'The power of communicating with purpose' with Jo Swift, Managing Director of Greenhouse Communications

Today we welcome the wonderful Jo Swift  from Greenhouse Communications to the Beautiful Business Podcast. Jo is a fantastic source of knowledge when it comes to talking about purpose and how you can talk about it with authenticity and genuine credibility.

In this podcast, Yiuwin and Jo discuss the noise around purpose at the moment and how cynicism is growing towards businesses that are possibly greenwashing their messaging.

This podcast explains the right reasons to talk about your purpose and how to use metrics and measures of success to understand your impact.

About Jo Swift

Jo Swift is the Managing Director of Greenhouse Communications and is responsible for the thriving, mission-led team in London and Bristol, working on campaigns with environmental and social change at their heart for government, business, NGOs and youth organisations.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The following transcript is the output of an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.   Every possible effort has been made to transcribe accurately. However, neither Beautiful Business nor The Wow Company shall be liable for any inaccuracies, errors, or omissions.

Yiuwin Tsang  
Hello and welcome to the Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way of doing business. We believe beautiful businesses are led with purpose by people who care, guided by a clear strategy and soulfully grown. 

Yiuwin Tsang  
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. My name is Yiuwin Tsang. I'm part of the Beautiful Business team and this week, we're joined by Jo Swift. Jo is an experienced agency leader in the communications industry and she's driving forward the sustainability agenda. She's the managing director responsible for the thriving mission led team at the Greenhouse Communications Agency in London, Bristol, working on campaigns with environmental and social change at their heart for government, business, NGOs and youth organisations. Jo's area of expertise includes narrative and messaging behaviour change, communication strategy, creative campaign development, integrated marketing, media and Stakeholder Relations, team structure and organisational design. She's a trusted adviser to national and global business figures and was selected to be part of the reclaiming agency 2020 cohort, Alicia programme from purpose disruptors creating positive change in the marketing industry. 

Yiuwin Tsang  
So let's talk about communication with purpose. This is obviously what Greenhouse is all about. Can you give us a couple of examples of some campaigns your team has worked on that you're particularly proud of? And what is it about them that gives you joy?

Jo Swift  
Yes, of course. So the first one is a organisation that is funded by the European Union. And they are funded to accelerate innovation in the food system. So they celebrate protein diversification, regenerative agriculture, sustainable aquaculture, and they're really interesting organisation, they came to us and said that they wanted to work with Gen. Zed. Doesn't everyone. And they wanted to understand how to engage young people in the food system or in their food, because young people feel quite disconnected from the food that they eat. And they felt like, yeah, there was a real opportunity to engage them, but they didn't know how. So we came up with an idea, which is called the future food makers, where we set up a competition across Europe to find 10 young people all who have like really brand new and interesting ideas as to how government can connect young people with their food and can help them feel more part of the choices that we all need to make on a day to day basis. So we recruited a group of 10 individuals, we call them the future food makers, we worked with them to develop five policy asks that they then took to really senior government individuals as part of an EU conference towards the end of 2021. And their policy asks were included in a final paper from the European Union. And you said at the time that the young voice or young people voice was something that they'd never considered before just how important it was to engage young people. And so, yeah, that impact that felt really important. And we've now got this group of future food makers that we're doing a huge amount of work with further down the line, we're working really closely with them to understand Yeah, what they want now to see from governments what they want now to see from business and education. And, yeah, it's the kind of idea that it started at Greenhouse, and we created this group, but it's been fantastic to see them grow and develop their own voice. And for us to give them a platform.

Yiuwin Tsang  
That sounds incredible. I mean, you know, the Gen Zeds of the world at so much kind of picked on really, in many senses. So to have a campaign that's built around, because I can't remember where I read it, or I heard it, but this it was a discussion around the future of democracy, basically. And there's some really interesting ideas are flying around around giving parents to votes so that they could represent their children in terms of what legislation kind of comes through. And this project, it reminds me of that it's given the voice of the people who often not heard or certainly aren't listened to, yet, they're going to be, you know, the biggest consumer group coming through the probably the, you know, the ones which hold the most wealth and fingers crossed at some stage. So for them to have their opinions heard, and certainly their thoughts and their feelings around something as important as food consumption ingredients cooking on his fourth is sounds really, really good. That sounds amazing. So I guess one thing that I'll be really interested in is in terms of communicating with purpose and working with these clients. And we spoken before about how selective greenhouses are the kind of diligence that you put into working with clients to make sure that they are properly impactful? What's changed in the last couple of years in terms of communicating with purpose compared to before in your mind what the purpose led companies need to consider now?

