Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Capstrat recently hosted Triangle Tweetup 2.0, a gathering of Triangle residents who use the popular social networking service, Twitter.  Twitter is a service that allows users to stay in contact with one another by sending short answers to the question, "What are you doing?"

Nearly seventy people attended the event and highlights included a demo of the video conversation network, Seesmic (http://www.seesmic.com ), a demo of Twitter Movie Reviews (http://jazzychad.com/twitter/movies ), and a happy hour at Capstrat's media bar.

Here's a photo of the assembly, but there's many more available on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/triangletweetup).

About a year ago we started Capstrat Green, an employee-led group that helps us collectively understand sustainability. By doing this we’ll know the sacrifices individuals may need to make, the expected outcomes and understand the balance needed to make both work.

We approach Capstrat Green as a living experiment to provide both external and internal learning.

• We help our clients better understand how sustainability plays into Corporate Social Responsibility by being a living example. We learn to communicate sustainability efforts with credibility.

• We inspire our colleagues to think creatively, yet pragmatically to solve problems. We get paid to do this every day. This program helps keep us in top form.

In short, sustainability is the ultimate in “step ahead” thinking. We’re required to learn, explore, analyze, refine and implement solutions that have a guaranteed impact on our company’s culture, our client’s business and the environment.

Our core team leads our company to find creative ideas that can be practically implemented.

It’s worth noting, this is not planned as a Capstrat cost savings initiative. It’s reasonable to assume that conserving environmental resources may also have an impact on our spending. However, we are looking for the biggest impact we can make with the smallest sacrifice. The team solicits sustainable solutions to learn from and inspire others.

Criteria

Ideas must be implemented within reason. The team reviews ideas for:

• expected environmental impact versus cost to implement

• ease to implement and adopt

• results that can be documented

•originality

The team promotes Capstrat Green throughout the company to drive behavioral change. More importantly, the team shall drive creative thinking with a purpose that balances all the moving parts to understand all sides of an issue. Then they promote innovative thinking to design a solution that works fairly for all concerned.

As more companies want to understand their impact on the world, I imagine we’ll see more internal teams pop up like Capstrat Green.

We arrive from diverse backgrounds, but here we share a passion for winning and a natural curiosity about the world around us. Welcome to “Curious Capstrat” – a blog series of interesting, maybe quirky themed questions.

The first topic is Etymology. What are the origins of these phrases?

"Honeymoon"

“Mind your Ps and Qs”

“Drinking the Kool-Aid”

No cheating! Give us your best, unaided guess even if you have no idea.

Consumer interest in sustainability is at an all time high, and many companies are scrambling to understand, embrace and communicate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

For Capstrat, this means clients are seeking our counsel on strategy and communications for CSR.  But to offer sound and credible work, we know it was critical that our own CSR house be in order.

And so 2007 for us was a year of introspection about our own practices and how they fit into the larger social and business context of CSR.  With our management team in the lead, we embarked on a series of self-evaluations to bring our agency into alignment with CSR.  We share here what we learned.

Our Triple Bottom Line

To begin our analysis, Capstrat's management team took a hard look at our "triple bottom line" - the hallmark of Corporate Social Responsibility.  Triple bottom line is a buzz phrase of CSR, and refers to a businesses' financial, social and environmental impact. 

Financially, Capstrat has always adhered to strident ethical principals with respect to our business practices and we employ a policy of financial transparency at every level of our company.  Financial results are shared semi-annually with all employees and financial goals are set through a collaborative process.  

On the social front, Capstrat is an agency that seeks to do "work that matters".  We accept projects and clients based on whether we think the work will make a positive difference in the world.  And, we have been recognized for a number of our philanthropy programs.  One is the "Boomerang Society", an employee driven program that delegates 1% of Capstrat net annual revenues to local and regional non-profit organizations. We also assist in the planning and implementation of Capstrat employee volunteer initiatives, and offer matching gifts for employee volunteerism.  Finally, our CapstratCares program offers an easy way for employees to set aside money from each paycheck to go toward a charity.

