Skip the Queue

Understanding Sustainability Reporting

Episode Summary

On today’s episode I’m joined by Polly Buckland the Owner Founder of The Typeface Group, a BCorp Communications Agency and Design studio based in Hampshire. The climate emergency is a subject that is gaining traction. The changes to our climate are palpable, and finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint and impact on the planet is front and centre for many people that visit attractions. People are making mindful decisions about where to spend their time and money, to have as little impact as possible – but at the same time people still want to enjoy experiences. There are many attractions that understand this and are working to reduce their impact, and communicate this clearly to potential guests. So I’m going to be talking to Polly about how you can measure, and communicate the sustainability of your attraction.

Episode Notes

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends on 8th May 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

 

Show references:

 

https://thetypefacegroup.co.uk/

www.linkedin.com/in/polly-buckland-69146a12

Download the latest Impact Report

Polly sat on the client side in a marketing manager role at BMW (UK) Ltd before co-founding The Typeface Group in 2010. She’s an ideas person, blending creativity and commercial awareness to get the best outcomes for our clients.

The Typeface Group is a B Corp Communications Agency + Design Studio based in North Hampshire. Their mission is to counteract digital chatter by championing authentic and strategic communication. Team TFG work with brilliant minds in business to extract, optimise and amplify their expertise, cutting through content clutter and stimulating sales
while reducing digital waste at all costs.  

The Typeface Group have been B Corp certified since October 2021 and is currently going through recertification. 

Nancy Hyne: True Horizon: https://truehorizon.co.uk/

Seismic Change: https://www.seismic-change.com/

 

Transcription: 

 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with Vista attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. 

On today’s episode I’m joined by Polly Buckland the Owner Founder of The Typeface Group a B Corp Communications Agency and Design studio based in Hampshire.

The climate emergency is a subject that is gaining traction.  The changes to our climate are palpable, and finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint and impact on the planet is front and centre for many people that visit attractions.  

People are making mindful decisions about where to spend their time and money, to have as little impact as possible – but at the same time people still want to enjoy experiences.  

There are many attractions that understand this and are working to reduce their impact, and communicate this clearly to potential guests.  So today I’m going to be talking to Polly about how you can measure, and communicate the sustainability of your attraction.

Paul Marden: Polly, welcome to the show.

Polly Buckland: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul Marden: Absolute pleasure. My first in the driver's seat all by myself. So it was important to me that this was going to be an interview with a friend so that I could ease myself into the hot seat of being the main host of Skip the Queue.

Polly Buckland: Happy to help.

Paul Marden: Thank you. Thank you for joining me. So regular listeners will know that we always start the podcast with a icebreaker question or two, which is always a surprise. So I picked out some lovely ones for you. Okay. These were ones that came from one of the podcast alumni last week, Ross Ballinger from Drayton Manor. So these were ones that he prepared. So he said, “If you could master one new skill instantly, what would it be and why?”

Polly Buckland: Being able to focus one thing at a time, because I don't know what that feels like.

Paul Marden: Does any agency owner know that? I mean, I think that is kind of a skill for agency owners to be able to focus on 16 things concurrently.

Polly Buckland: No, I’m not sure. Yeah. I feel like it would be a superpower to just really focus in on just that one thing.

Paul Marden: It's interesting, isn't it, because different people behave in different ways. So some people just hyper focus, don't they? Right down into the cornflakes. I can't do that at all. I'm like, just give me the headlines and I'll focus on the six things concurrently, rather than write down deep.

Polly Buckland: Indeed. Lots of tabs open.

Paul Marden: Oh, yeah, completely. All right, so my next one then. If you could live in any period of history, what would it be?

Polly Buckland: Well, my mum told me recently that we descend from Vikings in our family. So maybe I'd go Viking. Maybe I'll go that era.

Paul Marden: That's taking it right back, isn't it? That's good.

Polly Buckland: Or all the 60’s, 70’s, because my mum also went to the Isle of Wight festival when Hendrix was there, and that sounds like it was fun.

Paul Marden: I think if I had to choose between those two, I'd probably go for 60’s or 70’s.

Polly Buckland: Life might have been harder as a Viking.

Paul Marden: I think it could have been quite a lot harder as a Viking. We went to Wealden Downland Museum a couple of weeks ago, and you could see the history of all of the different buildings and places that people lived. Yeah, no, I'll take central heating, please. Central heating and somewhere to cook your dinner. Don't really want to go back to just everybody sitting around a fire trying to. Trying to cook off a fire and live in the same space. That doesn't sound too fun for me.

