In this episode, we share an update on the season 1 totaliser and do a deep dive into the thinking behind the badges our members get to help them show the world how much impact they're having by join our Climate Cleanup Club.

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Badge design examples

In this episode we discussed some badges from organisations like 1% for the planet, B Corp, Fair Trade and ISO 27001. In the video we should slides with these and other badge designs on screen, the slides are below:

Slide 1 - "Bad" badge design examples

Slide 2 - "Carbon Neutral" badge examples

Slide 3 - "Good" badge design examples

Slide 4 - Glad badge brief

Transcript:

>> James McQuarrie:

Hi, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Glad Tidings, the climate cleanup podcast. Just a quick heads up before we dive in. Unfortunately, we ran into a bit of a technical issue during our recording of this episode. So while you'll still hear Ben's insights throughout the episode, his video didn't come through as planned. So we're going audio only for Ben's parts. We hope you enjoyed the conversation regardless, and thanks for your understanding. Let's get into it.

>> Ben Wynn:

Hello and welcome to Glad Tidings with Me, Ben Wynn,

>> James McQuarrie:

and me, James Macquarie. This is the show in which Ben and I discuss the progress we and the amazing Glad members have made towards cleaning up the mess we've made of our atmosphere. Coming up in today's show - a deep dive on how our members can display and share their impact scores and an update on the season one totaliser.

Ben, do you want to talk about impact score sharing?

>> Ben Wynn:

Yeah, let's do a quick reminder first.

That's probably the best thing to start with.

So everything we're doing with Glad is about delivering impact, but we're trying to do it from a different perspective to how a lot of, at least what we have seen within the business community and what's going on there and what we see is with the best intentions. There are far too many instances of business leaders and corporates basically getting tied up in knots trying to do the right thing, trying to make, a difference, but getting bogged down in reporting in compliance and turning the whole thing of sustainability into a tick box exercise. And the problem is that leads to minimal impact, lots of frustration, and just not really moving the needle.

Everything we're doing at Glad is to take a different approach and to say do good, look good, feel good.

So deliver impact, get as m much impact as you possibly can from your resources, from your money, from your team, from your time, and then tell the world what you're doing, not in a greenwash way, which for our perspective, to simplify it, is do the bare minimum you can and then over claim, but the exact opposite, which is do as much as you possibly can, as much as you can afford, and then be proud of that and tell the world and do so candidly, transparently and clearly.

And so the cleanup score that we talk about is the result of you taking that effort of going that extra mile and trying to actually deliver impact. That's really what Glad’s all about.

>> James McQuarrie:

Yeah. And I think it's worth adding in there. That something we've talked about a little bit in the last couple of weeks is we want to be able to help people show off that they're doing more than they need to. This isn't just about ticking the boxes and doing the things that they're compelled to do by somebody else or an outside influence of some description. Glad is all about taking the bull by the horn, so to speak, and do it going that extra mile and doing that extra effort to help everybody get a cleaner environment.

>> Ben Wynn:

And the other thing we should say is with our cleanup score, what we do there is we provide a single number and it's the impact that you've had as an individual or as a business, but we refer to it as impact influence. And so what we are doing is communicating precisely the impact you've had from, from the membership fees and the sponsorship and however else a business is topping up or contributing to the climate Fund. And we do provide a direct one to one this amount of money, this amount of impact. But the cleanup score is your impact influence.

And that's really important because we're using that as a currency. We're using impact as a currency with that. And what I mean by that is the bigger your score, the better you look and you get a bigger score not just by putting your hand in your pocket and contributing more. So as a business topping up, sponsoring, hey, this, this podcast. So anyone interested in doing that, join the queue. But if as a business you leveraged your relationship with your employees or with your customers and you influenced impact from, then you should be able to claim that you should be able to get benefit from that. And the benefit you get is an increase in your cleanup score.

Now, we talked in the last episode about how the maths of that worked. What we felt we should do is talk about how we're going to communicate that or how we'll let members communicate that. So I think we should dive a little bit deep into the badges.

Okay, so what is a Glad badge? The Glad badge is an asset that you can put into your marketing collateral. So think of, uh, the footer of your website, your email signature, uh, your pitch decks, wherever you choose to put this. It's dynamic because your cleanup score will update as your impact updates so that you're always portraying the latest score that you have as an organization.

And we have spent a fair bit of time trying to work out what those badges should look like. And our process for that has been to look at what else is out there in our sector. Uh, and out of it to work out what's good, what's bad, and then to set ourselves a criteria for a design brief so that we can design our cloud badge. And I think to do that, I'm going to turn this from pure audio into interactive video and do a little slideshare. So, let's do that. For those listening on audio, the notes for this, the slides will be in the blog post, so you can always refer to it there.

