Articulate Impact Report 2024

The triple bottom line is a framework that overlaps with the three pillars of sustainability, and refers to the ‘three P’s: profit, people and planet. The ‘bottom line’ is the standard most businesses measure in terms of profitability. However, there is now a movement towards committing to measure both social and environmental impact as well as finances.

We are part of that movement. Since becoming a B Corp, in fact, we have integrated the concept of the triple bottom line with our policies at every level. At Articulate, we consider each of these areas to measure our success as a business, using a scorecard of targets. That means, if we turned a greater profit but doubled our carbon footprint without offsetting the difference or attempting to mitigate that impact as much as possible, we would not consider that a successful year by these measures. Growth should not come at the detriment of our people or the planet, and we are wary of the risk of losing sight of that.

Saying that, our clients, our employees (not to mention our founder!) expect this company to grow and be profitable. We are ambitious and that means we always want to get bigger projects with bigger clients and be a major player in our field. Over the years, we’ve grown the business from a one-man-band to a 20+ person agency. As part of that growth, we’ve also implemented a senior management team that is majority female leadership.

Our service range has broadened from copywriting to add website design and development, marketing and brand strategy and HubSpot consultancy. We’ve worked with clients that include big names like Dell and Microsoft. Growth and sustainability best practices are not at loggerheads in our business. In fact, they support one another. Profitability means we can, and often do, do more to improve our employees’ work lives and take positive action for the planet.

One of the ways we embed the SDG of ‘Decent work and economic growth’ is by aligning our client targeting with our values and our purpose: to inform, connect and inspire. We made a commitment to target purposeful organisations as a primary customer for our marketing agency. That means companies that work in sectors that are positive for people and planet, such as environmental tech or HR tech. Or, technology, SaaS or cloud services companies that share similar values, such as companies that offset their carbon footprint.

We do not work with companies that operate in sectors that oppose our values, like big pollutants or fast fashion. This ensures that our employees have the psychological and ethical security of knowing they will work with companies that have a net positive impact on society.

We’ll talk about this more in the ‘Planet’ section below, but part of prosperity and growth is ensuring operational efficiency. That means consuming resources responsibly, not being wasteful, choosing our suppliers and clients carefully and so on. While every individual and every business has an impact, we must do what we can to minimise that impact. This is an integral part of our journey to Net Zero.

Financially, this means we do not take wild gambles with people’s job stability. We don’t take on high-risk projects. We do everything we can to ensure sufficient cash flow to support times of recession (and generally). We take a measured, careful and transparent approach to balance great benefits with long-term success of the business. We are happy to pay that bit extra for more sustainable alternatives and providers.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Fundamentally, prosperity fuels our efforts in all other areas of ‘People’ and ‘Planet’. We aim to be ethically prosperous rather than capitalising on people’s misfortune and the planet’s detriment.

It is because of our ambitious growth that we have been able to extend our service range, hire extremely talented people into the business and plant tens of thousands of trees (more on this later). What we don’t do is spend those profits on a company jet. Rather, we invest in the business, provide compensation and additional benefits to our employees to reward their hard work, and offset our carbon footprint, to name but a few initiatives.

They say money makes the world go round. We agree if that money is used wisely to create a stable place of work and to make operations sustainable for people, and the planet.

Articulate proudly offers the Real Living Wage as a minimum for all full-time employees. Of course, many of our employees do earn more than this, but — crucially — never less.

Important: the Real Living Wage should not be confused with the UK Government’s National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage.

Rather, it is a voluntary basic payment level calculated by assessing the actual cost of living. If you’re in London, then, it is paid at a higher rate to reflect the true cost of living there. This calculation is not based on corporate recommendations or as a percentage of the country's median earnings. The marketing industry is notorious for bad practices such as late payments to freelancers, zero-hour contracts and unpaid internships. We try to do things differently. In fact, we also pay any sub-contractors a very fair rate and provide payment within one-two weeks.

You don’t wake up one day and achieve perfect equity in the workplace. It’s a continuous effort as new people come and go within a business, as new data comes to light, and as we hold ourselves to higher and higher standards. We aim to ensure Articulate remains warm and welcoming; it’s a good place to be. No office politics. No exclusion. This is where you can shine no matter your background, be yourself, make connections and have every opportunity to do high-quality work.