Polly Buckland: No. Maybe I was hasty. Yeah. Let's go to the Isle of Wight festival and watch the doors.

Paul Marden: Sounds pretty cool to me. All right then, Polly. So the other thing that we always ask people is, what is their unpopular opinion? So tell me, what's yours?

Polly Buckland: I don't like ABBA. 

Paul Marden: Really?

Polly Buckland: Quiet, full stop. Well, just so overplayed. It makes me sulk a little bit if I'm dancing and someone puts an ABBA track on.

Paul Marden: Which is quite often, isn't it, really?

Polly Buckland: It's too often.

Paul Marden: So you're not too interested in watching some musicals with some ABBA soundtrack in it? That's. That's not going to light your fire?

Polly Buckland: My kids like watching the Mamma Mia films. They're okay. I like Meryl Streep, but.

Paul Marden: Not so much the music.

Polly Buckland: No. And I love musicals, but, yeah, not ABBA.

Paul Marden: So next wedding you go to, better make sure that they don't have ABBA on the soundtrack and ruin the end of the evening for you.

Polly Buckland: Yeah.

Paul Marden: Okay. So, Polly, thank you. We are going to talk about sustainability reporting because this is something that you do in your business. Yeah. But it's also something that you do helping other organisations with their sustainability reporting, isn't it? So really, I just wanted to start right back at the beginning. For people that have never done this before that heard the term bandied around, what does it actually mean to be doing sustainability reporting within an organisation?

Polly Buckland: Well, it depends what framework you choose to report by and what's most suitable for your business. And there are many excellent sustainability consultancies out there that can help you kind of decide which road to go down. But for me, regardless of what framework you choose to work by, sustainability reporting is important because you can't improve what you don't measure. 

Polly Buckland: And in order to move forward as a more sustainable business, you also need to bring your team on board, your customers on board, and you're kind of missing the most important communication tool if you haven't galvanised your mission and your targets into a report. So, yeah, it's really important, regardless of where you are in your journey, regardless of whether it's a legal requirement for your business or not, to actually get your goals down in black and white and start communicating them.

Paul Marden: So there's something you touched on there about it being a legal requirement for some people. So is it's mandatory for some sorts of organisations, is it? And then is it an optional for others?

Polly Buckland: Yeah. So quoted companies, LLPs, large businesses, there's kind of thresholds of energy usage and turnover that will define whether you are legally required to report or not. All B Corps have an obligation to produce annual impact report. And that's kind of how we started putting our annual reports together since our accreditation three and a bit years ago.

Paul Marden: Wow. Okay. So if you don't have to do it, if it's not a legal requirement for you to do it, why would you do it? It sounds like, not having done this before myself, it feels like it could be quite a lot of work. So is there a business benefit to producing this?

Polly Buckland: It is quite a lot of work. It's definitely not a tick box exercise. There's buckets of research out there as to the relationship between consumer behaviour and sustainability. So McKinsey did a study. 60% of customers actively prioritise purchasing from sustainable businesses. Capgemini, 77% of customers buy from and remain loyal to brands that show their social responsibility. 

Polly Buckland: That I could literally keep quoting stats as to why businesses should take their sustainability goals very seriously and the communication of their sustainability initiatives very seriously, because it's becoming clearer. There was another stat about primarily women making the decisions based on sustainability of a business, and millennials and Gen Z being sort of high up the list of people that are taking sustainability creds into consideration when they're making a purchase.

Polly Buckland: So, I mean, it's a barrel load of stats that suggest if you don't have your eye on sustainability reporting and communicating your sustainability goals, you perhaps should have.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So thinking about our listeners and sorts of people that listen to the podcast, we've got attractions. And, you know, when we as an agency going and talking to people, we're talking about the audience. Who is it that's actually going to be buying from an attraction? Those are key demographics that you're talking about and making buying decisions off the basis of sustainability reporting and sustainability an overlap of what they want and what the organisation is offering. That's a key buying decision for people that are making decisions about where do they go at the weekend with their family. Could be off the back of those sustainability goals themselves, couldn't they?

Polly Buckland: 100%. And actually, if you think of the little people that are going to these attractions, I know my daughter is in junior school at the moment, and they've done, it's part of the curriculum now. So she's coming home and talking to me about plastics in the ocean and looking at signage and looking at labels on fair trade, that there are little people out there that are looking for these messages now. Yeah, it's important to them. I even noticed the other day a new Sainsbury's opened near where we are, and there is an abundance of sustainability messaging throughout the shop.

