Following its acquisition by Thomson Reuters in October 2019, Ethical Corporation, the world’s leading sustainable business event series and publication, is making its incredible insights and analysis collections available for free in a new industry intelligence hub.

The acquisition combines Reuters’ globally trusted news brand, scale and editorial excellence with Ethical Corporation’s deep expertise in highly specialized events and content production for key decision makers right across the sustainability industry.

In this Q&A, Brenda Staines, project director of the new content platform, explains how the newly launched Insight Hub fits into Ethical Corporation’s long-term vision for the sustainability industry.

Brenda Staines, project director Ethical Corporation by Reuters Events
 

What role does Ethical Corporation play in the sustainability Industry and what business intelligence does it provide?

In short, Ethical Corporation provides business insights and analysis to the whole sustainable business industry. Though we're most known for doing that through our events and magazine, we also produce a great swathe of business intelligence in conjunction with these events to engage our global audience in the run up to every conference.

Historically, we’ve done this through free to download whitepapers and reports but have increasingly looked to webinars where key decision makers and influential stakeholders can share best practice in their industry directly with the market between events as well.  And in 2020, as part of our Virtual-First strategy, we will be running several free-to-attend Virtual Weeks tackling the key issues and opportunities currently faced by our community

How does the Ethical Corporation Insight Hub create new value for sustainability professionals on top of the services and events Ethical Corporation already provides?

As mentioned earlier, we’d traditionally release major content and webinars in advance of our events, but these would only be marketed for a short time. The Insight Hub doesn’t just give us an opportunity, for the first time, to house all this industry leading content in one place, it also gives us the scope, resources and platform to create, commission and curate a far broader collection of business-critical intelligence than ever before.

As with our events, the Insight Hub will serve the full value chain of job roles and disciplines contained within the sustainable business industry. No matter whether you’re involved in sustainability, purpose-driven communications, ESG investment, net-zero energy or responsible procurement we can now house a far greater library of content than has previously been possible.

We’re lucky to have a unique legacy of creating platforms that bring the sustainability industry’s biggest and most influential names together to share their expertise, so it’s exciting to be able to offer this digitally through the hub in addition to our leading conferences and exhibitions.

That’s why we hope this Insight Hub will become a valuable tool used by business professionals globally to discover the latest trends before they happen, work with our network of experts to uncover solutions before they’re needed and unlock the full potential of their business units no matter which market they operate in.

In turn, we also hope to act as a catalyst for businesses and professionals looking to make the leap into sharing insights of their own; whether they can share new technology use cases, perspectives on trends, valuable data sets or industry initiatives from net zero targets to ESG materiality – you can see that it’s a really wide reaching and exciting project to launch!

Why is Ethical Corporation by Reuters Events offering this new service?

It’s clear that insights, data and reliable information are more important to decision making than ever before, and while we have facilitated knowledge exchange chiefly through our conferences in the past, we cannot be ignorant to the fact that conference attendance can’t always be possible for all attendees – the current COVID-19 crisis is perhaps a more extreme example of this than we could have anticipated but helps serve the value of digital knowledge sharing.

Our strengths have always been in unlocking the world’s most influential decision makers and being the vehicle for them to deliver new insights and business critical intelligence to the masses. As a result, it is quite natural for us to be looking for new opportunities to share this treasure trove of insights and increase engagement amongst our audiences while we continue to grow.

As I have said before, we now have the platform to do this, to share industry leading insights and deploy our networks to achieve this. It’s just that now really couldn’t be a better time to launch this platform and ensure that our readers can access critical insights that can help them optimize processes, workflows and systems in what is now a time of increased uncertainty and pressure to produce. 

Does this mean that people are turning away from events?

No not at all, as we all know there's nothing as good as face to face networking. However, we can’t ignore the fact that large gatherings aren’t a priority right now - that’s why we will look to ensure that our network can still access business critical insights in the interim.

Event attendance, whether at events as large as the Responsible Business Summit Europe – Europe’s #1 sustainability and ESG conference– or Responsible Business New York will continue to be the destination events for the face-to-face best practice sharing and networking upon which our industry relies to grow, thrive and exceed expectations.

What kind of audience does Ethical Corporation serve and how engaged is its audience to digital content?

All our in-depth analysis pieces, reports and articles are research focused and look to understand what senior level executives in the sustainability industry need to know about right now to make better informed decisions.