But we will do our best to describe the logos and the badges that we're going to refer to in a second. So let me just put this on screen. Okay, so we're going to start with some bad examples, some examples of badgers that are being used by organizations to communicate their affiliation, their certification, the fact that they're verified by a third party, something along those lines. And they're being used to communicate that to their customers and their clients.

But these examples we think just could work a lot harder from a design perspective. And it's probably best to just dive into them and, uh, and explain why. So the first one I'm going to pick on is my own personal bugbear, and that's ISO 2700. Nothing to do with the Glad category per se.

This is the certification you can get as an, for Information Security Management. So a really important piece of certification, really important for those that have gone through it to be able to communicate that they are certified to their clients. But the badge they get is just woefully too complicated. These are things, these badges are things that go in the footer of a, of an email or of a website. It's not the front and center of everything that you communicate. It's a, uh, it's a piece of reassurance.

And therefore it's often displayed black and white, small. The ISO 27001 badge just has so much information density. So the sort of lesson learned from that one for me is just less is more.

>> James McQuarrie:

You'd have no idea what that was for if you weren't already familiar with it, would you? Um, conversely, I've spotted the third one across on the top row, uh, has gone somewhat the other direction and gone super minimalist. Um, what, what is that? I have no idea what that is.

>> Ben Wynn:

Yeah, that one's from, uh, our category, that's Renoon. And we love what Renoon are doing. But as a badge, um, let's call it Abstract. It's a beautiful logo. The line and the dot for the R.

Renoon do sustainability management Some people may be familiar with it, but as you say, it's so stripped back it doesn't communicate the name of the brand, it doesn't communicate what you're certified or verified. There's some very little communication going on. It's a mark, a brand mark, and it only works if you know who they are. What I do like is it's just pure black and white. If we look to the left on our, on our slides here, we've got Living Wage Employer.

For me, this is an interesting one because it's distinctive. I've not seen anything like it. But it ends up with just too much going on because it relies on colour and its colour contrast ratio is just really weak. So we are a Living Wage employer. Some people may be familiar with this.

It's three circles, a blue, a yellow, an orange, plus a tick and the light weight of the text. Certainly of employer or we are a. In that badge just become pretty legible, particularly when it's black and white and small on a website or email signature, that kind of thing. So, um, colour contrast is a lesson there. And colour itself. Sorry, yeah. Contrast of within the colour, but also whether, whether to stick with using colour or have something that can work in black and white, I think.

>> James McQuarrie:

Agreed. Two more to call out on there. We've got one from feefo and we've got one from the Carbon Neutral Britain.

I put them in the category with the ISO 27001 badge in that they're very busy and have too much going on and just don't render very well at small sizes. But what I do like about both of those is they've got the year that, that uh, that that badge or certificate was awarded listed on them. I quite like that because it would mean that as a business you'd be able to re-certify every year and have that kind of collection of these badges over time showing that you have been committed for a while to this particular thing. Yeah, I thought that was good.

>> Ben Wynn:

Yeah. I agree. I think that's a really useful thing, but it doesn't save the Carbon Neutral Britain badge for me. Uh, that one, it's pretty large on the slide that we're both looking at it right now. James. And maybe it's just my eyes, but I was struggling to read the carbon neutral business 2024. So yes, it does technically have a date, but I can't read the date and that's a large size.

But there is another problem with the carbon neutral one, and that's the word carbon neutral. Now I'm not against that as a word, but it's not a brand. It's not like a, uh, Renoon or an Ethy or a Verisign or a visa or a MasterCard where it's a distinctive, trademark-able brand name. It's more of a concept. The fact that I, as a organization have become carbon neutral. And because it's not a distinctive entity, when you see how that's been used.

And I think our next slide, if we, uh, look at that, if you're listening on audio, look at the next slide on the, on our blog. But, um, these are carbon neutral badges. And so this is a Google search on Google images for carbon neutral logos. And I'm not going to uh, say that all of these are fully verified, but I believe all of these to be from different organizations, all of which are badgers that businesses can put into their site to say that they're carbon neutral.

And that's a real problem because there's. What is there? Uh, there's about 20 on the slide, something like that. They're all a version of green. They've all got different shapes, different layouts, different fonts, different. They look like completely different brands. And how on earth, uh, are you expected to use that or to read that as a customer, to know that this is a verified thing? I mean anyone could come up with basically any design, which is what seems to be happening here, to try to make that claim. And that in itself removes the impact of the claim of being carbon neutral.

>> James McQuarrie:

Yes, I agree. And it just undermines the entire effort that uh, people are going to, in order to try and do the right thing.

>> Ben Wynn:

So why don't we up the positivity. Let's have a look at some good examples.

>> James McQuarrie:

Yes.