Jo Swift  
Once it becomes a buzzword, it's immediately you feel like as a communicator, you need to work even harder to prove that you're actually genuine. So everyone talks about purpose for brands. Now, every brand wants to demonstrate that it has a purpose. But of course, it's always had a purpose, because otherwise it wouldn't have existed even if that purpose is perhaps Yeah, not always in line with supporting and enriching the planet. But the more that organisations say they've got a purpose, the more scrutiny they're under to prove that that's actually true. So as I say, what it means for communicators is we need to work much harder to prove that we're authentic and genuine. And there's a huge amount of organisations now that are saying that they do something with purpose. But yeah, it can feel quite shallow, if you scratch the surface. So we get much more scrutiny on the work that we're doing. But that's a good thing. And because of the nature of the work we're doing that actually ensures that we have cut through because we can be confident that when you do scratch the surface, there is genuine action underneath what we're saying that we do.

Yiuwin Tsang  
I do completely hear what you're saying. It feels like there's this wonderful shift or this kind of movement, obviously, and spotted before everybody else in terms of being more personal in terms of the importance of sustainability, whether or not that's a generational shift, or if it's just a higher awareness of the impact that we're having on the planet on societies and communities. But people are much more discerning. And as you say that the danger of greenwashing is, and you can tell me if this is true or not, but is there a level of cynicism, even if it's inadvertently done but a level of cynicism when somebody comes to the market to say, or if a brand or if an organisation couple of marketers say, you know, we're trying to save the planet, or we're trying to, you know, to make sure that we're fully sustainable? And so first of all, is that making the job of a communicator? Harder?

Jo Swift  
Yes, it's ensuring that we're not necessarily harder. But yeah, you're met with many more questions, and you're in a pool of many other organisations that are trying to say something similar? I see no, so it is not there is so much nuance as well, that does make it it's not a black and white issue at all. And that's also something that we Yeah, continue to be really mindful of, because yeah, on the one hand, you can be considering that you're doing the right thing, but either the language that you're using has moved on, or the part of the organisation that you're working with, where the funding is coming from changes. And so you need to be really alert to every possible change that's happening. So yeah, it definitely has made it harder. But that's for good reason.

Yiuwin Tsang  
Yeah, indeed, is there anything else that you'd add in terms of companies or businesses that are trying to achieve this kind of cut through in such a congested space over and above that proof of authenticity?

Jo Swift  
Yeah, it's ensuring that you have practical tangible examples of action and impact that we can only communicate what's actually happening. So really challenging yourself to demonstrate your impact. And also, Paul Polman, talks about this the X CEO of Unilever, he talks about the say do gap, which is a really important phenomenon, which is, again, that comes from a leadership of any CEO that's perceived to say something and then do something different. And that gap, that's where you lose your employees. That's where you lose your customers. It's where you lose, ultimately, shareholder value. So yeah, making sure that you don't have your say do gap.

Yiuwin Tsang  
Good. That's a lovely bit of advice overall, what kind of process to take your clients through, when it comes to creating a communications campaign that puts purpose at its core? What else can you do to try and avoid? You know, that kind of that greenwashing phenomenon?

Jo Swift  
Yeah, so the initial process is to understand all the different aspects of their organisation. And for us to then marry that with some really detailed, thorough audience data that shows who their audiences are, like exactly what they're doing and the kind of information that they're currently consuming, and ensuring that we then marry that with what they want to say, because it's one thing for a company or an organisation to say, this is what we want to stand for, this is what we want to say. But if the audience isn't ready to hear it, or is listening to something very different, then there's a disconnect. So yeah, the first thing we do is to really get under the skin of the organisation, but couple that with the audience's that they're trying to reach, and in some ways, or in many cases, we will challenge and say but if this is your goal, this is what you really want to achieve your audience's doing this. So have you considered a different route to reach them? Or have you considered actually focusing on this project versus this one, because we think that actually will give you more cut through

Yiuwin Tsang  
Oh, that's really interesting. So the audience analysis before any comms goes up before any campaign has even crafted, he's trying to understand how was a breakdown Joe, in terms of, you know, what kind of insights do you look for? Or, you know, what's a method there? If for listeners thinking actually sounds like a really good bit of advice out? Well, let's try and get the feelers out. Let's try and get an idea of what the audience that we want to connect with currently thinks, how do you go about getting that data? And what kind of data points do you look for?

