A Line Item in the Budget for Sustainability. A Universal Best Practice
In January of 2020, over 40 event industry professionals attended a meeting in New York City to explore and discuss sustainability and events.
Thankfully, we took notes on a whiteboard and photographed it. This is what the whiteboard said that we need:
Be the standard, invest in ourselves
Demands on vendors (green clauses in contracts)
Toolkit / Best practices
Knowledge base
Identify cost savings
Resources
Case studies / Success stories
Normalize the cost
How to convince clients to pay for sustainability
How to engage with clients
Contract language
In 2020, we didn't know how to achieve the above.
And we all know what happened next.
In the following months (and years), I tripled down into event sustainability. I learned, got certifications, and started a community around sustainable event management.
As I ponder solutions, something has become clear to me. The best solutions should be simple, be consistent, and work for all events. Ideally, solutions shouldn't be time consuming, or need to be expensive. Solutions for incorporating sustainable event management need to be easily understood, universal, simple and straightforward.
Here’s what I came up with: We need to add a budget line for sustainability.
Don’t get me wrong, I know sensitive event budgets are. But, it could (or should) be in the contingency section. There is no specific amount or percentage of the budget that is required. Maybe it’s $500 or maybe it’s $1,500. This is a mechanism to bring up sustainability with the client at the beginning of the event planning process.
It’s okay not to know if, when or how your client will spend this money. That’s what a contingency is for.
If the client says to you, “I see you added a line item for ‘sustainability.’ What does that cover? What is the cost?” I think it’s okay to say, “We don’t know yet. Sometimes sustainability costs more, let’s see what comes up as we plan, and what might come up when we discuss it with vendors. We don’t have to spend it, and we can certainly remove this contingency all together.”
Adding a line item for sustainability has many benefits. It’s an opening to start the conversation with the client, and then with vendors.
In early 2020, I worked for a venue startup that offered that meeting space that you could rent by the hour or by the day. A restaurant across the street was one of our catering partners. By default, everything was delivered on plastic platters with plastic cutlery. We asked the manager about this, and he immediately offered to deliver the food on ceramics, and come back to pick them up later. We were pretty shocked that this solution was so easy, and it didn’t even cost more.
But what if it had cost more?
If sustainability costs a little more, I don’t think this is something universally bad, or something that we need to run away from. We need to normalize the cost at some point.
Plus, more often than not, incorporating sustainability makes a better event. I don’t think there is anyone that prefers a plastic cup over a cup made from glass, ceramic, or metal. Organic and locally sourced food often has a superior taste. No one likes seeing lots of garbage. Electric generators are quiet and don’t emit toxic fumes like diesel generators (and can save money on expensive fuel costs).
My hope is that adding a line item for sustainability in event budgets in the contingency column becomes Standard Operating Procedure for all events.
Sustainability is a catch all word for many things. Sustainability doesn’t always cost more. It can save money, it can even generate profit, it can be cost neutral. We just don’t know before we start planning, that’s all.
So appropriating a small contingency fund to hire a truck driver (in advance) to take items to a creative reuse location will alleviate jumping through hoops during a breakdown. And by the way, most creative reuse agencies, such as Materials for the Arts, will give you a charitable tax deduction charitable letter, so this can even be cost neutral (or better).
Here are some ideas where this money might be spent:
Hiring a sustainable event consultant
Hiring an sustainable onsite waste management company
Hiring a compost company
Greener signage
Hiring a truck to responsibility donate, recycle or dispose of event materials
Using a reusables/rentals instead of single use
More sustainable swag
Carbon offsets for unavoidable emissions (like flights)
Event professionals often carry the weight of the world, we demand a lot of ourselves. When we think about sustainability, we might want to bite off more than we can chew, especially at first. All of a sudden, event professionals start to think, how can we make a zero waste event, how can our event be carbon neutral? Slow down….You can’t (and shouldn't) go from zero to 1,000.
Having a line item in the budget just means: let’s identify some options. Let’s open the discussion and see where we might want to start. There doesn’t need to be a finish line or sustainability goals associated with this line item.
Once again, this line item is simply to cover anything sustainable that might cost more. It’s an entry point to consider options. The goal is to make sustainability easier and accessible, and to make it the norm. We all know stressful and time consuming event production can be. Let’s start to incorporate sustainability right where we’re at.
In 2020 we had a lot of questions. We wanted to figure out how to apply sustainability to events. We wanted to engage clients and vendors alike, create best practices and SOPs for our industry.
I believe that adding a line item for sustainability in event budgets can accomplish all these things, and more.
Thank you for reading, please email me your thoughts and comments at michele@museusa.org