At Articulate, we do our best to examine unconscious biases, talk about them and ensure they stay out of our recruitment process. As a company, we participate in annual awareness-raising events such as Mental Health Awareness week, using our platforms to communicate and share key resources. We provide an inclusive working environment for our diverse employees and respond swiftly and candidly when employee behaviours don’t align with our efforts to create an inclusive environment. Of course, we are not perfect and fully own the fact that there is more work to be done. Nevertheless, our efforts thus far earned us HubSpot’s coveted HEART award for diversity, equity and inclusion in 2022, which shows we’re on the right track, as verified by a third party.

On top of this, one of our efforts to be more inclusive has been a recent decision to improve accessibility on our website, and all websites we build. So far we’ve made fundamental changes to the code, swept the site for missing alt-text on images, ensured clear colour contrasts, implemented a speed reading mode on our blog that is proven to help neurodiverse readers, and we’re adding AI-generated audio on new articles.

Transparent governance requires clear, accessible and comprehensive policies. We have 40 of them, ranging from ‘Rewards and recognition’ to ‘Whistleblowing’ to ‘Mental health’ policies. Each policy is crafted with the input of relevant stakeholders, such as the CEO, CFO, and Head of People and has a stamp of approval only once all parties are agreed. These policies then live on our company intranet, so every employee can access them easily without any gatekeepers. They are reviewed and updated regularly to ensure they are legal, fair and reflect the needs of the business and of employees.

Ambiguity around policies can be stressful and cause friction in a business. With this system in place, employees have a very clear understanding of our policies, which can help to ensure legal requirements are met, and contributes to job security and psychological safety.

This was a big moment for us. Articulate first became Investors in People certified (Standard) in 2020. In 2021, the company was further awarded IIP Silver status and, in 2022, became the IIP Small Employer of the Year, which was a massive achievement (and Kerry Godliman gave us our award!). And, at the tail end of the 2023-24 financial year, we learned that we had achieved IIP Gold accreditation in our latest assessment, reflecting our consistent commitment to continuous improvement. Hip hip hooray!

Over the last 20 years, IIP has been offering accreditations to those organisations that have demonstrable high standards for people management in the UK and internationally. This helps businesses improve their overall business performance and realise objectives through the management and development of their employees. As such, it involves a rigorous nowhere-to-hide assessment across all departments.

Employer branding and recruitment has been a major focus for us over the last year. We took on the project of both overhauling our recruitment process and tooling, and building a distinct brand position targeted at prospective employees. This involved a series of in-house workshops to understand what makes a great Articulate employee and what employees love about working at the agency. From there, we came to our employer brand promise: ‘Time at Articulate is time well spent.’ Meaning, everyone wants their work to be worthwhile, but each person decides what is worth their time — that most valuable, irreplaceable currency. We empower people to spend their time wisely, and we respect the time they put in each day.

From there, we updated our company pages on the website, including our about us page, sustainability commitments page and careers page. We made a showcase page on LinkedIn and put out content on our blog, social media and email newsletters to attract candidates. On the process and tooling side, we built our own recruitment platform right into HubSpot, with automated emails and a clear system so every candidate is seen and responded to in a timely manner. We’ve run this new system a few times since its inception, refining it as we went. Now, as we wrap up this first phase of the project, we’re looking at the metrics to quantify our success.

Apart from retention, employer branding efforts over the last year (and, of course, beforehand) have also been aimed at improving retention and keeping our existing employees engaged. Articulate is a remote-working business and always has been, so we’ve put an extra bit of effort into ensuring everyone is as connected as possible in a digital workplace. As such, we’ve used initiatives like company get-togethers, we call them ‘bite-size’ meetings, where we go over the company scorecard and even have after-work drinks — a remote ‘Happy Half Hour’, as we call it.

We also use Slack and Microsoft Teams for asynchronous chat and meetings, with conversations ranging wildly from client work to gaming to our favourite books. These platforms ensure a lively and thriving company culture where people feel connected to their colleagues. Saying this, we know that culture is something you do, not something you have. If you don’t work on it, people can become disengaged. We’re not immune to that at Articulate, and we recognise that there have been fallow periods during the life of the business. It’s our mission to keep maintaining the culture so that employees feel heard and are fully engaged in keeping that heart of Articulate beating strong.

The SDG of ‘Quality education’, for us, represents a learning culture in the workplace, and a generous spirit of resource and information sharing both internally and on our marketing platforms, which we do every day as a marketing agency. And, more than opportunity — also, time, space and motivation to invest in every employee’s personal development. Everyone has 12 paid days per year for training. We have clear career paths on the intranet with signposts illustrating how an employee can seek a promotion internally. Of course, we promote based on employees achieving those goals as aligned with business objectives.

