Stepping up sustainability: tactics for a greener event landscape

Cassidy Knowles:

Talk to some other people in your situation in a similar situation and get some ideas from them. I think a lot of what I gained from speaking on the panels with you and others is that inspiration of what others are doing. Even though I feel like we are quite far along with our journey, there's always things to learn from others and what they're doing.

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events, create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages sites and connects audiences well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Paulina Giusti:

I'm Paulina.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu:

I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier:

You are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing. 

Hello everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Alyssa and I am your host for this week's episode. Today I am joined by my wonderful colleagues and fellow hosts, both Rachel and Felicia, for a little bit of a interesting episode that we're going to construct here today. New format for us. We like to try all new things, but before we get started, we have a little bit of sad news to share with our listeners who have been following along with us since the beginning of this ride.

Our dear fellow host, Paulina Giusti, has departed us not only from the Great Events podcast, but she has left our organization to fly into the stratosphere, what I think, and to a new opportunity that she has with a really great organization, whom we hope to have back on this podcast at some, but from more of a customer or a pundit type perspective. She certainly is a thought leader in our eyes, and we just want to thank her for all of the great work that she did on this podcast with us as our fellow co-host. I don't know Rachel or Felicia, if you had anything else you wanted to say about Paulina?

Rachel Andrews:

No, Paulina is just an amazing person and the three of us are going to stay friends with her after this. It's bittersweet to see her go, but I'm so proud of her. She was here for those dedicated listeners. She's been at Cvent for ten years. She gave a really amazing decade of insane innovation and growth to our events team, and I could not be more proud of her. She's going on to amazing new things. I'm excited to have her back as a guest host because I think she's going to come on and talk about some epic events that she's doing in her new organization. Congrats, P. We are going to miss you so much. I already do. It's already week one and I already feel the pain, but that doesn't mean that I'm not super proud of her. It's great.

Felicia Asiedu:

Absolutely. I'll just add a small thing. I rejected her personal resignation when she sends out that email of "Guys, it's been 10 years, I love you all," and whatnot. It's like "I reject this. I don't know why you thought I would take it in. I am not allowing you to resign. We are going to stay friends, so I'll be WhatsApping you all the time." I'm going to give that as a tip some advice. If you're going to work with someone for 10 years, reject their personal resignation,.

Alyssa Peltier:

Reject, delete it. I rebuke thee.

Rachel Andrews:

No, I mean one thing that can be said though is if you're happy for the people that move on and they move on and upwards, that's a good sign of a good company that's groomed you into the next step. But on a personal level, screw, you should come back. Why did you leave? But on a professional level, I love you. I'm so happy for you, I'm proud of you.

Alyssa Peltier:

It's funny, we started, we have our planning production calls that we meet regularly on with our whole team and I was reflecting, I don't know, it's not January. I was in a reflecting mode today and just thinking about the progress that it takes to think together, right? This podcast is now in it's third year of episodes. Paulina has been along for the ride in the beginning. I'm thinking back to how we tried to get it off the ground and it took us, I don't know, three or four months to get our lives together. It took us some time to get our podcast up and off the ground and get this running and we never lost sight of wanting to do this. Now, that we're in the third year, we're starting to see kind of the fruits of the labor. We have people reaching out to us on LinkedIn that want to speak.

We're starting to speak with those partners and guest individuals on other types of industry events. It really feels like this has been something we have nurtured for a very long time. I just want to thank Paulina for her support of that and this experience and just building something together that always feels really good and very rewarding on a personal note in a professional space. Okay, enough about you, Paulina. We love you so much and we miss you already. However, we've got other things to talk about and better great events to explore. Felicia actually had a really interesting conversation with an event agency located in London called Chorus this past week related to their sustainability efforts, which we know is very much top of mind for every event planner, event organizer these days.

It's just table stakes now for the modern event organizer. I asked for you to give us a little bit of an overview of that conversation and then we'll actually roll a bit of that footage from that conversation. Then Felicia, Rachel, and myself, we'll come back and have a little bit of discussion around the meat of that conversation. But Felicia, just give us the high-level overview.

Felicia Asiedu:

Absolutely. I met with group managing director Cassidy Knowles. I've been on many a panel of Cassidy if anyone's ever been to Event Tech Live or I just can't even think of so many events we've been to. We've been on sustainability panels together. What I love about it is we joined the sustainability panels just after the pandemic and Cassidy was able to give us that "During the pandemic, this is what we did," which you'll hear a little bit about as she explains it. Then I've almost been with her on her journey of like, and "Here's where we are today." I thought she'd be fantastic for this, helping us to understand how she has implemented sustainability in her business over the past two or three years. So hope you enjoy the conversation.

