Beyond Carbon: Talking All Things ESG with Matt Grey

As we dive into the future of events, it's time to think beyond green. Matt Grey, Founder of event:decision, sat down with Broadsword to discuss sustainability in the events industry, talk about Event Decision's new holistic impact tool, and explore the broader impact of events including social engagement and local impact.

Matt is part of the team of EventProfs at event:decision  helping the event industry transform for a more sustainable future. Event:decision is the #1 in event sustainability audit & advisory and is working with global brands, agencies and venues to help event planners make better decisions in environmental sustainability, social engagement, governance processes (ESG & Responsible Business). 

Hope you enjoy this episode!

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Transcript

Christine (00:09.038)

Welcome to our podcast series created by us here at Broadsword called B. Listening. Today we are joined by Matt Gray, a part of the event profs team at Event Decision, helping the event industry transform for a more sustainable future. Welcome to the podcast, Matt. 

Matt

Thank you, Christine. It's lovely to be here. 

Christine

 What prompted you to found Event Decision? Was there a moment in your career where you felt a change was really needed for the industry?

Matt

Good question. There wasn't a blinding flash of white light in my head that sort of drew me towards creating a company to work in event sustainability. 

But I have 25 some -ish years of event agency experience from the doing and then into their talking and selling. And, like for many people, the early 2020s and the COVID word did result in a sudden change of employment status for me, like many of our industry. So at that time, I was able to catch up with some friends, some colleagues, and just find out what was missing. I didn't want to leave the events industry. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go straight back into another agency. And the result was the overall feeling of lack of measurement, full stop, not just in sustainability, but also that sort of year and a half, two years where the industry was in turmoil did lead and perhaps at Broadsword as well into many agencies and event brands looking at their sustainability position and their offering. And there certainly wasn't the ability to quantify some of that stuff. So that's what we did. 

Christine

Could you tell us how event decision supports planners to meet sustainability objectives?

Matt

 Yeah, of course. So in our mind, there's an awful lot of people in events and there's more and more people, growing number, very fast growing number of people in sustainability. And still, even now, there's very few people that actually sit in the middle of that. So yes, lots of agencies, lots of in -house teams, lots of suppliers have a kind of nominated sustainability person. But that person almost certainly will have a passion for sustainability, but may not have.

20 years of event experience, almost certainly won't have 20 years of sustainability experience. Those people are very few and far between. And hopefully we've got a couple of them on board at Event Decision. We help people to firstly understand what it means, and I'm sure we'll come to different elements of sustainability later on in this talk. But it still now, we're two and a half years old, nearly, Event Decision.

from one person a few years ago to 15 people now. And we're still spending a really large amount of time, and there's nothing wrong with this, in helping in -house teams, agencies, and suppliers understand what sustainability means. I think the first...

The first avenue that a lot of people go down, it means green. Everything has to be green. We can't do this, we can't do that. We can't be seen, which we will come back to optics, I'm sure. We can't be seen to be doing X, Y, and Z. And actually, the world continues to turn. Sustainability includes commerciality as well as environmental. So, as you all know, broadsword, you'll have...

a range of measures, policies and procedures to make sure that your business is still here in five, 10, 15 years time. And so should all event brands and so should all huge consumer brands. So there's just as much commerciality in there as well. It's now trying to fold in the environmental and social pieces because the poor event planning community has had so much to deal with. When I was doing it,

10, 15 years ago, there was a lot to think about. All the different contractors, supply chain, venue accessibility, or lesser accessibility back in the day. Usually, how smooth could we make it run? How slick could we make it appear? And how easy was the delegate journey?

Now we've got in -person versus hybrid versus virtual and all the sustainability stuff, not just carbon. So there's a huge amount for event planners to think about. And what we really try and do is quantify some of it, but really simplify and allow people to understand what are we doing? Is it doing good to humankind and the planet?

If it's doing less good to the planet, how can we make that even less? For whatever motivation you want, whether it's, you know, saving the planet one event at a time, or whether you want to win more business as an agency, that's your business. Our business is to help event planners by providing, and I hate to use the word data, but just some information and guidance on...

what really makes a difference and therefore show you how you can make a bigger difference. 

Christine

What do event planners find more difficult when trying to be more sustainable and what makes them kind of reluctant to sign up to measurement services? And an additional question, what attitudes are there in the industry to becoming more sustainable? 