Every month, employees track progress on their Objectives in 1-1s with their line manager. We enable access to resources such as LinkedIn Learning where we have built learning paths for people looking to learn new skills, and we have implemented a range of performance awards to recognise people who are developing themselves and going above and beyond. Given this is a more recent project, we’d like to do more work to improve the learning paths and to refine the rewards and recognition programme. All of this culminates in an in-depth annual appraisal process.

Very early on in Articulate’s growth journey, we put employee wellbeing at the heart of our company culture. Although no longer at the company, many of these initiatives were championed by our Chief Happiness Officer, such as ‘happy meals’ where small groups of us met for a coffee and cake, often virtually, and ‘happy talks’ where we discussed wellbeing on a one-to-one basis. The CHO also organised our in-person meetings and fun activities like bowling and cocktail-making classes. Now, our CFO and Head of People carry this mantle forward. Of course, wellbeing is the responsibility of everyone at the company.

Some of the wellbeing initiatives provided by the company include things such as BUPA private medical insurance. This helps to give our employees peace of mind around seeking medical care and they have the option to avoid long NHS waiting lists. It covers remote appointments with a doctor or nurse. And, when something unexpected happens, employees can use the BUPA Anytime Healthline.

Using the employee ‘happiness accounts’, people can also purchase items for their home office, like ergonomic chairs to support good posture and physical wellbeing. Naturally, we provide any reasonable accommodations as required by law, but we also welcome requests to use the happiness account funds for additional purchases.

A major part of wellbeing is, of course, mental health. Articulate signed the Mental Health at Work Commitment in 2022. Most everyone faces times that are challenging for mental health in their life. We try to ensure that discussing things like anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions or neurodiversities in the workplace comes without stigma. There are several routes for people to reach out for support if they are struggling, such as talking to a line manager or a Mental Health First Aider. While some companies simply pay lip service to this, we walk the walk. If an employee is struggling with mental health, they will get support, and they will not be judged or treated unfairly.

For several years, we have participated in several mental wellbeing initiatives, such as a ‘Week of Calm’ and the annual Time to Talk day. In fact, we run a ‘Time to Talk’ meeting every month to discuss various topics related to mental health. We also participate in Mental Health Awareness week, sharing stories and resources. Everyone in the company has access to the Calm app and the BUPA Employee Assistance Programme with free access to counselling.

We’re also acutely aware of the impact of workloads, behaviours and the environment on mental health. As a fully remote working company, we know loneliness can be an issue for our employees, and therefore we try to maintain a communicative and connected environment. We do not tolerate bullying or discriminatory behaviours and have clear policies around both. Project management tools, forecasting, Service Level Agreements and a points system for measuring workloads are all used with the clear intent of establishing and maintaining a calm, organised, low-urgency working environment. Transparently, we do not always manage to avoid those high-pressure moments. Our goal is to keep them to a minimum and to acknowledge and appreciate the extra efforts of our employees in such times.

While this ‘People’ section has been focused on the team at Articulate, we are also part of a community. As such, the company provides 2.5 paid volunteering days to employees, which have been used for things like:

• Building websites to support food businesses and local businesses during the pandemic
  
  
• Providing technical support and website design services to environmental groups fighting river pollution
  
  
• Local events and street parties
  
  
• Putting on ‘Warm up here’ crafting workshops at the library during the winter months.

While not as many employees have taken advantage of this as we would like, this is something we plan to focus more on in the coming year to increase uptake.

As a company, we support various causes throughout the year via that which we call ‘allyships’. These range from Pride to Hearing Loss Awareness. As part of these allyships, we create a page of resources on our company intranet, put on events like last year’s British Sign Language (BSL) workshop and ‘Fancy dress for MS’, share resources and stories, and raise funds for charities like MIND. Fundraising has included £1,500 for ‘Walk over Cancer’ and thousands of pounds through Payroll Giving (about £1400 every year), which we match as a company for a chosen charity. Such charities have included Look Good Feel Better, The Woodland Trust and Young Minds. This means our commitment to ‘People’ extends beyond the company, encompassing both our local communities and people in need.

Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions are the direct emissions generated by the business, such as through assets like buildings or cars, or processes like manufacturing, transportation or other activities. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from buying energy from a utility provider, such as electricity for heating.