Jo Swift  
Yeah, so we work with a range of digital tools that can help give us that research and data, we also will do, and again, you can do this much more now, post COVID. But the real value of qualitative samples as well. So we use digital tools to see to get really granular on what certain groups are searching for the kind of information that they're consuming what they're responding to. But then, in addition to that, if there is a specific group be I don't know, founders of small businesses that focus on construction, in this part of the country, we can also identify them and do some qualitative research ourselves, just to give us that additional layer of data and insight that we can then test some of our ideas on and take back to our clients

Yiuwin Tsang  
that's really good. It really kind of just blows away that myth of, I guess, old school PR when it was all based on, you know, relationships with journalists and trying to get column inches here, there and everywhere. The fact that you spend so much due care and attention on audience side, before you necessarily craft, you know, the communication strategy for the client side makes a huge amount of sense in terms of how to go about doing it. How do you go about measuring the success of these campaigns? And if we've got listeners who are trying to do some of the comms work themselves? What should they be paying attention to? What are the metrics that they should be paying attention to,

Jo Swift  
they should consider what the goal is and what the touch point for measurement could be. So for example, if you have a report that you think your audience really needs to read, and that's going to be the communicate your message, or it's going to give you access or help you sell more to an individual, then what ways could you measure their engagement? So for example, is it a simple download? Is it dwell time? Do you want them to be visiting certain pages on your website, is it quite simply that they will read a certain title and a piece of coverage in that title will actually make a huge difference. So I think it's making it really tangible. And then going back from that, how is once you know exactly what you want to achieve, it's ensuring that you've got some metrics in place. So you can really show the impact that you've made. So we do a lot of work with landing pages, for example, to ensure that they're really working hard and that they are as accessible and straightforward as possible for the audience. And that the information we want to present, it's really simple to navigate, but that we've also got the ability to track and measure how long people are on there for and what they're downloading, and then what the action that they've taken is from that. So gone are the days of simply looking at press coverage and saying, Oh, we got you in this. I mean, this is still important. But it's just one of many metrics, we got an article in this title. And we know that X number of people possibly saw it, that's definitely a metric. But I would also recommend that you think of others just to ensure that you know, if your communications is working for you,

Yiuwin Tsang  
it sounds almost kind of scientific in the way that you've just articulated then Joe, I remember and this is probably showing how much of a Luddite I am work with PRs way back when, and they were talking about opportunities to see as a metric OTs, and it all kind of blew my mind. I was like, well hang on a second, tell me what that number actually is. And I said, Well, these are all the titles that we've managed to get your coverage in. And then we've added up the circulation of all those titles. And that's how we got that a huge number. And I was like, that's a really impressive big number, but doesn't really mean that much to me. But as you say, the science behind I guess the thing that I'm taking away from this is that it's not just about coming up with a clever message or some snappy copy. It's thinking about the whole kind of journey that you're taking your audience through from understanding how they'll respond or react to the message in the first place. And what kind of message to take out and what kind of campaign what direction you're going all the way through to the channels and mediums and channels you go to, to the whether or not you call it the end point. But to that point on the page or whatever the action is, and thinking about how that page is built the way it's laid out the words that you use the UX of that page of that asset, so that it all points towards achieving those objectives as he said those objectives out at the very start.

Jo Swift  
Yeah, that's exactly it.

Yiuwin Tsang  
Thank you so much. Jo Swift from Greenhouse communications it's wonderful hearing your insights and your experience and all stories you had to share. 

Yiuwin Tsang  
Thank you for joining us for this week's Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way to do business. Join us next time for more interesting discussion on how businesses can bring up will change helping communities building a fairer society and safeguarding the planet you can also join in the discussion at www.beautiful business.uk