Paul Marden: Oh, really?

Polly Buckland: Yeah. So I think people are switching on to the fact that consumers want to see this stuff.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So the other group of people that listening to us are people that working with attractions. And I guess if you're doing sustainability reporting, does that also look at the supply chain? So the people that you buy from, you need to be buying from people that are also thinking about sustainability. So for agencies like us or other people that are servicing the attraction sector, for those attractions that are interested in sustainability reporting, they're going to look to that, to their suppliers to also care about those sorts of things.

Polly Buckland: Yeah, 100%. So doing your due diligence with your supply chain is a big part of what you claim to be as a business. We've just supported one of our clients with the design of their GRI reporting. And as part of that, as one of their suppliers, we had to write a statement to go into that GRI report. So, yeah, supplier due diligence is massive, and I think it would only help you as an agency or as a supplier into these big attractions to not only do the sustainability reporting get the accreditation with whatever framework that works for you, but communicate it to your prospects and customers as well.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So you're talking a little bit about frameworks, and you've talked about different types of sustainability report. Is there some kind of standardisation to this? You know, accountants have standards by which they do their financial reporting. Is that the same sort of thing happening in sustainability space?

Polly Buckland: There are just a number of frameworks you can report by. So if you are one of those larger businesses that we spoke about previously, there are SECR regulations that you need to be compliant for. There are reporting frameworks, as I mentioned, like GRI. There's the ISO accreditation, there's B Corp and our sustainability consultant that we use, Nancy Hine from True Horizon, based down in the New Forest. She very often says it's a case of choosing the framework that's right for you and what you're hoping to achieve as a business. So went down the B Corp route because that's suitable for us. One of our clients, as I said, has just gone down the GRI route. So there isn't one size fits all.

Polly Buckland: And there are a lot of consultancies out there, like Seismic Change, for example, that can support using whichever framework is most kind of commercially viable for you and where you're looking to go as a business, but keeping that credibility through the reporting.

Paul Marden: So getting some advice and guidance from some of the experts to help you pick makes a lot of sense then, I guess.

Polly Buckland: 100%. 

Paul Marden: We've talked a little bit about the frameworks. Now you might need somebody to help you with those frameworks, but let's just take it right back to basics. We need to talk a little bit about the sustainability report itself. How do you go about actually gathering all the data and being able to report on the numbers themselves?

Polly Buckland: Yeah, so like us, when we started, weren't really affiliated with any framework. And actually we started by just getting an environmental audit of our business because were interested in how we fared. And that's really how were then introduced into the world of B Corp. But at a basic level, I would split impact reporting into the story and what makes you different as a business and where you've been, where you are, where you want to go, what your commitments are and the data which would be your scope one, two and three emissions. 

Polly Buckland: So your scope one emissions, they include all direct emissions from the activities of your business. So that might include any company owned facilities or vehicles. Scope two emissions cover indirect emissions from electricity, heat, cooling that are used by the organisation. And then scope three is pretty much where everything else sits. So for us, a fully remote business, the majority of our emissions sit in scope three, and we are granular to the point where we know the majority of our emissions come from our coffee habit. 

Polly Buckland: And that is. That is fact. So once you get a basic understanding of what your scope one, two and three emissions are, there's so much training you can do as a business, whether it's through carbon literacy or you can find consultants to come in and do one one training. What I found was really important is getting the whole team involved in that training.

Polly Buckland: So everyone has a basic understanding of what we're measuring when we're saying scope one, scope two, or scope three, what we mean and what's included within those scopes so people can start to be mindful about waste. So understanding the emissions is important, but tracking your emissions as a business is really important. And we use a business called Compare Your Footprint. And it's basically an engine that you put your data into and it tells you what your carbon footprint is.

Paul Marden: And it's doing that across all of those three different scopes of emissions that you're able to put your data in. Because obviously that's going to really vary by types of organisation, isn't it? Because if you're running a big attraction, then you're going to be, you know, that's a big physical space, isn't it? So you're going to be consuming lots of electricity to be able to power that thing, and probably gas as well to be able to heat it. But, you know, there's ways of mitigating that. But your focus might be different than you are if you're a virtual organisation like us where you know you, a lot of it is very indirect, that kind of scope three type stuff.

