TCC #58 — Context is king

5 ways to add context to sustainability communications

Bill Gates is famous for claiming that, on the internet, Context is king.

Just kidding – he actually said Content is king, and he’s not wrong.

He also recently said he’s impressed with Trump, once again revealing the total moral spinelessness of the billionaire class.

But today, we’re talking about context, not content.

The problem with so much of today’s corporate climate communications is that it is presented in ways that make it utterly meaningless to most readers, and it’s almost always because of a lack of context. Here are a few examples:

→ A company pledges to remove X tons of carbon by 2030. Is that significant, globally? How much carbon removal is actually needed? Is it more than their peers are doing? How does it compare to their carbon footprint?

→ Maybe a company makes a statement about how it has reduced its Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Does it frame those reductions as a percentage? Does it contrast this progress with its long-term decarbonization roadmap? Does it also acknowledge the relative size (or growth) of its Scope 3 emissions?

→ Maybe a company claims to have invested $1 million into decarbonization efforts. How does that compare to its other investments? Is that more than the company is spending on expanding, say, oil and gas investments? Is it more than the company spends on anti-climate lobbying? 🙃

Without context, readers can’t understand the significance of a number, and whether it represents progress or not. Basically, without context, you’re reciting facts — not telling a story.

Why do sustainability communicators ignore context?

Sometimes a lack of context reveals a carelessness on the part of the communicator. Oftentimes, scientific types are so steeped in weights and measures and their molecular understanding of the planet that they forget that other readers may not have an intuitive understanding of what a ton of carbon really means, for example. When these people leave out context, it’s usually not done out of malice, but the end result is still a lack of clarity.

A more sinister lack of context is an intentional one. Many companies know that readers won’t understand how much a dollar figure or carbon tonnage or megawatt hour really signifies, and will use these figures to appear precise while really obscuring their true meaning.

5 ways to add context to sustainability communications

Ironically, context is, well — contextual. It’s hard to give universal rules or guidelines to make sure you’re providing adequate context without drowning readers in unnecessary or obscuratory detail. But here are a few simple starting points.

1. Know your audience. Not just who you think your audience might be, and how much they might know, but actually get granular here. I wrote about this in detail a while back, but studying and surveying your audience is necessary if you want to craft comms that resonate.

2. Use time-based context. This means zooming out to situate your subject within time. It often means presenting the past and/or the future to demonstrate how things have changed (or need to change) over time.

3. Use what I call pie-based context. This means showing how much of the whole something represents. It would be like Elon Musk, for example, jumping off the ketamine for a minute and tweeting that ‘feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the woodchipper’ represents less than 1% of federal government savings. You can think of pie in terms of the company (e.g. how does an investment figure compare with your total budget, or what percentage of your carbon footprint does your investment in carbon removals represent), or the global problem (e.g. how much of a dent does your contribution make, globally).

4. Use relevant benchmarks or baselines. Sometimes readers just need to understand where the bar is at before they can judge a result or statistic on its own merit. Consider reporting the average performance of your industry on a particular metric, or comparing your company’s performance to a broad baseline, like Hawaiian Electric does in this racial diversity comparison.

5. Explain or convert units. When using technical or scientific weights and measures, consider explaining unfamiliar ones or converting them (particularly large ones) into more tangible, everyday units. There’s so much room for creativity here. In Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, his ghostwriter Josh Daniels helps readers understand the cost of petrol by comparing it to buying bottles of soda.

Won’t adding context make it longer?

Yes, it will.

Aspiring writers are frequently (and uninspiringly) told to simplify, simplify, simplify. Good writing is supposed to materialize not by adding more things but by feverishly taking them away. But context is one of those things where, sometimes, more is actually more.

In William Zinsser’s four principles of good writing — clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity — clarity comes before simplicity and brevity. Meaning, something should be made longer only if it improves the reader’s understanding. Good context does this, so it should never be spared in the name of simplicity or brevity.

We live in an age where anything over 250 characters is considered long-form and writers are warned to make their content atomically small and comically dramatic in order to get readers to pay attention. The underlying assumption is that readers simply can’t stay focused for too long or pay attention to anything cognitively demanding.

But what about binge-watching the same Netflix show for hours on end, or staying up til 3 am going down internet-forum rabbit holes? What about listening to a two-hour podcast, or forgetting about dinner on the stove because of a captivating Substack essay, or sneak-reading Fifty Shades under your work desk because you’re hooked? (Meg and I are far too snobby to read something like this, but we’re told this was a thing.)

I think people are begging for something to pay attention to, and I think we underestimate our readers’ capacity to pay attention to something that is clear and compelling. Readers tune out when something is boring, and very often, something appears boring when we don’t understand its true significance, or we don’t understand it, period. Context can address both of those problems.

Don’t be afraid!

I want to end by acknowledging that, although avoiding context is a signature move for greenwashers, the reverse can often be true too. Impressive positive impacts and sizeable contributions can be under-appreciated if readers can’t place them in the right context. Unless you’re actively attempting to deceive, context is not something to be afraid of. It can actually make your sustainability story all the more powerful.

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