Environmental PR: Has Come of Age

Not long ago, companies engaging environmental PR activities would schedule a clean-up day in which its employees would volunteer to clean up a local area or, perhaps, plant trees or engage in some other civic-minded activity (of course, the media was invited out and the CEO would deliver some remarks). That typically represented the entire corporate commitment.

Of course that’s all changed given the importance of corporate stewardship and the environment, an area in which investors are scrutinizing companies’ track records prior to investing.

Today’s environmental PR professional must be skilled to deal with a wide range of options and with an increasing number of regulatory requirements within the environmental management. The environmental PR pro must also have the communication tools to handle environmental communication as a strategic process that relates corporate environmental objectives with the publics’ expectations.

There are many aspects of environmental PR that the practitioner must be skilled in, such as:

*Understanding scientific and technical elements related to the company and its products, so as to translate specific expressions into clear and comprehensive language for all publics;

*Getting employees, consumers, and the media to understand the meaning and the importance of the environmental PR activities undertaken by the company;

*Acting with the knowledge that the company’s environmental PR efforts being undertaken are somewhat risky, because knowing, evaluating and deciding on the basis of elements that may be viewed differently by the company’s various constituencies.

Journalists and other constituents can outline the environmental issues, and help define the environmental impact of enterprises’ policies and decisions. The environmental PR function must be capable of assessing the environmental impact and all related concerns defined by the actual values of the community within the given enterprise, product or service.

An environmental PR pro should be able to develop plans with the following components:

*An analysis of the impact of the company’s decisions and situations with respect to the environment, relating such impact to the internal and external publics;

*Providing information on the company’s measures adopted within the manufacturing process, the products and services;

*Defining and managing programs to develop environmental protection with educational objectives to demonstrate the company’s proactive role on environmental issues within the community;

*Producing reports on a timely basis in order to identify the trends on environment protection issues generated by groups and associations;

*Representing the company’s opinions and positions on issues having specific impact on the environment in the media and other places;

*Suggesting and adopting internal measures, involving employees and external staff in significant actions for the environment safeguard, such as, for example, materials recovering and recycling;

*Supporting the management and all company’s functions in their compliance with the environmental activities.

To handle these activities, the environmental PR professional must have a deep knowledge of all the company’s technical and production processes that may somehow be related to the environment protection issues, together with an appropriate information on all possible kinds of external publics and, mainly at local level, of associations, groups and, of course, the media.
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