Matt:

Wow, there's a lot in there, isn't there? There's a lot to unpack. I mean, firstly, don't think that you're going to...

Your attendees, your delegates, your guests, let's call guests a bit more personal. Your guests are not expecting you to solve the world's problems with your event. Don't think that you can deliver a global conference with zero impact. It doesn't happen. Even virtual has a fairly minor, but some impact. But what your guests are expecting you to do is to live up to your promises.

So if you plaster all over your website, all over your event collateral, that you're going to be doing this sustainably, they're going to want to see something that allows them to understand that they are attending a more sustainable event. You don't have to do, we'd love all events to be as sustainable as possible. I mean, it's a never ending journey, this stuff. But.

And there's a mixture, we'll come to the attitudes in a minute, but there's a mixture of attitudes and appetite for this stuff at the moment. And certainly in delivery, there's a huge range of outcomes. But event planners don't be frightened of just trying the next thing. If it feels right, it probably is. Manchester Central published a white paper just over a year ago about...

funnily enough, about their proposition in the sustainability space, but they followed it up with a second short white paper this February, February 24. And it stated that 71 % of event planners thought they were doing a more sustainable job a year on from the first white paper. You won't find a stat like that.

in automotive, in pharmaceutical, in mining, in tech, in anyone, any other major sector where you think some of those operators think that they're doing a more sustainable job. Our first question is, can you prove that? I mean, great, please do carry on doing everything you can, but actually shouldn't we as an industry be able to go, last year we did it like that, this year we're doing it like this, next year we plan to do it like the other.

And each one we can demonstrate how much better in terms of less environmental damage, fewer emissions, lower carbon footprint, but also, and I'm sure you're going to ask me about the social part of legacy or of delivery. Because in the big wide world where the boys and girls have slightly bigger budgets than we do in events, many more noughts on the end there. They do measure their sustainable performance and it does include their commercial performance, but it's shown in what we understand to be sustainability terms in a three -letter acronym, isn't everything? E, S and G, environment, social and governance. Let's hope we've got the governance piece sorted as an industry because we're all professional event planners.

the environmental piece, quite easy to quantify. It's your carbon footprint. And there's already a global standard unit of measurement, the tonne of carbon dioxide, CO2e. So everything's measured in TCO2e, that little handy five -word acronym. But the social part's much harder. And it's even newer than the environmental piece. So if you think back to your

at the beginning of your career in events, which is, I don't know, a few years. A few years. There probably wasn't a lot of emphasis. No. On an environmental piece. And we would just plan away to make it as simple and smooth as possible. That's what three, four, five years old, really as a mainstream piece of thought. The social piece, we'd say even newer than that. It's...

Probably only, certainly this year, there's a lot of talk about it. We're doing a lot of panels on legacy and social benefit of events. And we didn't do that many last year. And we did even fewer in 2021. So that seems to be an up and coming trend. Will they stick around? I hope so. I mean, the environmental piece has gone so far now that there is legislation. There's legislation active right now.

in the town, we're sitting in London under European law. And I know we're not part of the European Union, but actually broadsword won't be part of it. It's called CSRD, corporate social responsibility directive. And it means that you don't have to measure your scope three. I think you're planning on doing that. I know you are. So well done, but large entities as defined by the EU. So basically our big customers as an industry, they do have to now measure this stuff.

So legislation is coming, which means people are going to do more of it. So the appetite piece is an interesting one. The second part of your question. There's three reasons we think that people want to measure carbon footprints. Look at their environmental performance of events. The first one is commercial. You kind of have two clients are demanding it, whether that's because they're being legislated or because they want to be seen to be more sustainable.

I don't know as for them. But it means that you as an agency and other event professionals do start need to start taking account of environmental concerns. The second reason as I mentioned is legislation and it's at different stages across the world. So as we've just said, CSRD is active now in Europe. If you are a

Let's call you big client. If you're a big client and you operate in the UK and or the EU, you need to start measuring at least to understand whether your events are material. Do they matter enough to measure more in detail? That's active now. So you're going to have to report next year on this year's events. Okay.