But when it came to our environmental practices, and our love of all things paper (in all colors), we really needed to take a hard look at the environmental impact of our little corner of Raleigh.  We dug deep and realized that our corporate practices needed to come in line with the sustainability interests of our employees. 

Always quick to take action, our management team appointed a "Green Team" representing employees from all departments. Their charge:  take Capstrat to sustainability in 2007!

Capstrat Goes Green

While management was working on macro changes around our office energy consumption, the Green Team set out to change the ingrained behaviors of our more than 90 staff. Daunted by the many items needing attention, they began by launching "Green Month":  an extravaganza of employees carpooling to work, reusing materials, reducing carbon footprint and expanding recycling efforts.  This was followed by "lunch and learns" and seminars helping employees change their behavior. 

By the year end, we had tangible results and increased attention to keeping the office green.  Some of our new approaches include:

• Hosting paperless meetings – a difficult but necessary transition involving laptop- projected agendas.

• Placing recycling bins at each worker’s desk - no more excuses of the long walk to the copy room!

• Changing printer settings to double-sided (we are in the process of training our clients to "turn over")

• Restructuring office supply orders (refillable pens, recycled paper, etc.) to be more eco-friendly.

• Sending an electronic internal newsletter to employees to keep us all updated on latest progress.

• And finally, holding a competition of employee teams to encourage individual green efforts.  Posters tracking team progress were mounted prominently in our office, and the winning team members each received a basket of green products to take home – bringing green behavior beyond the office!

Looking Ahead

So, as we launch into 2008, we have an exciting plan for a Greener Capstrat. 

At our year-end company meeting, our management announced a number of green incentives for employees, including a loan program for purchase of a green vehicle.  It’s a $2000 no-interest vehicle loan for any employee who buys a personal transport that uses alternative fuel – hybrid; electric; hydrogen; bio-diesels or it fuel efficient at the ultra low or super low level.  Two employees have already taken advantage of this great benefit.

Other plans for 2008 include:

• Reducing white paper consumption by 10%. (We have been admonished against hoarding!)

• Installing light motion sensors to reduce energy usage in our office suite.

• Conducting energy audit in cooperation with our property management company to see where we can reduce energy usage.

• Replacing our many light bulbs with energy efficient bulbs.

• Ensuring our future appliances are energy star.  Our new dishwasher just arrived!

What We Learned

This year-long process not only improved our CSR, but it was equally important in helping us understand what large companies face in moving toward sustainability.  We appreciate that getting serious about CSR can have far reaching challenges in scope and impact for some of our clients.  But our commitment to this important work remains steadfast, and we are proud and excited about what lies ahead as North Carolina’s companies join the movement to make sustainability central to doing business.

I think a big challenge in trying to communicate precisely what an integrated communications firm like ours can do for our clients is helping our clients and prospects see themselves in a different light. I know, I know, its not really about who we are as an agency. Its far more important that we adapt to our clients communications challenges and craft solutions or stories that work. I had an idea about how this can be done in a light-hearted, fun and informative way.  

Produce a fun and engaging online video game of Capstrat working for clients. People who believe we may be the right communications partner come to the Capstrat site, click on "game" sign in- or not sign in, get a brief on one of a handful of projects that we make up yet are characteristic of our skills and industry concentrations. Think Sims for an integrated communications agency.

They then try to solve unique communications problems using combinations of Positioning, Branding, PR, Public Affairs, Government Relations, Web, Dynamic  Media, Social Media, Viral and Design. Each game session is successive. You win points and go on to lead the score. Every few weeks we add another scenario and the high score gets something neat like a new iPod.

Here is a scenario: "Welcome, Sandy. Your objective is to boost the national rating of the local university's school of medicine. You have 5 years to make a difference but only 6 months to demonstrate initial progress. How do you plan to start?" A) Positioning B) Media Blitz C) Press Release(s) D) Rebranding E) Bottle of Whiskey

Essentially it is a model of our office and an integrated working methodology. It is an interactive means to show our next generation clients what we can do and why they ought to choose us. It could also integrate examples of a lot of our work including creative, interactive, dynamic media, media buying, advertising, our awards, our space, our strategic and articulate staff and our superb ideas well executed.

Think this could fly?