Polly Buckland: Exactly. And I guess it's important to differentiate at this point the difference between carbon neutrality and net zero. So there are lots of businesses that will claim carbon neutrality and what that means is they've calculated their scope one and two emissions and have offset those emissions. You don't have to have any reduction plan in place for those emissions and you can offset them and claim carbon neutrality. So on one hand, at least, scope one and two emissions are being measured. However, we could, I could easily do that as a business and pay 30 quid in offsets and claim carbon neutrality knowing that I have tons of emissions sat in my scope 3, whereas net zero, you have to get your baseline of emissions, then you have to reduce them by 90%, I believe it is, and then offset the rest.

Polly Buckland: So there's a world of difference between claiming carbon neutrality and net zero and there's most people, if not everyone really is in between and doing the work. I digress going back to that very first impact report, getting a handle on your emissions. In our first impact reports, we said we've done scope one and two, we haven't done scope three yet, so being really transparent because you've got to start somewhere. And actually, we included in our Impact Report because weren't governed, it didn't have to be compliant in the way that a GRI report might be. 

Polly Buckland: So we're slightly more free with what we include. We really told a story through ours on what we set out to do, what we did towards that, what worked, what didn't work. Then our data and data visualisation around our scope one, two and three emissions. And then actually the biggest part of our first ever impact report was the to do list for the coming year.

Paul Marden: Oh, really?

Polly Buckland: What we wanted to focus on. Yeah. And actually the beauty of an impact report like that for us is, A, we get really good feedback because people love the storytelling aspect of it. But B, I'm just doing my third impact report now for us, and I go back to last year and say what we said were going to do, and I have a double page spread with what we said were going to do, what we actually did. So it's a really great accountability tool, as well as a way to tell the story of your sustainability progress.

Paul Marden: Yeah. It holds you accountable for setting a plan and then measuring how well you completed against that plan. And I'm guessing that varies. Some things you will have done really well on some things you didn't progress on, and there'll be some things that you do that you hadn't necessarily thought about as well.

Polly Buckland:  Yeah, yeah. And there are some targets in there, like revenue from purpose driven businesses. I think year one were at 30% and we said we wanted to get to 40%, and then we said we wanted to get to 50%. And I think we're at about 54% at the moment. So putting those targets in place really helps give you that focus throughout the year in some of the decisions you make as a business.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.

Polly Buckland: It helps you grow internally as well as provides a vehicle for communicating something that's actually very important to a lot of people that are choosing your product or service.

Paul Marden: You touched on the storytelling element of this. When I think about sustainability reporting myself, I guess I started from a point of view of, and this might because I'm a data geek, but I started from thinking there's a huge amount of data involved in this, you're going to have to gather lots, but equally important to you is the storytelling around it. So are you thinking about that in advance, about the narrative of where you want to take the business over the year ahead. And how are you thinking about that? Is that something that you get the whole team involved in?

Polly Buckland: So throughout the year, we have a slide deck open and it's called our Sustainability scrapbook. And any decisions we make or anything that we do mindfully around the sustainability of the business, anyone can chuck into that deck. It doesn't look pretty, but it's just a repository. Show us putting our money where our mouth is and making decisions that might not directly impact our scope, but could have a real social impact, for example. So we use that Sustainability scrapbook to help build up the story in our impact report for the following year. I think businesses are going through a lot of change at the moment, and there might quite naturally be a theme that pops up when you're starting your impact report journey for the year. So last year, for us, it was educating ourselves and other people.

Polly Buckland: So we'd done a lot of training internally, but we'd also created our digital cleanup challenge to help people understand their digital footprint. So that became the thread that worked its way through our impact report last year. This year, we have defined down our services. So our impact report is about kind of slaying in your own lane and being really clear on what it is that you do to reduce waste. Yet naturally, if the people that are writing and communicating your impact report are close to the decision making, you'll probably quite naturally know where your report is going to go in that any one year. If you outsource it, so we support businesses to help them tell their story through their impact report. We interview the key decision makers in the business and we will really draw from them that narrative.

Polly Buckland: And I think it's really easy to get bogged down in the data. It's incredibly important, but it can be quite stressful gathering that all together. So actually having someone interview you about, but what were the things that you loved? What were the things that you saw people coming into your attraction really engage with? What was the thing that surprised you about signage that you put up to do with sustainability? Or, I don't know, when you get the little activity sheets for the kids, what did the younger visitors engage with the most? Asking them that sort of question will really draw out the story to help bring the impact report to life.

