This month has been a busy time for Adventure Base but we’re steaming ahead with actioning some of the key decisions made last month and having a greater focus on our B-Corporation impact assessment.
Project Sustainability – Update
Following on from last month’s update on our 2024 season project sustainability, there has been some progress towards getting the key points in place before we launch. I think something that has become clear to me as we’ve gone through this process is that transforming a business and fundamentally changing certain elements of how it operates to incorporate sustainability takes time and that can’t be taken for granted, especially whilst a small team is responsible for a disproportionate amount of work.
This month we have put the focus around updating the trip prices in our backend system to ensure they reflect our additional sustainability fee that we’ve decided to include by default across all of our products. To compliment this, we’ve also started to draft some of the supporting information surrounding the ‘why’, which will be displayed on our sustainability pages throughout the website. This will give our clients a clear picture as to where this money is going, how it’s invested and most importantly; the positive benefits it’s bringing to the environment and local communities.
With the summer season coming to an end this month, we hope that more of our time will be able to be focused on our 2024 project sustainability efforts to ensure we hit the ground running.
B-Corporation
One of our 2023 targets was to have our B-Corp impact assessment completed and be well under way towards gaining accreditation. Good news! We’re still on track to complete this objective and this month Virginia and myself have made some sterling progress towards getting there.
We’ve got a good structure in place now for how we work, whereby Virginia and myself will execute tasks and where needed, bring to Charlie’s attention for approval and his inputs. This has helped alleviate the bottleneck with securing time with Charlie, who as we know is a very busy man, now residing in the west country… Surf Adventures coming soon!
But in all seriousness, this month has seen us gain a total of 15 points on our impact assessment. We’ve taken on tasks such as updating and creating various policies to help with our code of ethics, privacy and more. Although these may seem like small tasks, ensuring they’re applicable to Adventure Base and more importantly storing them somewhere where all employees have access and understand that they’re available to them was as big of a challenge.
This month we have also been looking at how to weave sustainability KPIs into people’s job descriptions. Working within such a small team makes this challenging because there is very much a ‘muck in’ culture at Adventure Base whereby everyone gets involved with tasks to help out. When we talk to sustainability KPIs, it’s important that they are both measurable but also achievable. Below are some of the ideas we looked at for the operations team:
- Ensure 100% of clients are briefed on Adventure Base’s sustainability ethos and are aware of the impact of climate change on the mountains during the on-boarding process.
- A 5% uplift in the amount of clients who utilise sustainable travel to get to the start location of their trip.
- Ensure 100% of client travel data is logged into the client travel database for accurate emissions reporting.
With each KPI that we put in place for a person’s job specification, we need to ensure that they feel able to work towards achieving them and like with any change, there will need to be a transition period to get used to working with these new KPIs in mind.
Next month we are starting to dissect some of the other impact areas within the B-Corp impact assessment, turning our attention to topics such as workers, environment and social.
I look forward to updating you further next month – enjoy the last of the summer sunshine!
Tom