Our current network stands at around 100,000+  global business professionals, but we can actually double that reach to 250,000+ once we consider our ability to leverage multiple mainstream and niche industry channels to get all our content out and visible to the downstream industry as a whole.

We’ve always looked to develop close relationships and partnerships with the principal associations, magazines and trade publications that serve each sub-market of the sustainability industry no matter if we’re talking circular economy, supply chain & operations, ESG investments, business development, human rights or environmental impact. 

It’s through leveraging these relationships that we’re able to penetrate our insights far deeper into companies and professional networks than has previously been possible in the business market.

Add to this the fact that we’re very digitally apt, possess an engaged social media following and have been very successful at engaging people that are hungry to learn, it’s a good time to be launching as platform such as our new Insights Hub.

What do people need to do to access the hub? What does it cost?

Sure, it's really easy. All you have to do is visit our website, which is https://events.ethicalcorp.com/content/, and find the Insight Hub tab where all our content is hosted for free – it really is that simple!

What are some of the main trends that we are seeing having an impact across the sustainability industry?

Before COVID-19. This 2020 was supposed to be the “decade of action” where it was thought to be a year in which governments and businesses across the world would take action to reduce their environmental and social impact. However, many projects had to be put on hold to give priority to the health and safety of people.

In our latest research in the face of the COVID-19 challenge, we’re seeing leaders taking this crisis as an opportunity to rethink and change the way we operate; from the way we work to the way we consume products. They are seeing the rare situation as a potential catalyst to transform the global economy and come back cleaner and stronger. There’s growing momentum behind the term #BuildBackBetter

A recurrent question is whether the pandemic will flatten the curve of climate change by speeding the energy transition? With airplanes on the ground and millions od people working from home, global carbon emissions seem to drop. China’s emissions look to have been temporarily slashed by 25% in the first four weeks after the Chinese New Year, compared with the same time last year. There is a strong call to governments to be firm and demand more clean energy reviewing the real cost on fossil fuels and set a price on carbon.

Civil society organisations and trade unions are calling on brands, governments and suppliers to urgently mitigate the health and economic impacts of the crisis on garment worker, millions of people workers have lost their jobs across the globe. Companies need to collaborate closely with their suppliers to reduce negative impacts and consider shortening payment times and other measures to ease the financial burden. The response companies must have in consideration, that the way the respond to this crisis is the way they will build trust and legitimacy in the next years to come. Companies that have stood by their supply chains, repurposed their production for societal need and furloughed their workforces on near full, will expect to see a better acceptance from the stakeholders and the public.

As you can see, businesses and leaders are being viewed under magnifying glasses and will be held accountable for their responses to the crisis proving their resilience and innovation.

Are there any examples of content currently available through the Insight Hub or soon to be available that kind of touch on these trends?

I'm glad you asked! There is so much content on our Insight Hub; we have our recent magazine issue that delves into the impact of Covid-19 on sustainable business and asks whether we can build back better.

We also have more specific content such as our responsible business week, and our virtual weeks series  where we tackle the main trends and issues in the sustainability industry.

These are just a few of the major content pieces available, for free, that users can already access with much more on the way.

What if I wanted to create content with Ethical Corporation for its audience, what should I do?

The best and simplest thing to do is to reach out to our team which is at our email at content@ethicalcorp.com and let us know what you're thinking. We can then work with you to advise which products would be the best fit for getting your message and insights out to our global business community.

We do the hard work and get your insights and technical knowhow in front of the professionals and decision makers that you need to be successful, and it all starts with just an email to the address above.

To achieve this, we have to be very dynamic in terms of the products that we deliver. It might be that a report is the best option, or a webinar but whether we decide to commission or collaborate on a whitepaper, interview, podcast, video or anything else. You name it, if the content itself is high quality we will go the extra mile to ensure that your message gets through to the people that matter most.

What kind of return on investment will I see on working with Ethical Corporation? What kinds of leads have been generated before?

The return on investment really depends on what you’re looking for, we take a very qualitative over quantitative approach.

This means if success for you is getting your content in front of fifty spot-on people then we’ll target them directly and use these lead generation metrics to measure success.

Conversely, if you’re looking for as broad exposure as possible to niche markets, say Implementation of circular economy in the supply chain or  ESG investment in Europe, we’ll work with all our best-fit partners to see that your content is front and centre in their minds.

The Insight Hub is live, free and available at https://events.ethicalcorp.com/content/

Please contact content@ethicalcorp.com if you have any questions.

Main photograph by NicoElNino/Shutterstock
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