Paul Marden: Yeah, and I love the scrapbook idea. I love the scrapbook idea just more broadly as just a place for the whole team to dump their thoughts about doing different things. So having one all about sustainability. It must capture so much that the more senior people, the people that lead the organisation, they may not see some of the smaller stuff going on, and they're. They could be really powerful stories. So it kind of makes it much more democratic across the team, doesn't it? To have a place where everyone can put their thoughts about sustainability and record the little things that they're doing. And then you can draw those stories out later on.

Polly Buckland: 100%. But you can use those stories to engage your customers as well. I've been on a couple of panels, the B Corp type events, and I've sat alongside a lady called Faye, who owns Beevive, which are the little vials that revive bees. I think they're in the Natural History Museum shop, and they're not B Corp yet, but they are a manufacturer. So their raw materials, their packaging, the mileage, their distribution, everything has to be considered. And what Faye and her team are excellent at is documenting all of that. And it's like we said one of the panels, just because you don't wear your Fitbit doesn't mean you haven't done the steps. And I think it is the same with sustainability accreditations. You might not be ready to be B Corp. You might not be ready to go through an ISO accreditation or GRI reporting.

Polly Buckland: You might not be ready to be B Corp. You might not be ready to go through an ISO accreditation or GRI reporting. You might not be legally required to do any of that. But let's start documenting it because people care. And you could run one initiative at your attraction, and that's you off the mark. You've started your sustainability story, and I think that should be documented and that should be shared with your audiences.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So that story that you can tell, I guess, is kind of reusable, isn't it? Because it's not just about, you know, you start off thinking about sustainability reporting. I'm going to have annual report and I'm going to publish it. But this is a story that can thread through everything, I guess.

Polly Buckland: Yeah, 100%. I think this is the same with all content produced across most businesses, to be honest. Lots and lots of hours go into creating something, and then it gets shared once on LinkedIn or there's a paid Facebook campaign, and then it dies a death. I saw someone on LinkedIn the other day, say, for every hour you take to produce a piece of content, you should spend the same amount of time distributing it. And I think that sustainability reports, impact reports, can take weeks, if not months. So as part of your reporting, I would have a distribution strategy as well. So where are all the places that you can get people to engage with that report? Is there a QR code in the cafe at your attraction where it's like, do you want to have a look at what we're doing for sustainability?

Polly Buckland: Is it an email that goes through to all your members? I would imagine that investors want to see this type of information. I would imagine that it would be really important to go onto the bottom of job descriptions when you're recruiting because there is a huge influx of people out there in the market that want to work for purposeful businesses. So this impact or sustainability report should go everywhere, really, in the footer of your emails. You just want to get eyeballs on it. And of course you can break it down. Kew Gardens have got a really great video on YouTube about their sustainability mission. What I would say is, don't hide it. And I think previously, sustainability reporting sits with other financial reports and policies in the footer of a website.

Polly Buckland: I looked earlier at an attraction that me and my family love going to, and they have some really nice bits of sustainability messaging when you're there. I couldn't find their sustainability report on their website. It was kind of the group website and then it was hidden away in a sub sustainability page. And I think transparency is really important. And bringing your sustainability report to the conversation, not hiding it away once you spent all those hours creating it.

Paul Marden: Yeah, there was a. There's an attraction that we visited just recently that were talking to, and they've got biomass boiler on their site, and they coppice wood from the site and they use that coppiced wood then to power the biomass boiler, which then powers the hot water that people are sitting in hot tubs and enjoying. You know, there's a really powerful story to tell there about the sustainability of going to that place. And that's something that they recognise is not something that they're not telling that story very effectively. And I think for a lot of people in the UK, now they're making decisions about what they do for their long weekends or their holidays, even on the basis of trying to have a minimal impact.

Paul Marden: And if you've lost that story, even, you know, even the people that are doing lots of amazing work may not be spotting the opportunities to tell the story of what they're doing to be heard by those people that make the decisions.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. And I think that they're photo opportunities as well. Right. So if you're in a hot tub and there's a little sign saying this is powered by wood from the estate, that's a little Instagram opportunity for those people to be righteous about the choices they've made, about what attraction they've chosen to go to. So I think more and more there's an opportunity for user generated content with sustainability messaging on site. So, yeah, everything's really an opportunity to share that message and it shouldn't be just contained to the impact report.

Paul Marden: I was at the Natural History Museum last week with my daughter's class. I took the class, I was one of the responsible adults going along with them. And I had 15 10 year olds in the gift shop at the end. And of course I'm just stood there like a numpty in the middle, just watching them all, trying to make sure they would make a decision as quickly as they possibly could. And I did find myself looking at the signage that was in the shop and they were talking about their sustainability journey and how they reduced single use plastics from what they were doing and they tried to improve the sustainability of the gifts that were available in the shop. So those messages are there, but are they consistent? Are they shared everywhere?