And the implementation scale depends on the size of your company, but just Google CSRD Yeah, you'll see when in the States literally Where are we now April so last month? late March the Stock Exchange Commission SEC kind of kick the issue down the road a little bit The States is a slightly different beast to where we are in the UK and Europe they've got quite a big well as of we but

we think their election might affect global policy a bit more than our one. So they have decided not to force companies to measure scope threes quite yet, but have given fair notice that there is their intention to do that. So that's in the US. The needle in sustainability though, in events companies in the US is it's not just bouncing, it's just flying up. Again, in our first year of operation, nothing.

Now we spend, I think probably half of our top 10 customers are in the US now. So, and in Asia, it's a more tricky question because it's more disparate geographically, politically, religiously, all sorts of different ways. So it's probably harder to get a general consensus. But given most of our customers, either the agencies like yours or direct are global.

I think probably kind of parity of process will mean that wherever you are in the world, if you're planning events, you're going to need to look at your carbon footprints. So that's the E bit. We're going to be here all day, aren't we? Keep going. The S for social, I find fascinating and I know some of our team are really motivated to develop this side of our offering. So yes, we measure an awful lot of carbon footprints of events three times more than anyone else. Delighted to say. So we're probably the global leader in this stuff, which is fantastic. And testament really to the appetite as the word you use of the industry for this stuff, which is brilliant. And that's, we use a series of a suite of products called track. So that just measures footprints. We have recently introduced one. I don't know. You're probably not familiar with it yet. It's quite new. It's called impact. And it looks at the E and the S and the G of an event. If you're familiar with B Corp, you can think of it as a B Corp on an event rather than on a company. It's quick, it's easy. This isn't a sales op for us, but it's a really lovely tool and it's developing some quite cool industry data that we've just not had before. And to be able to report to a you or one of your customers to say,across your portfolio of events that you've put through this tool, we can then say, how are you performing? How well are you doing sustainability as an agency? How well are you delivering a corporate events program as an in -house team? And the preliminary data really, actually it's not that surprising, but if we were to mark E and S and G, each out of 10, say,Across the industry at the moment, and we're going to be publicizing this in a white paper later this month. So tada, newsflash. E for environment, round about six and a little bit out of 10. S for social, that's way down there at 3 .4 out of 10 on average. And the governance piece is north of seven, which we would expect it to be. So there immediately we've got a huge disparity between people who are delivering events with sustainability in mind, and then the social part. And I'm not using the words good or bad. They are what they are. The industry can't reinvent itself overnight. It's working really hard at it, but we're not going to be able to get everything at 10 out of 10 overnight. You probably don't remember, but in the 70s, the UK government introduced like seatbelt law.

You have to wear your seatbelt when you're driving your car. And so that really affected my parents because I'm of that age. It still took the government a whole generation to persuade people to wear a seatbelt with the really very obvious life and death benefits that that brings to you. A whole generation for something so simple and something so helpful.

So why are we expecting to have overnight a transformation of the events industry within three, four years? I don't know. But the appetite is there. It's demonstrated by our growth as event decision, by the appetite of BroadSword and other agencies and other suppliers to do events just a little bit better. So what do people find difficult?

First trick is to put your head above a parapet and be brave and to have a little measure, have a go. No one's going to criticize you for having a go. But there we have to split certainly the carbon pieces into two. And sadly, it's not as easy as one would wish because there's things that you can see like the optics of an event, no plastic bottles.

no single use plastic, perhaps not filling the menu full of red beef from Argentina or something like that. The fairly simple tactical things that you can, as a planner, you can influence them pretty easily, pretty simply. And then you've got the out of the room factors, the travel, the accommodation, transfers, things like that, which as a planner, we always say you can.

influence quite heavily but you may not be able to completely control like you could your menu for example and guess which one has the larger carbon footprint associated.

It's not the plastic bottles. So I mean, a long haul business class flight has this return long haul business class flight has the same carbon footprint as about 26 ,000 water bottles. So I think plastic in terms of emissions is not an issue. There's lots of reasons we don't like plastic and mostly that's where it ends up in the environment. But it's not to do with carbon because

If you're an event planner and you're looking at a conference or a product launch or any form of event, even the festivals who are quite good at their waste streaming, the easy bits to influence are the ones that people see and touch and taste. And sadly, they're not the ones with the very, very big carbon footprints. Those vectors sit outside the room in...

basically getting your people there and putting them up while they're there. So it's the moving of people that has the higher carbon footprint. And that has become very, very clear in reporting for the last two and a half years. Sadly, it's also an absolute mainstay of in -person events. But that's not an issue for you as an agency. It is an issue for our industry. How do we transition?

to a more sustainable future. Interestingly, we think there's an industry out there that's sort of done this already in terms of how it delivers product globally, massive products that still have a very, very high carbon footprint, but in the public's mind, they're doing quite a good job of becoming more sustainable, and that's the automotive industry.