Here I am with Cassidy Knowles, right? You run Chorus, you run Chorus, right?

Cassidy Knowles:

The group managing director of Chorus Creative Group. There are three entities under our banner now, Chorus being the creative live event and production agency. Then Scotch Creatives being our drinks marketing agency. Then Chorus Arts being our art led experience agency. Yeah, thank you family.

Felicia Asiedu:

That's all right, so lots to manage. I know we've been on lots of panels and bumped into each other at loads of events and we always end up talking around sustainability. It seems to be our panel expertise. I wanted to catch up with you just on what are you doing at Chorus? Because we always talk about how it's a bit of a, "Huh? What is actually going on?" What are you doing at Chorus around sustainability?

Cassidy Knowles:

Yeah, so we're quite lucky in that we're quite far ahead in our journey of sustainability. We started in the pandemic when things were a little quieter and got our ducks in our row and said, "Who do we want to be when we come out of this, whatever it was?" Decided that sustainability was absolutely an angle we wanted to take the business in. We promptly joined isla and used their tool TRACE to start measuring firstly ourselves and then what we're doing with our clients. We took everybody along the journey at the same time. Everybody in the agency does the sustainability and events training that Isla offer and all the different modules. We pick four modules a year that people do. When I say the whole company, everybody from the head of finance down to our junior designers. It isn't just the project delivery team doing that, but we think that's really important in terms of making sure that everybody's on the journey.

We also made the decision not to hire sustainability in but to create it from within. Everybody in the agency is responsible for it and cares about it a lot. We've also found that it's really helped in hiring people, especially the next generation. They really care about sustainability in the planet and what companies are doing. Having that sort of holistic view rather than having specific roles doing it within the agency has really helped us there. Fast-forward to 2024, April, can you believe it? We are going for our ISO standard ISO 20121 this year. We've been carbon-neutral and carbon-positive, actually, as an agency for a couple of years. We wanted to take the next step and we know there's lots of accreditations out there, including B Corp, and we felt that ISO was the next right step for us.

It's also being updated this year because it was born, obviously, in 2012 for the London Olympics as part of that legacy. It's being updated for Paris, hopefully in time for Paris this summer. We will benefit a lot from all of those updates that are incoming. We engaged a consultant to help us through the process and he went through the audit with us and we were really happy to tick off almost 70% of the standard before we even started. We were clearly going in the right direction there.

Felicia Asiedu:

I love that. You've just jam packed me full of so much goodness. The first question I have there is how many people are in your organization that do this training?

Cassidy Knowles:

Twenty of us at the moment and four roles pending. But yes, it will continue that way. I know I said we don't hire sustainability roles in, that doesn't say that for the bigger projects, we don't have a part of a role dedicated to sustainability on our big projects we do because clearly it does take up time to do that reporting and we want to make sure that we're doing the best job we can there. But on all of our other small to medium-sized projects, we would provide a sustainability report as part of our service, as what we do. It's woven into the production and project management time that we are charging our clients.

Felicia Asiedu:

Could you give me an example or just a taste of what's large scale for you? How big are we talking for some of your larger projects?

Cassidy Knowles:

I would say anything in terms of revenue from 750 upwards, three-quarters of a million upwards.

Felicia Asiedu:

Okay, so that's some hefty projects and because the reason why I ask is because I know a lot of larger organizations especially will say it's difficult. It's hard, tough. I put those two things together. I heard you say 20 people in your organization, so some would say it's easier for you, less people, but actually you are dealing with huge large-scale events and large projects where you are taking sustainability very seriously. That's both ends of the spectrum there, I think.

Cassidy Knowles:

Actually, as a business it is quite easy for us because we're smaller and we started off in a completely virtual environment, which clearly cuts out all those office emissions. We're back to hybrid working as an agency. We do three days in, three days together, two days, wherever we like to call it. It's not only because of that work-life balance that has now come out of the pandemic, it is about sustainability as well.

We do measure our working-from-home emissions too, and they're getting more and more accurate with the more data that we put into those and encouraging our employees to be on a renewable tariffs in their homes. It extends far beyond just what we're doing as an organization. It goes into people's personal lives. Even this morning we have a bi-weekly sustainability round table with the team just to talk about generally how we're getting on, any questions. We were talking about sustainable fashion and if anyone knew any sustainable fashion brands and it was good because they didn't. It was really interesting. Everyone can think of fast fashion brands, but not many people can mention sustainable fashion brands.