Paul Marden: So that wherever people are touching that brand, is it available for them to understand that it's a sustainable brand? It's important, isn't it?

Polly Buckland: Yeah.

Paul Marden: So I think you've touched on this, but let's just. Is this something you would do on your own or is this something where you would get in help from experts to get you started?

Polly Buckland: I would get help because you've got to factor in the hours in your day as having a value. So the length of time it would take you to figure out how to do an audit on your business and to work out your starting point and to get your initial scope one, two and three emissions measured is probably going to take you three or four times as long as it would a consultant. So if you can, I would do that. If you can't, there are some great tools out there I mentioned Compare Your Footprint and their customer service is really excellent. So if you want to start simple, you can. But if you have the budget, I would go with a consultant because you'll get to where you want to go, which is ultimately to find your baseline quicker.

Paul Marden: Yeah. Is this something where you start small and get a consultant in maybe to help you with a small part of the organisation? Or is this something where you really want to be throwing your all into this to try to do everything that is kind of best practice all at once?

Polly Buckland: Oh, no. No one's perfect. So don't hold yourself to that standard because it's just going to stop you doing anything out of fear. I think you just need to get started. That said, hitting publish on my first ever impact report was one of the most stressful things I've ever done because I just felt like I was going to be judged.

Paul Marden: I think that worries me as well, is that thought that unless I do a perfect job, there's a risk that when I put this out there, that I'm going to be accused of greenwashing, and that my intent may not be well understood if I don't do it perfectly first time.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. Which is why, again, that storytelling part of the impact reporting is really important for me, because I will say we are not perfect. These are the things that we know we need to work on, but these are the things we've done better. And that's what I really like. The B Corp BIA assessment and their framework is because it takes you across five categories of measurement, and no one's perfect in any of them, but what it does do is it provides a framework for you to better and measure yourself against. Yeah, I think the messaging behind your sustainability is really important. If you're professing to be perfect and you're not, you will get stung, because I think people can see through that.

Polly Buckland: But if you are showing that you're trying to better, I don't think many people could argue with that. So it's not just environmental reporting from a B Corp standpoint, it takes you across governance, workers, community, the environment, and your customers. There is a real breadth to that framework. So, actually, on our first go at certification, I guess our strongest category was governance.

Paul Marden: Oh, really? Okay.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. And then you have three years to make changes, make improvements. It's a continuous improvement journey, for want of a better word. And we're just about to re accredit. We're going through re accreditation now after three years, and you can see significant improvement across those categories.

Paul Marden: So that B Corp framework, that's going to be relevant to quite a lot of attractions that are profit making organisations. But of course, people like our charity based museums and some of the cultural organisations that could be non profit making. The B Corp route might not work for them, but it's something that quite a lot of consumers recognise now, isn't it?

Polly Buckland: It is. And the B impact assessment tool is still a useful framework, regardless if you want to become accredited or not, because it takes you through the five categories to focus on. And actually, I think if you're starting your impact reporting and you're not sure where to begin, it's a really nice framework to use.

Paul Marden: Lovely. Polly, really interesting talking to you about sustainability reporting and then going off and talking a little bit about B Corp and places like that as well. It's been lovely. We always ask our guests to leave us with a book recommendation, something they love, or it can be anything, a personal book recommendation, a business book. So what have you brought with you today?

Polly Buckland: I absolutely love Manifest by Roxy Nafousi, 7 steps to living your best life. It's not a book about visualise it and it will happen. It's a book that takes you through the steps to improve your chances of achieving what you want to in life. It takes you through your vision, removing fear and doubt, how you can align your behaviour to get what you want, how you can overcome tests from the universe, how you can embrace gratitude, turn envy into inspiration and trust the universe. So it sounds a bit woo, but everyone that I know that's read it absolutely loves it.

Paul Marden: What a lovely recommendation, Polly. Thank you. So that will go onto our list of the books recommended by our guests, which are blog posts that we've got. And as ever, if you want to win the book, if you head over to X and you retweet the episode announcement with the words I want Polly's book, the first person that does that will get the book sent to them. Once again, thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast and talking to me about sustainability reporting. It's been lovely. Thank you.

Polly Buckland: You're welcome. Thank you.

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

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