There's still there were still plenty of cars on the road. And I walked here today. That doesn't seem to be an issue. Humans seem to demand cars. And there's a lot of people working very hard, obviously, to move us away from that, which we think is fantastic. But the automotive industry spotted decades ago that they were going to run into problems with their existing products. So what did they do? They develop new ones. It's taken a long time. And yes, there's different types of footprints for different types of vehicles and different types of engines. But there is now there an option for people who want to be seen to be sustainable in terms of electric vehicles and so forth. Are events going to be able to do something with a potentially more meaningful transition? I hope so. Does it mean we're just going to end up in virtual? I hope not. We saw what that was like three years ago.

And it wasn't very fun. 

Not very fun at all. I've answered all the questions. I'm sure there's lots more in there because it's a very, very wide topic

Christine

We can go more into the sustainability on the social impact side. So how can events be a force for good going forward in terms of sustainability, but also social impact? 

Matt

So that's, that's a really good question, Christine. As we said earlier, it's quite a new topic to us as event planners. That's all we are at Event Decision. We're a team of event planners from agencies, from brands, from marketing. But genuinely, this is the bit that kind of makes you feel good. Carbon footprints are one thing, but they're a bit clinical. It's a standard unit of measurement, and that's what makes it so effective. It's really easy to kind of quantify different impacts within an event's carbon footprint. The social side - much broader, many more grey areas, hugely emotive. And well, I'll give you an example. A client of ours in a financial brand, she does lots of head of events. She's a fantastic lady. She works really, really hard on her event sustainability, not just the footprints, which she does measure, but also the social side. And one of the areas she really cares about is not throwing food away, really simple premise. So she organizes, I think it's a dozen or so road shows twice a year all around the UK, so UK based brand, and they go and engage their audience, which is brokers. So they're traveling all around the country and they're doing all these road shows and it's anywhere between 50 and 500 brokers each. And so she's negotiating with the hotels around, you know, the room rates and the, you know, the higher rates and all their different inclusions, exclusions and cancellations and all that fun contract stuff. And then says, okay, so food, we're going to feed a hundred people. How much food is going to be left over? Oh, don't worry. They say, we're used to no show numbers. There won't be any food left over. There won't be any waste. And she didn't take many of the properties at their word. Well done, her.

In one of the events, which I think if I recall was in Liverpool back in 2020, end of 2022, the leftover food, they redistributed via third party and it fed 33 families, parents and children who would not have otherwise had a hot meal that night. Is that not quite a good thing? It cost virtually nothing and it fed 33 families with food that would otherwise have ended up in the bin. That sort of stuff actually is like, it gets you going. You think, why are we not doing that? We as an industry, why are we not doing more of this? The tools are generally there. The partners are generally there. If you're, if you're delivering events, um, in a, you know, um, a main city in this country, not for every hotel across the whole country, but.

There's people out there that need this stuff and we are creating it and throwing it away. So that's what drives us as a team to try and help event planners do that. It's not something that we're all familiar with doing. It's not always easy. Yes, there's liability issues, but you know, the third party is quite good at that now and they've got relevant policies. So it's not just food. It's your coffee.

It's so many different areas in, can you, it's possible to quantify the economic impact to a local area of holding your event there. It's possible to look at diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility for every single event. You should really be looking at wellbeing of your, not just your audience and your guests, your attendees, but also the delivery team.