Felicia Asiedu:

Oh, interesting. I love that, that it permeates every area. It's not just, "Oh, we've got to do this for work," but actually it's getting everyone to really think about what's their personal impact on the world.

Cassidy Knowles:

It's habitual, right? It's like when we first started wearing seatbelts or not smoking in pubs or recycling, they're all quite new things in our lifetimes. It's about changing your habits and the same with sustainability.

Felicia Asiedu:

If you were going to give some advice to another organization, that's... I don't even want to say at the beginning of their journey, we should be past that now. We shouldn't be at the beginning, but that feels that they're hitting a bit of a wall or it is a bit of a struggle. What kind of advice do you think you could give

Cassidy Knowles:

To them, talk to some other people in your situation and a similar situation and get some ideas from them. I think a lot of what I gained from speaking on the panels with you and others is that inspiration of what others are doing. Even though I feel like we are quite far along with our journey, there's always things to learn from others and what they're doing. Other agencies might be on their B Corp journey or have received their B Corp certification, which is an incredible achievement and you can learn so much from even going on the B Corp website and filling out that initial survey. You wouldn't even think about changing your bank, changing your pension scheme, all those kind of things that don't touch you day to day, but really are important to the sustainability of the organization also, make me think about things personally. It's made me think about my pension personally and who I bank with personally as well, about what's good for the planet, not just good profit.

Felicia Asiedu:

Oh, I love that so much. I guess we're a supplier. You are a supplier in that sense, in the supply chain. When I have suppliers, we had one of our suppliers recently tell us "We're a B Corp." I was so excited because actually it made me feel like not only have they've done a good thing, but I work with them and I want to work with them, and they've done something that's made themselves more sustainable, which just makes me more sustainable. That's the impact that you are having as an organization on the clients that you work with. They would be happier to know, "Oh thank God I work with this agency," because I think that makes them look good as well in a sense.

Cassidy Knowles:

It does come through and we get asked a lot about it in creds meetings because we put it front and center. We always start with that piece because we're really proud of it and we think it's really important. I don't know why you wouldn't think about that. It's always an offering as part of any pitch proposal or proposal we do to clients about how can we reduce first, how can we reduce this impact that you are going to have. We obviously don't want to talk ourselves out of doing events. That's what we do. We're in the live events business and we do travel around the world globally for it. That's an amazing perk to our business, but it's about the best spend of money that is for the people in that organization and for the planet as well.

Felicia Asiedu:

Thank you so much, Cassidy. I know it's short and snappy, but it was amazing.

Cassidy Knowles:

Thanks for having me.

Felicia Asiedu:

Oh my gosh, that was such a good interview. I was so happy that she took the time to sit down and just express what she's doing. I think we should dig into that a bit. She started by saying, like I said before, she had started during the pandemic, they all thought, "This is some downtime guys, we don't have all the events coming in, so why don't we use it to make ourselves look better when this thing finishes." They started by looking at sustainability, which is just so inspiring. But I think that's a cool thing for us to talk about because people often say, "I don't know where to start. I don't know what to do." To that, I think she proves just get going, just do something.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, and I think this zero excuses policy is the best policy to have. One little thing will truly make a difference, right? I don't know Rachel, I know we're in the throes of Cvent Connect planning and this has been a slow roll for us to get things moving on sustainability for our Connect events, but I feel like we're in a good place.

Rachel Andrews:

It's exactly two months out from Cvent Connect right now, when this goes live, probably sooner than that. But yeah, for us, we're doing a couple cool things. I think one thing that I want to be able to say is that we don't use any single use plastics at events. That is so hard to do because just with giving people water, not everybody brings their recyclable water bottle and so you end up giving away more swag water bottles and it's like is that really sustainable, giving away more throwaway swag? It's this conundrum, but I think if everyone can just make a conscious effort to make that a rule at their conferences, honestly, even if it's just one big conference that you do and all the other ones might be harder to do that at, but just make it at your biggest conference or your biggest five conferences, I think that would make a world of difference.

One cool thing we're doing this year is one of our sponsors is Intuitive AI. They are bringing a robot that is going to stand by the trash cans and you basically take your trash and you show it to the robot and it tells you what trash can to put it in, which I'm so excited to see a little sneak peek for folks coming to Cvent Connect, but it's just a wave of the future. I know a lot of venues and hotels are already doing this with the three different trash cans that are at venues, but a lot of venues and we're also reliant on how they throw away waste. A lot of times when you're sourcing, you need to source responsibly for the venues and the convention centers or the hotels that are actually doing these programs. If they're not LEED certified or if they're not in some sustainability program, maybe don't consider them. Let's not have this culture anymore. Let's just do it. Enough talking, let's do it.

