It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the tough statistics we face today: one in three women globally will experience gender-based violence in their lifetime; by 2050, climate change could increase the risk of hunger and malnutrition by 20%; and more than 75 million children are currently deprived of a proper education due to conflict or disaster. These challenges can leave us feeling powerless, but they also underscore the urgent need for collective action.
As a privately owned media, data and information business, Haymarket is in a privileged position to use the influence we have, for good. This responsibility drives our commitment to being a force for positive change. The pressing global challenges require solutions that the private sector is well-equipped to deliver, creating a significant and growing market for business-driven innovation.
Redefining Haymarket’s sustainability agenda
While it sometimes feels like there is still much work to do, reflecting on the progress we’ve made over the past 18 months reminds us how far we have come.
We stepped up our sustainability commitments on a global, unified scale with the launch of Haymarket Impact in March 2023 — focusing on where we can have a lasting impact to help the planet and people now, and in the future.
While Haymarket has long been recognised for our sustainability work, as the raft of PPA Sustainability award wins testify, it was time to step it up a gear. The decision to rethink our approach came about as a result of our internal global leadership summit back in 2022 — we could really feel the sense of despair in the world around us and increased anxiety amongst colleagues globally, so we knew we wanted to do more.
Haymarket’s purpose of shaping a better future with remarkable content relies on our unerring focus on driving positive change — our sustainability and DEI work to date had been on a regional basis and it felt like now was the time to unify our efforts and adopt a global approach.
Our Impact framework recognises that if we are to affect real, meaningful change, we need to focus our energies and efforts where it makes sense, where we have a right to play, and where we can make the most positive difference. We also recognise our unique position to inform and influence the specialist audiences and clients we serve, around the world. That’s where our influence becomes infinitely more powerful.
Alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
We knew that even with all the will in the world, our scale limits our ultimate impact and we therefore needed to align ourselves with a broader mission that resonates globally. For us, that is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
There are 17 global goals so, as a global leadership team, we spent time considering which were most relevant to our business and the work we have been doing, and not spread ourselves too thinly. We chose to focus on Quality Education (SDG 4), Gender Equality (SDG 5), Climate Action (SDG 13), and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17), all the while retaining our longstanding broader sustainability commitments, including DEI which is core to our DNA.
By aligning ourselves this way, we felt confident we could amplify our positive impact, driving systemic change not only through our internal operations but also externally with our audiences, clients, suppliers and communities.
Getting our house in order
With integrity being one of our core values, it was important to feel confident we were doing our best as a business to drive change internally before ramping up our efforts externally, bringing our 1300-plus employees with us along the way.
To keep us on track, we established a governance framework and created new Impact-focused roles, including an impact manager, while experts like Laura Haynes, former UK chair of UN Women, and David Ellis, founder of sustainability consultancy Maikai, guide us as members of our Global Impact Board, chaired by our global CEO. Underpinning the board are employee steering groups focused on our core priorities.
We set bold targets too. From engaging net zero experts, Normative, to measure and reduce carbon emissions across our global business to conducting a gender pay gap analysis across our key geographies, using the UK legal methodology, in the spirit of transparency.
All our colleagues globally have received mandated training on the UN SDGs and our Impact strategy. We have individually committed to follow-up action plans to ensure we maintain momentum and can learn from each other. We instigated a content audit and resulting dashboard across our 70-plus brands and multitude of events, to better understand how our products and services align with Impact, and the extent of our audience influence and reach on these matters. In just 12 months, we have produced more than 11,000 Impact-related stories, attracting more than 2.5 million views, while also welcoming over 10,000 delegates at Impact-related events.
Holding ourselves accountable
We’re pretty good at shouting out our collective achievements internally, but much more modest when it comes to doing so on a public stage — something we’re working hard to improve on! We want Impact to be all about transparency and continual improvement, so it made sense we establish an annual check-in to hold ourselves accountable. This July, we published our inaugural Global Impact Report, talking to our progress against the Impact agenda over the previous 12 months.
There is a lot in there — from how we live our culture and values, our commitment to embedding diversity, equity and inclusion in all that we do, and the progress and milestones against our chosen UN SDGs.
We announced the first results of our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions measurement, and have published our first Global Environmental Policy, with region-specific reduction targets, alongside our Global Sustainable Travel Policy. This has helped us to reduce business travel by 9 per cent in the UK alone, over the past 12 months.
With our UK business becoming one of the first media companies to receive ISO 20121 certification for sustainable event management, we proudly reported having exceeded our targets as we continue to work through our event portfolio, leading the charge when it comes to producing sustainable events, without compromising the exceptional standards our delegates deserve and have come to expect from us.
The report highlighted our upgraded status as a UK Disability Confident Employer, committed to recruiting and retaining talent, regardless of accessibility needs — and showcased our numerous partners for good globally. From being proud to be a founding signatory of Publicis’ Working with Cancer pledge, to partnering with Hey Girls to provide sustainable, free period products across our UK offices.
It was also the perfect opportunity to announce another first — Haymarket’s new global charity partner. With Impact’s global outlook, it made sense that we align this approach with our charity partnerships. Having already supported the British Red Cross, part of the global Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, on some of the world’s most horrific disasters and conflicts in recent years, we are delighted to have them as our global charity partner.
This sits neatly with our focus to think local, act global, recognising the role we play in our local communities across all our locations, be it through volunteering, employee fundraising, supporting, and working with some long-standing partners while scouting out new ones that align with Impact.
Haymarket’s Global Impact Report serves as both a reflection of our achievements to date but, more importantly, as a roadmap for future progress. By embedding Impact into all that we do, we are committing to our sustainability agenda being intrinsic to the future of our business success.
The road ahead: leading through purpose
Haymarket Impact places purpose and responsibility at the core of our operations. Through our commitment to shaping a better future with remarkable content, we are redefining what it means to be a leader in this space.
Our focus remains on collaborating with global partners to create real, tangible change, while reducing our emissions in line with our goal to reach net zero by 2050. Our commitment to gender pay will continue and we will continue to provide learning opportunities for our colleagues, giving them the toolkit to propagate positive change. And, crucially, through the power of our remarkable content, we will continue to work with, educate, challenge, inspire and influence our specialist audiences on their own sustainability and DEI journeys.
As for what else is ahead, you can expect to hear some big announcements from us on a global scale. Keep an eye out for exciting things to come...
For more information about Haymarket’s Impact programme: haymarket.com/impact
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