We all know what it's like working on an event. It's not three hours in the afternoon, is it? So all these different things add up. You know, are you considering any United Nations sustainability goals known as SDGs? Are you identifying just one perhaps as part of your event to see if you can help? And they're quite broad. Air, sea, land, environment, climate, et cetera. You can just identify one and see if you can do something during your event that promotes.

that development goal. They can be human based, they can be environmentally based, they're all in there, just Google your own SDGs. You know, even something as simple as coffee, there's lots of suppliers, ethical suppliers that will happily come into your event and do the coffee break for you. There's supply side stuff. There's, I'm sure you use crewing companies, I won't put you on the spot. There's a crewing company out there called Connection Crew who, Yes, they will provide you with crew to move your flight boxes around and do the event basics around the infrastructure on price parity with other crewing companies across the country. So it doesn't cost anymore. And yet some of the crew that they supply almost certainly will be people that they have identified and helped into our industry who have been at risk of or experienced homelessness.

and it's helping them get back on their feet. And if it works, they then can work to train into being, um, audio or noise boys, I think they're called in the trade or, um, or lampies or slightly more specialized and skillful roles within production. And they will report to you how many hours of that type of help they, that you've managed to purchase over the year. It's good for you guys. It's good for your motivation, your loyalty, all those wonderful things that HR like to talk about. Um,

But it also is using your event to deliver some good at no cost. It's right there. You can do lots of these different things. All we're doing with our impact tool is saying how many of these are you doing in the environment, in social and in governance? And how many of these are you doing compared to the rest of the industry? So we're hoping that we will start, um,

a new industry standard and saying you can you can report across E and S and G and actually this event here that we've put through the impact tool performs above average across all three or exceptionally well because we tend to put people in quartiles or by the nature of average there will be some that are below average but you'll know where to look to bring it up whether it's in your environmental bits in your social pieces.

that's hope not the governance. And it will identify areas where others are doing more. It's up to you if you want to do it. But hopefully that will be a useful tool. And that's, there's a lot of work, there's a lot of thought going into, and often it ends up with the word legacy. What are you leaving behind after your event's done? Because it's, yes, your event has to address the...

The core ROI. Why are you getting people together to sell them stuff, teach them how to sell stuff, review stuff, give them a big whoop whoop, you know, for the year, whatever that piece is, you've got to do that given. But what else can you do that delivers a piece of good while you're there? We used to call it CSR, didn't we? Corporate Social Responsibility. And you would go out and clean a graveyard, which I think you're doing soon.

or paint a changing room. And these are brilliant projects, but they are just one part of the big puzzle of ESG. Yeah, it really does start with the smallest of things that can grow bigger and bigger as kind of time goes on and people realize, oh, this is good. Yeah. And I went to an event in Holland, end of last year, end of 2023. And there was an afternoon off where you could do something much like you're planning to do with BroadSword.

But one of the options was to go and do a beach clean. So a hundred of us popped out to the Dutch coast and picked up, and I can't remember how many bin bags and stuff, but a huge amount of litter, sadly, gladly and sadly. But it was like a team building event for us. It was brilliant. We got to talk in a completely wonderful environment about all sorts of stuff with all sorts of people that probably I wouldn't have if I was stuck in a plenary room with them. Yeah.

and yet do some goods. And it was fun. The weather was average, but that kind of like brought us all together more. So there are lots and lots of ways. Don't be frightened to take some of these on. There's even people who will identify projects for you to go and do. So there's no excuse really. You know, as brands out value each other, our values are this and we stand by that. And, you know, we will deliver X, Y and Z. They will start to expect their events to do the same.

Christine

As we've come to the end of our episode, what are some quick actionable tips event planners listening can be more sustainable at their next event? 

Matt

Again, very good question. We've just talked about the social side. Investigate it. If you want a free list of areas you should look at, I should point you at Event Decisions Impact Tool. It's all there with no commitment. It's free to look at what could or is being done by everyone else.

In terms of the carbon piece, you've just got to do the tactical, the optic bit as a matter of course now. So ideally, no single use plastic, no plastic bottles. Look at the materials that your supply chain are bringing on, make sure that it's all being streamed appropriately afterwards. Ideally, reused, if not recycled. That's a really succinct way to put an awful lot of work and that's the bit you need to do in the room.

Strategically, you've got to look at now why you're having the event, you've got your core objectives, but also where and how. So in carbon footprint terms, the single biggest piece of the puzzle is almost always delegate travel, attendee travel. Given that that's not going to disappear in the short term, The single biggest thing you can do is choose your destination and your venue carefully and try and ensure that the largest proportion of your audience can get there in the most sustainable way possible. That's the single biggest takeaway if you want to minimize your carbon footprint.