Communicating your work with stakeholders

Having a strong sustainability plan is one thing, but it is equally important to be able to communicate your sustainability related activities to a variety of audiences in an effective way. Here are four examples of different approaches taken by business schools from Canada, Brazil, the UK and the Philippines in communicating their work in the field of sustainability to internal and external partners.

Rachel Goldsworthy, Coordinator at the Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation at the University of Victoria Peter B. Gustavson School of Business in Canada started a CSSI Communique. This short email, which goes out to faculty and staff across the university every two weeks, outlines a range of interesting research, publications, news items and websites that could be of interest to faculty looking to incorporate sustainability into their curricula and daily classroom activities. “Regularly sharing educational resources with faculty members is one of the key initiatives of the Centre. It goes hand in hand with another key initiative, which is to ensure that sustainability and/or social responsibility are included in every educational offering at Gustavson. By keeping it brief (a page), and providing links (instead of entire articles or reports), we hope that professors can easily follow up on the items that interest them.”

Fondação Dom Cabral regularly produces a Sustainability Committee Information Report that highlights the activities carried out by each working group linked to the Sustainability Committee. There is also an online intranet portal dedicated to updating the university community on sustainability topics on campus.

Cranfield School of Management’s Knowledge Interchange ‘KI Online’ is an online platform that is constantly updated with faculty interviews, podcasts, opinion pieces, books, topical issue reviews and commentary by faculty, as well as relevant research. It is used for their international Executive Education provision of blended learning for customised programmes, which are run in more than 30 countries around the world.

Faculty at the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business in the Philippines write a column focusing on socially responsible business in The Manila Times entitled “Managing for Society,” which has been running weekly since 2005. Faculty members write for the column by rotation, focusing on various social responsibility themes. The school also has regular weekly columns in Business World and Manila Standard Today.

How do you communicate your work in the field of sustainability to stakeholders both inside and outside the university? Share your examples in the comments area below.