Felicia Asiedu:

I tell you what, in the UK I was, again, it was at Event Tech Live on their green stage. We had someone come along from the department for environmental something and something a bit more, it was Defra, and she was telling us that single-use plastics have been completely outlawed. This was last year. Here, any restaurant you go to, anywhere you go, it is all wooden everything. It might fall apart after a while, but by the time I tell you, yeah, or a glass, but by the time you've had your meal, you didn't really need that thing anymore.

It's really easy to then go and throw it away and recycle it. You can't even find single-use plastics. That makes me think about the standards. The country has just said, "No, we're not having single-use plastics." As an event organizer, you can't even make that choice anymore, which I think is a cool thing if you are trying to achieve standards like she spoke about in that interview of ISO standards or B Corp standardization, you've got to just go for it and do it like we're saying, good thing and go on.

Alyssa Peltier:

I want to touch on what Rachel said, this notion of culture, too. What I found really compelling about the conversation was just how the newer generations are starting to push the culture shifts organizationally. This is becoming not a nice to have, not a afterthought or even at the event level. This is now becoming part of the corporate culture and that's permeating into the event programs. I think this will be a very quick change as a result of that new hiring process. These early professionals are not going to choose to work for these companies that don't have institutionalized policies across every function. It's an interesting commentary.

Felicia Asiedu:

I tell you as well, I'm going to IMEX Frankfurt soon. I just chose my meal for the gala dinner and it said in the options, "Would you like to choose the vegan meal, or the meat based, or fish based meal?" It told me what the carbon emissions would be for each of those. Immediately I was triggered to choose the vegan meal. However, I like flavor, right? Culturally, I like to be entertained. I want to eat something I enjoy. It had a link out to the menu and it said, "Okay, the vegan meal is a..." I think it was a "Sweet potato pie with this that and the..." I was like, "That sounds amazing. I'm not even interested in the other meal now." I feel like I've been fully informed as an attendee to make a decision that is actually better. That cultural change of get your whole organization to go with you, get your attendees with you, I think it's such a cool thing to do.

Alyssa Peltier:

That's such a great practical example. Give people exposure of what that option even is. We so frequently say, "Do you want meat or veg or whatever. These are all your options," and you don't really know what you're choosing, but if you really make the better option even that much more compelling, so many people will choose that. It's a no-brainer. I find myself doing that at weddings. I always want the vegetarian option, because it's so elevated. It's always like a butternut squash stuffed risotto or something and you're like, "That sounds better than the filet I've had at every other wedding."

Felicia Asiedu:

But to Rachel's point where she was like, "Your venue has to help you with this, your venue, they are the chefs and they're going to source the food and make sure that it is appealing so that the sustainability choices are things that as a planner you can get behind and say, 'Yeah, I think I would choose that for my audience,; because you don't want to be lumbered with just a mushroom."

Rachel Andrews:

I think if you're able to do the choose your own adventure style, that is the best option for your attendees. I went to an event once and they just had, everybody had the vegan option. I forget what it was, but it was something they were trying to make into something that looked like meat, and that trend, I hope that never comes back. Let's call it what it is. Just call it what the real food is and make it good enough and protein-based enough that it's a sustainable or sustainable in multiple ways. It gives you energy, but it also is good for the environment. But I cannot stand the mushroom-shaped short ribs, so you're not fooling anybody.

Alyssa Peltier:

I feel that same way about us spaghetti squash trying to be pasta. I'm like, it's not pasta. Don't try to trick me.

Felicia Asiedu:

Oh man, I love it. So one of the things Cassie said was about it being habitual. It becomes ingrained in you and she was telling about her staff. It's like, "What are you doing at home? What are you doing for your renewable energy," and things like that. I think our attendees, like you just said, you can't fool them. They're either making these decisions or they're not. If you give them the choices, they'll say, "Well actually, do you know what? I've been thinking about doing this anyway and thanks for giving me the option. I think I'm going to make that choice." But how hard do you think it is to get people to make cultural shifts in large organizations and your attendees? What do you think?

Rachel Andrews:

So hard. It's decades and decades of doing the same thing and changing vendors, creating that culture where people actively think about it. I think it takes time and it takes a lot of reiteration with communication and the culture we have in the US with events. A lot of people are getting better about thinking about it. If there's signs next to every trash can being like "Actively think what you're doing," or you don't offer anything besides wooden or paper plates. Paper straws should burn in a fiery pit of hell. The paper straws should just go and just drink out of the glass like a normal person.

