About
We help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) driving climate action (Doers) gain more visibility, greater recognition, and a faster ROI for their sustainability initiatives by providing a dedicated platform where they can launch, share, and compete for prominence through community engagement with climate-conscious supporters (Champions).
Founded as a newsletter by Andrew Sheehan in 2022, SustainabilityExamples.com has grown into a dynamic platform showcasing corporate sustainability challenges and achievements through three core principles:
- Creating a space where market and SME leaders can be heard, enabling collective progress;
- Persuading leaders to act through market recognition rather than regulatory force; and
- Supporting positive change for society and the environment through community engagement.
Through recognition, we drive behaviour. Through examples, we forge connections with like-minded people and between people and ideas. This form of storytelling proves more effective for influencing, teaching, and inspiring. It builds trust and conveys complex topics in ESG concepts in a way that complex statements, bullet points, and numbers don’t.
The first of its kind, our platform is fueled by sustainability initiatives and solution - large and small, past and present - communicated directly from people leading the sustainability agenda in SMEs that directly serve a community of climate-conscious professionals eager to discover, support, and drive progress.
The alternative is to continue depending on media and algorithms to dictate what stories we hear - most of which are negative and uninspiring.
The Community
There are two types of people in our community:
- Doers are people in SMEs making climate action a reality. They're purpose-driven founders and team leaders adopting new standards, innovating processes, embracing new technology and providing sustainable products and service offerings. We encourage doers to launch and share what they're doing for recognition and support from Champions.
- Champions are climate-engaged people looking for inspiration, insights and solutions from doers. They're decision-makers, sustainability advocates and solution-seekers in society not held by industry or location boundaries. We encourage champions to actively support doers.
Our role is to bring Doers and Champions together where they can interact, create value for each other and ultimately drive further progress in corporate sustainability. Our north star is for the champions of today to become the doers of tomorrow. Will you join in that effort?
The problem
Many SMEs are making remarkable sustainability investments and efforts, but their stories often remain unseen or untold. We want to change that.
While we encourage people in any size company in any sector to launch on SustainabilityExamples.com, 99.8% of Irish businesses are SMEs. Individually they have small carbon footprints, but collectively SMEs account for 38% of Ireland's CO2 emissions (63% in Europe).
Media outlets overlook many of these positive stories, and SMEs often lack the organic reach and resources to promote their sustainability initiatives and gain the commercial advantages they deserve from doing so. Social media posts rarely make it to people's newsfeeds, and the sustainability page on your website is only effective if people know your company exists. These challenges are discouraging SMEs from taking initial or further action.
To address this, we focus on showcasing the sustainability efforts of doers in SMEs that would otherwise go unnoticed. By providing a friendly and convenient place for doers and champions to interact, we believe more SMEs will be inspired to take climate action.
Our mission
Our mission is to surface the best examples of climate action initiatives and solutions every day for the world to discover, learn, and champion. We do this by providing a transparent platform that simplifies people's understanding of what SMEs are doing (or not doing) to fight climate change and support them for doing so.
Our purpose
In executing our mission, our purpose is to inspire more people in SMEs to take action.
We’re here to enable discovery, recognition, learning, and inspiration through knowledge sharing; transparency, accountability, and ownership through peer connections; informed decision-making and, ultimately, collective support for the people in SMEs taking action in one convenient platform.
Our vision
Our vision is for every champion to become a doer and for doers to continuously launch examples of corporate initiatives and solutions fighting climate change. We aspire to become the go-to place when people want a quick answer on how sustainable—or unsustainable—a company is. Today, our focus is on environmental initiatives, but with your support, we will expand the platform to surface the many Social and Governance initiatives organisations are incorporating into their corporate sustainability strategies. We will also add gamification and market-led sustainability rating features to the platform.
Our founder, Andrew Sheehan
Andrew is a qualified Accountant (FCCA), and certified Corporate Sustainability Consultant. He also spent 10 years in senior Marketing positions in Ireland and the USA. Most recently he's been advising SMEs on their corporate sustainability and communication strategies through his consultancy, Esgrade.com, and also founded the Sustainability Recruitment Alliance Ireland (SRAI) to raise awareness of the environmental impact of recruitment processes on the back of his experience as an expert judge for the Grad Ireland Marketing Awards since 2019. He also lectures to Masters students at Dublin College University on the importance Learning & Development professionals have in driving Sustainability in organisations.
Comparison with Sustainability Assessment Frameworks
Don't get us wrong, we're all for frameworks. And we encourage people to launch their commitment to frameworks like SBTi, EcoVadis, CorpB and others. While we support them, they often lack transparency about the actions companies, and the people in them, are taking behind the scenes to meet their standards.
This lack of transparency, coupled with the commercial relationships between companies and frameworks, leaves room for skepticism. We want to fill that gap by empowering people, not companies, to share examples what they’re doing to reduce emissions by 50% for the SBTi for instance, or what they’re doing to meet CorpB status.
This approach ensures accountability and transparency but also provides a pathway for other people to emulate.
Additionally, with numerous frameworks available (GRI, SDGs, SASB, SBTi, TCFD, B Corp, etc.), companies can receive different ratings across systems, making it difficult for the market to determine true performance.
Lastly, these frameworks are cumbersome. They are designed primarily for large organisations, despite SMEs making up over 99% of global companies. SustainabilityExamples.com offers a resource-efficient alternative that shows exactly what companies are doing to achieve their commitments and provides a direct channel of communication to the doers making it happen.