Many companies create corporate social responsibility or sustainability reports, but few are actively marketing their sustainability efforts. If you haven’t thought of your corporate sustainability report as marketing content, it’s time to start.

Sustainability reports provide a unique and appealing inside look at your company’s story. It’s one thing to state your values or explain what’s important to your internal culture, but the narratives, facts and statistics typically included in a sustainability report provide real meaning and substance to those statements. Plus, your commitment to sustainability builds trust with customers, shareholders and prospects, because it shows that as a company you are holding yourself accountable for building a better future – both inside and outside of your company walls.

To be known for your sustainability initiatives and good work takes more than just making a report; you have to promote it. Here are a few tips:

We’ve blogged about how we came to the realization that we needed to formalize our sustainability policy and we’ve gone into details about the environmental and economic aspects of our policy, but we’ve saved the part that we’re most proud of for last: our commitment to social sustainability.

Socially sustainable behaviors were in evidence among Savage employees long before we formalized the social part of our sustainability plan. Over the past 39 years our firm was undertaken countless pro bono projects and I firmly believe one of the greatest things we can do as a creative firm is use our God-given talents to positively affect change.

About seven years ago, I applied for, and received, my first Ideas That Matter grant through Sappi Paper. I created materials for parents of premature infants that educated them on the life-threatening conditions these infants face. I knew all about this because I too was one of those parents.

The other day we blogged about how we came to the realization that it was time for Savage to have a clear sustainability policy when a potential client for a sustainability report asked about our own policy. Fast forward a couple of years, and now we’ve worked to integrate sustainability into every facet of our work. We formalized a holistic policy based on three tenets of sustainability – environmental, social and economic.

Financial or economic sustainability is the most often overlooked branch of sustainability, but probably the most important. After all, if you can’t take care of your own bottom line, how can you serve your community?

Some days, learning something from a client can be as simple as rethinking a typeface choice because of their reaction. Sometimes, it can completely revolutionize the way you do business.

A couple of years ago we were meeting with a potential client about a sustainability report. During the interview the prospect asked us, “What’s your firm’s sustainability policy?” It totally caught us off guard. We knew that we didn’t have a good answer to that, and truthfully, it really bugged us that we didn’t. It was a critical realization for our firm and we decided to make that positive step forward.

If there is one thing a modern Creative Firm is associated with these days it is shiny computers running the latest in GUI-driven software. Application bundles such as Adobe’s Creative Suite that are the standard backbone of a Creative’s digital palette require hardware that can match their processor-intensive appetites and this translates to a hardware …