R&G Strategic Communications
Website: https://www.rgstrategic.com/
Industry: Professional Consultancy
Primary SDG Focus
Secondary SDG Focus
Which of the 10 Principles of the UN Global Compact applies to your emerging practice project/initiative?
- Principle 7: Business should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges.
- Principle 8: Undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility.
- Principle 9: Encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.
Please summarize your company’s SDG focus, how that SDG was implemented and how you achieved and measured the impact.
R&G Strategic is a professional brand, marketing and communications agency that partners exclusively with sustainable businesses moving towards circular economy business models. They give their clients the sustainable marketing expertise needed to reach their business goals as they develop innovative ways to manage resources, and act on climate change realities.
R&G is a small but expert consultancy team with a background in startup culture, and a strong marketing and branding portfolio in clean technology, renewables, applied innovation and social responsibility. Their work is creatively driven, but uncommonly built on a strong strategic foundation of market research and effective positioning. They are female-founded and led, critical thinkers, efficient creators, and business people who bring multi-award-winning branding expertise and design to bear on their clients’ growth strategies.
R&G measures their impact on ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns through the success of their partners. Evidence of this success is building the brand for Efficiency Canada to be the national voice for an energy efficient economy. It’s working with Clean Foundation to develop SolarAssist—a web application to help Nova Scotians discover their home’s solar potential. It’s helping Australia’s Galaxy Lithium integrate sustainability and corporate social responsibility into their reporting cycle. When R&G’s clients win, the whole world wins.
How was your primary SDG focus identified and prioritized in the company’s value chain?
By virtue of definition, sustainable businesses often excel at inbound logistics. But the innovation within one part of the value chain does not necessarily translate to another. When a business finds a new way to produce a product that benefits the environment, they still need to market that product to current and potential customers. R&G Strategic helps bridge the marketing gap to help these businesses build strong brands that outcompete their unsustainable counterparts. Helping cleantech companies scale quickly through polished, strategic marketing, branding and communications initiatives is necessary. They’re often competing with entrenched companies or economic/cultural behaviours that make it difficult for them to increase adoption for their innovation – but these companies often have innovations that can make a real difference, maybe even with the ability to completely disrupt the fossil fuel economy’s status quo. For David to take on Goliath, they need our help. We see it as a moral obligation – when we can help these businesses gain traction, everyone benefits from their transformative role in a greener, more sustainable world.
How was your primary SDG integrated and anchored throughout your business?
R&G’s core values are driven by the triple bottom line framework of people, planet and profit. We understand that the total cost of doing business needs to incorporate environmental impact, social responsibility and economic value. Sustainability is the qualifier we use to determine which clients we partner with, whether they be cleantech innovators, NPOs, Governments, or organizations seeking to track, measure and report social initiatives. Their efforts can be tracked in market share, reported effects on reducing overall emissions, reaching climate goals, mitigating climate change risk, reducing waste, driving the circular economy and creating social value that extends beyond their bottom line. How well we enable and empower our clients to make their own impact is how we gauge our partnership performance.
Did you employ any innovative approaches in your efforts to implement the goal?
[/vc_column_text]
Applied innovation is a staple of the cleantech businesses we partner with. In pursuit of this goal internally, the R&G leadership team established Circularity Forum—a thriving community of sustainable business leaders and entrepreneurs. As part of this effort, we hosted several events over the last year and were also able to offer affordable co-working space for startups, entrepreneurs, creatives and professionals with sustainable businesses.
Were any partnerships leveraged or created?
As noted before, partnering with sustainable businesses and helping them succeed in the marketplace is our core purpose. Over the past year, we partnered with Efficiency Canada to develop a brand that highlights both their national and global leadership. The results build on their momentum as they drive economic growth, stable jobs, healthier homes and lead the fight against global climate change.
Working closely with the Nova Scotia Department of Energy and Mines and Clean Foundation, we created a comprehensive brand experience for SolarAssist, developing the platform and a user experience designed to help Nova Scotians discover their home’s solar potential.
Together with Concordia University, R&G branded the campaign and designed the UX/UI for a personal emissions responsive web calculator. This campaign focused on delivering insights and resources to encourage students to make emissions-reducing adjustments to their lifestyles.
What communications strategy did you employ to share the initiative with your stakeholders?
We are a close-knit team who were brought in because of their passion for sustainable businesses. For internal stakeholders, we’ve conducted several development workshops to build our eco-centric culture and define clear objectives for sustainable growth. Apart from our standard messaging to external stakeholders regarding our work and our clients, our leadership team have been active voices in the cleantech and environmental sustainability space. These types of speaking engagements include featured remarks during the G7 Oceans Partnership Summit in Halifax and moderating a panel for a collection of purpose-led Atlantic Canadian businesses.
How were KPIs and the levels of success outlined and defined?
Our KPIs and levels of success were outlined and defined through several collaborative internal strategy sessions with our team. Since R&G exclusively helps sustainable businesses crush their unsustainable competition, we need to build an unbeatable reputation synonymous with sustainability. We succeed when our clients succeed and we measure our clients’ satisfaction through third-party review to determine their well-informed impact of our work.
How were reporting and monitoring conceptualized and undertaken?
We used Clutch for our external client reviews. Clutch is a platform offering unbiased and in-depth client reviews—arming businesses with the insights and analysis they need to tackle their challenges. We don’t pick and choose which of our clients we get feedback from. Receiving authentic client reviews is integrated into every project, so we can accurately learn and find room for improvement. All of our other KPIs are monitored and reviewed with the team on a weekly basis to keep our goals top-of-mind and to reinforce their importance.
What were some key lessons learned?
[/vc_column_text]
Our external reviews and internal observations have clearly demonstrated the importance of clear communication and purpose alignment. Being attentive and responsive to the specific needs of our clients has been invaluable to our collective success. Also, our specific expertise and knowledge in relation to their responsible consumption and production, and how that relates to their core purpose can’t be understated.
Finding an agency completely dedicated to sustainability is rare. So it is our responsibility to make sure other sustainable businesses know what we can offer and how we can help them reach new heights. We are young and growing, so maintaining that intimate collaboration will be paramount for success.
What were the key impacts and results?
We are proud of our team to have earned recognition as one of the top B2B Service Providers and Advertising & Marketing Agencies in Canada. Clutch also awarded us the #6 spot for Top Graphic Designers in a field of over 600 competitors, #13 in the Top Naming Companies, and #4 amongst the Top Packaging Designers in Canada.
We’ve been able to build a team that knows how to solve just about any advertising or marketing challenge our clients bring to the table. Whether it’s web and UI/UX design to digital strategy and market research, our clients know we can deliver. It’s the combination of our results-driven execution and positive client feedback that contributed to Clutch recognizing us for these awards.
The news release can be found here: https://www.rgstrategic.com/news-database/clutch-award-2019