Many businesses produce scope 1 and 2 emissions simply by having and running an office building. As an agency that has been remote working since its inception 20 years ago, we do not have an office. And, we do not manufacture or transport a physical product, but rather offer digital marketing and website services. This all means that our scope 1 and 2 emissions are essentially non-existent, as homeworking, use of technology and supplier-based GHG emissions are covered under scope 3. Of course, as individuals, it is up to each of the employees at Articulate to reduce wastage in the home, turn out lights or turn off devices on standby and to use green energy providers where possible. As a company, we regularly discuss these topics and offer advice for those looking to be more sustainable in the home.

Scope 3 emissions are all indirect GHG emissions not covered by scope 2, which is essentially supply chain emissions (both upstream and downstream). In the current model, which may change, it also covers remote working and the use of technology. For most businesses, scope 3 emissions account for 88 percent of total emissions and, therefore, represent a major opportunity for emissions reduction and offsetting.

As a remote-working business, employees do not commute every day, but we do occasionally travel to meet in person or for other meetings. We offset all travel and have done so for the past five years. We have also greatly reduced the amount of travel during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. And, while we will talk more about suppliers shortly, we also created one of our “suppliers”, Turbine, our sister company in 2010. This digital platform is for paper-free expenses and time off requests. It helps Articulate be as paperless as possible, along with every other business that has purchased the software.

We calculated our emissions for the financial year 2022-23 as 64.9 tCO2e, with the caveat that some emissions may not have been accurately or fully accounted for. We are more confident that our number for the financial year 2023-24 is correct, at 72.3 tCO2e, meaning our avoidance efforts (more than 300 tCO2e in those two years) cover more than double our emissions. Our work from home data is included in our total footprint in Scope 3.

As we get better, more accurate measurements, these numbers will likely become more reliable over time. This is something we’re working towards in 2024. Our efforts have been moderated by the For Our Planet Ecologi awards (although beyond the scope of this report which covers up to the end of the financial year March 2024, we have in fact recently achieved Ecologi’s ‘For Our Planet’ Silver Award 2024! So that’s the first addition to next year’s report already…).

Several of our policies in the employee handbook relate to sustainability and the planet. In particular, the ‘Environmental stewardship’, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and ‘Human rights’ policies. These codify our efforts to promote sustainability, such as by promoting energy efficiency in home offices, recycling, using non-harmful products and advocating for the use of public transport over cars or taxis when travelling. Employees are also encouraged to use their volunteering days for environmental action, such as organised clean-ups or community gardening.

Another policy that supports our efforts to be more sustainable is our ‘Local and ethical purchasing’ policy. This states that ‘we aim to use our purchasing power to support local and ethical businesses, responsibly sourced materials, goods and services and to reduce our environmental impact.’ As far as possible, we purchase goods, products and services locally and buy from fellow B Corps or otherwise ethical businesses, such as Fairtrade organisations.

We try to use digital providers that are equally committed to sustainability. For example, we use Microsoft 365 for much of our work, such as using Teams for meetings. Microsoft is carbon neutral and aims to remove from the environment all the carbon the company has ever emitted by 2050. Looking ahead, we’re working on clarifying our approved and non-approved supplier lists and noting where it has proven difficult to avoid less sustainable suppliers.

At the start of the financial year in 2023, we made a commitment to seeking out what we call ‘Tech for Good’ clients. That is, purposeful, ambitious B2B technology companies in key sectors such as health, environment and education. While we have historically long served customers in these industries, this was the first concerted effort to attract such clients. As such, we created marketing campaigns and sales processes to deliberately seek out clients in those areas, for example by targeting B Corps and by joining The Agency Collective (another B Corp).

This has shifted our client mix. Amongst all former clients, 11 percent of clients were in this specifically ‘Tech for Good’ category. For the last financial year, 38 percent of clients have been in this category. Clients in this category have included Michelmersh, Concord and Ecologi. Not only has this proven financially sustainable, but it also means that the work we do as marketers and brand experts further extends the reach of these companies who do such good for People and Planet. We are looking to increase that percentage substantially in the next financial year.

Over the years, we’ve run a number of sustainability initiatives, particularly around awareness raising. For example, we ran regular internal SDG Lunch and Learn talks throughout 2023 and the start of 2024, many of which touched on sustainable best practices around energy efficiency, food waste and purchasing, and more. We have also contributed to 27 sustainability projects so far with Ecologi, from a solar power project in Morocco to conserving the Amazon in Brazil.

