Paris Peace Forum 2019 - Doing well is good. Doing good is better.

The rise of corporate social and environmental responsibility has brought to light a shift in private companies’ conscience: they can take specific actions that both create profit AND contribute positively to society. 

We, at AUDITOIRE, take this matter to heart. As a leading international experiential agency, we believe it is our role is to engage in and help shape global conversations that matter. Moreover, we operate in a high-impact sector where it is crucial to assess the social and environmental footprint of our actions.

In this context, our long-term collaboration with the Paris Peace Forum – Auditoire is Official Partner and event agency of the PPF – provides us with the perfect environment in which to grow our approach to responsible events and experiment new ways of furthering the CSR agenda. By nature, such global forums have a massive impact on our social and environmental ecosystem. That is why we, along with the team from the PPF, decided to adopt a CSR-centric philosophy for developing and organizing our work.

Here is what we have been doing and what we found out.

At the project level, each and every one of our team members was named a CSR ambassador, tasked with making socially and environmentally responsible choices, such as finding ways to lower their digital pollution (we have been using the Workplace platform, which helped reduce our email flow by 30%). In addition, an official CSR coordinator was appointed to challenge these choices, improve them or suggest alternatives. Decisions were made on a case by case basis, taking into account both CSR compliance norms and our capacity to balance any impact on the budget. 

We also worked on creating a socially inclusive ecosystem. We integrated disabled workers in our design team and opted to work with a hostess agency committed to hiring staff from a social and professional reintegration program. The caterer for the opening cocktail is Meet my Mama, a social enterprise that hires and trains refugee women to become independent chefs. More generally, we established criteria through which we encouraged ourselves and our service providers to reconsider choices and processes in favor of more inclusive ones. 

In terms of production, we made a conscious decision to value efficiency over sophistication. We did our best to use only recycled or recyclable materials, limited the use of carpeting, and favored LED lighting and green generators. Moreover, large scale construction pieces are designed to be reused over three years. Whenever possible, we chose to rent equipment rather than buy it. We minimized printed content and are capitalizing on the event app for information delivery. Likewise, delegates’ badges will be recovered at the end of the event to be reused next year. We also implemented a CO2 compensation program for the forum’s delegates.

Finally, we made it a point to quantify all of our actions, analyze this data, and measure our social and environmental impact precisely. Auditoire’s partnership with the Paris Peace Forum is set to last another two years, and each year is an opportunity to consolidate our reports, draw on our learnings, and do better than the last. 

Disclosing these choices is not a matter of self-righteousness. Rather, we believe that achieving global progress demands collective effort. Sharing and discussing best practices is a key step of this process. What’s more, the mindset and practices developed through this collaboration with the Paris Peace Forum have inspired us to scale up a culture of continuous improvement within Auditoire. 

The result? This second edition of the Paris Peace Forum was a success, this success was achieved responsibly, and the impact on our social and environmental ecosystem was reduced (we’re still analyzing the data and will share it soon). More broadly, talent recruitment is on the rise, collaborators are excited and engaged in purposeful projects, relationships with suppliers and clients are stronger, and the experiences we create are increasingly more forward-thinking and inspiring. 

In the end, it turns out doing good is good for business.