Insight

The five value pillars of Sustainability

Sustainability is changing, and with each passing day, it seems planet earth is giving us new warnings that we need to make that change happen ever faster. One of the keys to this is data. 

Without accurate, easily digestible data, organisations cannot make the best decisions for their business, and they cannot make the best decisions for the planet.

Data comes with challenges though, and these are keenly felt by sustainability teams and professionals across the globe – these can broadly be summarised into 5 key questions:

1. How do we access the right data, at the right time?
2. How do we get our stories out there, in an engaging way?
3. How do we create tools and services that allow audiences to engage with our complex data in a more intuitive way?
4. How do we empower our sustainability and data analytics teams?
5. Where do we find data analytics and visualisation experts?

Infogr8 have spent the past 10 years developing solutions to these exact challenges, across a broad range of clients, solving problems across all industries, drawing on the expertise of our distributed network of data talent, interconnected around the globe.

Blending the thinking around these key data challenges with infogr8’s expertise and capabilities led me to develop 5 value pillars for our sustainability pod, available for download here. These 5 pillars are core to what we do, how we partner with our clients to drive change, and shine a light on how data forms a key tenet in the thinking of sustainability leaders.

When we look at access to data, this has historically been a major issue within organisations looking to understand where they stand currently on their sustainability journey. Data is often stored in various different locations, across various different tech stacks, collected and processed by different teams, and the logistics involved make it difficult to pull it all together, and play it back in a single location.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. Recently infogr8 worked with the City of London Corporation on a dashboard for their climate action strategy, and this tool offers a vision of the future – data from across an entire organisation, supplemented by open data, all available in a single location, ready for decision makers to consume, and arguably more importantly, the general public to hold them to account.

One of our core values is to bring a creative edge to all of our projects, guiding our partners towards more engaging ways of telling their stories and presenting their data. This can be uncomfortable, as it’s human nature to settle into a rhythm or routine, and adopt standard ways of working. Our work with Jobsite, on their ‘Lost in Translation’ study, is a prime example of infogr8 pushing the boundaries, and developing engaging content to tell important stories.

This leads nicely onto a recent engagement with Friends of the Earth that really got our juices flowing. They’d done all of the difficult up front data work, automating a collection process that pulled in open data across 80 different metrics, but then faced the challenge of cutting through that complexity.

The goal was to differentiate their platform, ensure that it not only visualised the data, but also acted as a campaigning platform that users will return to time and again, understand where action might be required at a local level, share insights with each other and start working on campaigns. At the time of writing, it’s still in development, but we can’t wait to share more details on how we collaborated with Gabrielle Merite to meet some of these challenges.

These three case studies underline our mission to unlock the value of data for everyone, creatively – and this is critical for organisations looking to effect change. There’s a lot of data, information, statistics and opinions out there relating to sustainability, but it’s a broad, and complex topic. In order to minimise the damage we’re doing to our habitat, everyone needs to be able to understand how they can play their part – whether you’re a large multinational looking to devise carbon reduction strategies, or climate-conscious individuals looking to make lifestyle changes to reduce your impact.

If any of this resonates with you, get in touch and we can talk about the challenges you’re facing within your organisation.

Download the PDF

infogr8 work with a broad range of organisations in the field of sustainability, from global corporations, through to government bodies and non-profit organisations, including City of London Corporation, Friends of the Earth, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Mars Petcare, Climate KIC, World Health Organization and many more.