As part of a B Corp Month initiative in 2023, we took part in the DoNation campaign where employees pledged climate saving activities. Our CEO also took part in Ecologi’s World Earth Day marketing campaign, joining in the video to #SaveOurPlanet.

Through the provision of paid volunteering days, employees have taken part in various community initiatives on their own as well. One employee ran craft groups at the local library during the Winter snap of 2022-23, as part of a local drive to welcome people to ‘warm spaces’ and save on heating. Our CEO has joined a local action group campaigning against river pollution and spent volunteer time building a website for the local waterways. While uptake on volunteering days for such initiatives has not been as much as we’d like, this is something we’re looking to really push in the next year.

The Articulate tree-hugging really began 14 years ago when we built Turbine, our answer to paper-free expenses, purchase orders and time-off requests as part of the digital workplace. From there, as a company, we’ve contributed over £500 to The Woodland Trust in 2022 and signed up to Ecologi, as we’ve mentioned.

Ecologi has allowed us to fund the planting of somewhere in the region of 20 thousand trees (at the time of writing), all over the world. Through a clever integration, we have set up a system whereby we plant a tree when site visitors fill in a form on our website. To date, more than 7,300 contacts in our database have contributed to our Articulate forest, which will long outlive us! For a company of our size, and over the course of just two years, this is an absolutely huge achievement. Very few organisations of 20 people can say they’ve had 1,000 trees planted per person. All this is ongoing, but to mark the progress of our journey we also recently adopted an ancient secular beech in the Forest of Immortal Stories in Romania.

As we mentioned, our total carbon emissions over the last two financial years, which is the period for which we have relatively reliable data, is 137.2 tCO2e according to Ecologi’s calculator. Of that, around a third is attributable to remote work, and the rest to suppliers and technologies. We calculated the cost of each remote worker by using Ecologi’s recommendations:

‘Ecologi Zero combines average UK household energy data with how many days your employees work from home, to calculate the increased energy demand and associated emissions from home office equipment and heating.’

It may be that the actual amount differs from the UK averages. At the moment, however, we are unable to track individual carbon footprints, and this is something we’re looking to investigate in the next year.

As we mentioned, in that time period of two years we offset (or ‘avoided’, see below) more than twice as much carbon as we produced — 300 tonnes — making us a Climate Positive Employer. This is one of our proudest achievements. We offset more carbon than we use. Not only are we doing the bare minimum, but we are going above and beyond to have a positive impact.

There is a lot of debate around the terms carbon neutral, offsetting and removal. To be dubbed ‘carbon neutral’ requires a certification process, which we have not yet gone through, although we believe based on the data that we more than qualify.

In our case, as has become common usage, we take offsetting to mean ‘avoiding’: action that prevents a carbon-emitting activity from happening. How this works is that a project developer can create a development, like a solar farm, and be assessed by a carbon standards organisation on the real-world reduction of carbon that this project will have on the planet, as measured by tonnes of carbon dioxide (tCO2) or tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). They then receive carbon credits equivalent to that amount, which can be sold on, or as Ecologi put it ‘credits provide a vehicle for converting money into climate impact.’ That is how Articulate offsets or ‘avoids’ carbon, by purchasing carbon credits.

The third term, carbon removal, refers to emissions that have been removed from the atmosphere and stored, such as via carbon capture and burial. There are very few such initiatives in place at scale. Most are in a testing phase, making carbon removal credits much more expensive. This is why the emphasis should be on reduction at this stage, while these technologies develop. It is reducing carbon footprints that will make the most impact on the climate, today, and therefore we do not, largely, rely on carbon removal as a business.

On 26 June 2022, we committed to Net Zero by 2030. But the truth is, we’ve been on this journey for a lot longer than that. Our goal is to achieve Net Zero status as quickly as possible, so if we can get there before 2030, then that’s what we will do. That means reducing our carbon footprint as much as possible and offsetting (or removing) the rest.

Moving forward, our mission is to track our carbon outputs more accurately and find ways to reduce these further, such as by being even more discerning about our suppliers and by supporting employees in reducing individual carbon footprints at home. With better data and due diligence, we can make those incremental changes that will get us to Net Zero. As such, we’re using Ecologi’s relatively new Net Zero tracking technology and Power BI to help us track month-on-month carbon outputs and offsets.