we support with our work, which we’ve added to our website. The SDGs that we support through our work at Wordscape are: gender equality (5), decent work and economic growth (8), reduced inequalities (10), sustainable cities and communities (11) and climate action (13).
Those insights led us to work with Liverpool John Moores University’s Eco-Innovatory team. They’re working out our carbon footprint for us, so we can reduce it, and we’re also looking at increasing circular practices in Ethos magazine, so that we create less waste, use our resources more effectively, reduce our more harmful impacts and can increase the good things we do. But it’s not something that happens overnight, so we’re committed to it over the next six months to really get some benchmarks in place.
For us, it boils down to a few key areas:
Adopting our SDGs, so we can look at each of our projects – and new work – to see if it fits in with our mission, vision and values, of which the SDGs are a part.
Understanding our carbon footprint, so we can take small steps towards reducing it. As a tenant in someone else’s building, not everything is in our control – but our aim is to work out the ‘now, soon, later’ priorities – and work with our landlord to suggest things that will help us all reduce our carbon impacts
Looking to see where we can really innovate. It always frustrates us that the magazine industry is so full of waste – covers are ripped off the front of magazines so that shops don’t have to send back unsold stock, to make sure they can’t sell them. It’s a terrible, frustrating waste. So we’ve been really focusing on our subscribers so that we know more about how many copies we need to print of each issue, and can try and eliminate some of that waste. But there’s always more we can do, so we’ll keep looking. (And yes, we’ve launched a digital subscription this year too – but the stats show that our capacity for learning and retention is so much higher when we read things in print, as opposed to on screen, so there’s an important education element in there for us…)
And we’re committed to talking about it. We want to be as open and transparent as possible about what we’re doing – and, you never know who else will find that useful. Which is why we created this small graphic of our impacts this year, and we’ll aim to improve them every year.
That’s where we’re up to now. We’ll use Ethos to update readers on our journey and experiences. But if there are questions you want to ask us, ask away…