Severn Trent – Corporate Responsibility Strategy around the concept of renewable carbon

Client challenge

Severn Trent wanted to develop a focused CR communications strategy targeted at key stakeholders and to position the group as an innovative FTSE company, particularly around their response to managing carbon emissions within the group.  Severn Trent also wanted to streamline their CR communications strategy across a number of their businesses.

Article 13’s help was enlisted to assess general impressions of environmental leadership and Severn Trent’s role, measure relevance/interest to individual stakeholder groups of Severn Trent’s activities and test in detail the ‘Renewable Carbon’ concept (and a small number of Article 13’s proposed substitutes) and messaging with different audiences.

What did we do?

Article 13 conducted in-depth telephone interviews with carefully selected stakeholders from government, NGOs, media, regulators, SRI and mainstream investors, regional decision-makers and employees of Severn Trent.  These interviews proved invaluable in providing an overview of stakeholders’ general impressions on climate change, environmental leadership and perceptions of Severn Trent.  They also established the concept most preferred amongst the stakeholder groups, along with key factors to consider – namely plain language, clearly defined and appropriate to the audience – when selecting a concept for a communications strategy.

Article 13’s communications experts then used this data to propose an approach and messaging strategy for communicating the selected concept effectively to audiences and developing ongoing dialogue with each audience.  Recommendations were also given on message focus and content, as well as an example of how it could be communicated in practice.

How did we break the cycle?

Article 13’s innovative research techniques and use of well thought out stakeholder dialogue equipped the client with a solid CR communications platform from which to position the group as innovators in their response to management of carbon emissions.

Article 13’s in-house communications team was able to provide really creative solutions to bringing together the Severn Trent companies’ communications strategy.

© Article 13 2006