I'm just kidding. But there's active things that you can change and not just in the culinary space. There's other ways you can impact sustainability. How many days are you using electricity at your conference and so on. I think you should look beyond just the single-use plastic. Maybe that's the starting point. Then you have three more attainable goals that you can recommend. I think a lot of people struggle right now, especially in the bigger company space. It's easier if you're at a smaller company, but it's harder when you're at a company with 5,000, 6,000, a hundred thousand people, even something small. But that's where it makes the biggest impact. Something small creates the biggest impact.

Alyssa Peltier:

I can testify, I work with customers who are doing thousands of events. I know our program rivals that within our own meetings and events team, but that small step across a thousand-plus events is actually quite monumental if you really think about it. It's not just one small step. It's actually many, many steps that add up. When you're talking about these large organizations, just one policy change that can be rolled out across that sea of events is actually really, really significant and can be built upon. Just do one, then do another.

Rachel Andrews:

I want to give a shout-out to Lori Allen at MetLife. She stood up in a, I'm not going to say which event it was, but it was a leadership event recently. She's like, "We as leaders get together and say, 'Okay, we're all going to do this one thing or these two things at our programs next year,' and sign a petition or sign an agreement for the industry that says, 'The industry won't do this.'" She's like, "We as leaders can do this. We are in charge. We can have the power to do this, and we just need somebody to help us at these, maybe at the association level or somebody that's at the advocacy level, helping us make those strides." I think it does start with the venues for a lot of the things that we do at conferences, but it also starts with the planner saying, "We need this."

Alyssa Peltier:

The new normal, the new requirements, if you will.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah.

Felicia Asiedu:

A hundred percent. We had a very similar thing, funnily enough a year ago where people did try and sign up to it, but the problem that people found was that it was almost hidden. It's like if one person does it from one organization and it doesn't permeate through the industry, then another person tries it again and there's a pledge and there's another one. There isn't this place that people can look at and go to and be like, "Oh, that's what everybody's doing." Then it just becomes a bit piecemeal. But hey, look, I agree with what you both said about the one thing, but you mentioned Alyssa, you said one policy change. I actually think that's the word. It isn't just one change, it's one policy change. We won't do things that way anymore. It's a standard.

Alyssa Peltier:

The standard across however large your program of events is, whether that's three events per year or it's 3,000 or 30,000, you start to institutionalize things. That institutionalization becomes a culture shift, too. Those two things also do meet in the middle to what I was saying earlier, the culture is pushing the institutions to change, and the institutions are pushing culture changes as well. There's an interesting dynamic there.

Rachel Andrews:

My planner brain wants a strategy meets checklist. I love checklists. I would just love, let's just start with a top 10 things checklist that you can do. Maybe it's like, and then there's sub bullets under each of those things. Just highlight one thing, two things, three things a year and implement it. I could take my own advice here, by the way. There's some things that we need to do better.

Felicia Asiedu:

Yeah, I'm so ready to go. Can we land on, I loved what Cassidy said when she said, when she pitches as an agency, she pitches and starts with how to reduce first and then enables the client to say, "Oh, I don't really want to make that change. I don't want to make that change."

Alyssa Peltier:

There is an order of operations here, for sure. Yes, yes. As a former recycling nerd, I can say reduce, reuse, recycle is very important in that order.

Felicia Asiedu:

Yes. Oh my gosh, that is so important. People think, "Oh, but we offset with this." It's like, "No, no, just use less first." I think I would like to, if that's the thing I took away from it would be like, what is the first thought? The first thought is reduce. The first thought is, "How can I do the best?"

Alyssa Peltier:

Adopt a mentality of reduction that you don't need to be as bountiful as you are. In fact, you create a more bountiful experience for the world if you take on less within your own space. On that note, I will wrap us for this week. As always, very much enjoyed this conversation with you, Felicia and Rachel and Felicia, thank you for bringing new outside perspective from London to the conversation today. I think it really helped enrich our own dialogue this week.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, shout out to Cassidy. Thanks.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, thank you so much, Cassidy. We really appreciate it having your voice present on this week's podcast. Listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Thanks for hanging out with us on great events, a podcast by CVent.

Paulina Giusti:

If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews:

You can also help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you, discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu:

Stay connected with us on all your socials for behind-the-scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Paulina Giusti:

Got a burning question or an epic story to share. We want to hear from you, find us on LinkedIn and send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Rachel Andrews:

A big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event includes great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

That's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.