Articulate’s 2023 Net Zero review — our progress on ‘Net Zero by 2030’

Last year, we took a stand.

We said we were committed to achieving Net Zero by 2030, or sooner.

See, our commitment is to reduce our emissions and offset everything else as quickly as we can, because the journey matters just as much as the destination. The more we can do now, the better.

In the interest of full transparency — and to help other businesses on a similar journey — we’re here to update you on our progress so far.

Why it matters

As a reminder, Net Zero is the internationally agreed goal to mitigate global warming, a major contributor to climate change:

‘The January–September global surface temperature ranked highest in the 174-year record at 1.10°C above the 1901–2000 average of 14.1°C.’

— National Centers for Environmental Information

While 62 percent of people believe it is crucial that companies behave in a more sustainable and eco-friendly way, 83 percent of employees think their current employers are not doing enough to mitigate climate change.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28 as it is otherwise known) is around the corner. As such, the world is once again looking to leaders to make meaningful policy changes and to give decisive direction to organisations and communities to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, businesses cannot wait around for regulations to direct their sustainability initiatives. We need to be more proactive than that. That’s why Articulate, as a certified B Corp, has made our commitment to Net Zero.

Our starting point

While our commitment was formalised early last year, we’ve always been a fully digital, remote-working company. This has helped us to minimise our carbon footprint, with no commutes, no offices and no paperwork.

We first certified as a B Corp in 2018 and again in 2022, with all the exacting requirements for governance and sustainable practices that entails.

We partnered with Climate Impact for years for carbon offsetting, before our more recent partnership with Ecologi.

Still, we knew there was more we could do.

What we’ve done in the last year

Over the last year or so, we’ve ramped up our game considerably. As we just mentioned Ecologi, let’s start there.

Ecologi

We partnered with Ecologi to plant trees and offset CO2. (Incidentally, they also became a client of ours - a win-win!). Through this platform, we have so far planted more than 17 thousand trees and avoided 270 tonnes of carbon. That covers not only our running “costs” in terms of carbon footprint, but also all travel emissions, and emissions for every single employee at Articulate, several times over.

Plus, we set up a clever automation. When anyone fills in a form on our website, we plant a tree on their behalf. So thank you, anyone who has downloaded anything from our site or viewed a webinar. You’ve made the world a greener place.

Ecologi Zero

We’ve also begun measuring our progress to Net Zero through the Ecologi Zero platform. As we get more data, we hope to get a better picture of our impact and what we can do to be more sustainable over time.

As you can tell, we’re fans. We even participated in their 2023 World Earth Day video and marketing campaign, too:

DoNation

We participated in the B Corp Do Nation challenge, alongside company-favourite tea-brewers Pukka Herbs. (As Brits, tea is life.)

A bit of friendly rivalry had the team pumped up to pledge 38 carbon-saving lifestyle changes, offsetting the equivalent of four flights from Glasgow to Amsterdam in one month.

SDG lunch & learns

During our in-person company meeting (offset, of course!) in October 2022, we identified several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals that we felt we could contribute to as a company. We began our regular SDG lunch & learns from this shortlist, sharing resources and discussing things we could do to support these goals.

Several team members have taken action off the back of these awareness-raising talks. Some started volunteering, others donated to good causes and more made small changes like turning devices off instead of leaving them on standby. Not only that, but we’re all so much more informed about the issues, which in itself is incredibly valuable.

What’s next?

These are just the cliff notes. In the coming months, we will be publishing the full Articulate Marketing Impact Report on this page. It will be available in Spring 2024.

This report will detail information about everything Articulate has done so far to be more sustainable for the planet, but also for people — our employees, suppliers, partners, clients and community. It will provide information about our plans looking ahead. So keep an eye out for that.

In the meantime, we’ll leave you with these resources for a cleaner and greener way of doing business:

• The climate action plan for remote-working businesses
• Carbon neutral websites? 8 ways for marketing to help get to Net Zero
• 25 of our favourite environmental tech companies (on-demand webinar)

If you share our sustainability values and need some expert marketing support as a purposeful B2B tech firm, then get in touch with our sales team.