>> Ben Wynn:

So here are a few. Some from the category we operate in is glad, some not. Um, and we're going to start with B Corp.

>> James McQuarrie:

Can I just say for those listening following along on the slides, this is slide 3 labeled good examples.

>> Ben Wynn:

Thank you, James.

So, yeah, we start with B Corp. Businesses that become a certified B Corp get licensed to use the B Corp badge on their marketing collateral. Now James and I are a big fan of this because what that's doing is kind of giving you a rubber stamp to say that you jumped through the hoops, done all of the processes and everything else that's required in order to become a B Corp. And for us that badge is super clear. It works in black and white. It's telling you exactly what you are. It says on it certified, then a great big B and then corporation. So it's clearly communicating what that uh, certification actually is. And it sounds super simple, it looks really simple. But as we all know simplicity is quite hard to achieve.

>> James McQuarrie:

Yes. And I think something that the B corp have done very very well is make it such that businesses that have been certified not only are happy to, but ah, are actively engaged in sharing that certification far and wide. So if you look at um, brands in the consumer product space you'll see the certified B Corporation stamp on their packaging of their products. The food and drinks and things that you could buy at the supermarket all have that stamp of approval on them. So they've done very well to produce something that helps get the word out about the certification and gets that brand awareness around it out there so that consumers can make better choices when they're purchasing things in the shops.

>> Ben Wynn:

My only bugbear is the size of the text corporation because this is as you say put on packaging and is often shrunk right down and when it's very, very small that becomes very hard to read. Um, actually much stronger in that from that perspective is climate neutral certified. It's distinctive, it's different, it's got an iconic little uh, uh, pattern or shape of a, I don't know how I'm going to describe this. It's like a fan almost to the left of it and just the weighting of those fonts I think is clearer when it's get, when it gets used in a very small format. Also black and white and very simple. So I like that one.

Let's look at trustpilot. So not from the sustainability or climate community. Hopefully everyone knows the trustpilot badge. Um, and that changed um, a few years ago they had an upgrade to this and I think they did a very good job. Their whole product is about providing reviews and those reviews are out of five stars. And the badge just shows how many stars that you have. It has the branding on there of trustpilot and what's nice about it is that what's in the badge is what you see then if you click through to the website on trustpilot and what they've done, even though it's very subtle is put their effort into making a star slightly unique.

>> Ben Wynn:

The combination as you put it all together I think they've done a pretty good job because it communicates what it needs to uh, while still being branded and uh, still Working at small scale.

>> James McQuarrie:

Yeah, I like that one. It's instantly recognizable if you're on any website that's using that uh, scoring system and on the trustpilot website itself. So it all ties together very, very nicely.

>> Ben Wynn:

Another one we'll pick on is Ecologi. Back in our category. Love what Ecologi are doing. So this is the tree planting service where you can sign up for a tree subscription and as you do so as an individual or as a business, it counts the number of trees that you've planted and you can build your virtual Ecologi. Forest Ecologi brand itself is a kind of almost like a handwritten signature of the word Ecologi. And underneath that for the dynamic badge they put a black bar and the number of trees that you've planted. I like this. It's very simple.

>> James McQuarrie:

It works and inspired us quite strongly in the work that we did on the flag badge.

>> Ben Wynn:

And then another couple of good examples for me, uh, 1% for the planet I think do a really good job. Very, very simple. Describes exactly what this is all about.

And then Fair Trade. This particular product is a fair trade product shown in colour. I'm sure everybody has seen it. It is a circle with a distinctive, basically a shape of a person with a hand in the air which creates an almost yin yang style pattern alluding to the fact that when you're Fair Trade things are much more in balance with the world I think. And yeah, just does a very good job.

The next thing to just think about is badges like b corp or 1% for the planet or even Fair Trade. They are badges of certification. And obviously the clues in the name with certified B Corp, what happens there is you, you go through the process to become a B Corp, you get approved and as a result you get a badge. And that badge is a stamp like a branding almost onto your business that says this business is certified.

And that's great but you have to be aware of what type of badge you're after. Those are ones that are kind of a brand put within your marketing to communicate to the world that you are certified Fair Trade or that you are contributing to 1% for the planet. Very different from that is something like an ecology, a more dynamic badge where the real piece of communication there is not the stamp of Ecologi per se, but it's the as an organization we have removed and the example in the slides, 178,000 trees. So it's an impact focused badge. And so there are differences.

There are nuances in types of badge. And for Glad everything we do is about impact. And what we're trying to communicate with our badge is the cleanup score.

So we put together a set of kind of rules or a design brief, I suppose, at a very high level for what we think are required. Ideally iconic, distinctive, but at the same time descriptive of what's actually happening. And so what's actually happening is that this is a cleanup score. It's your impact influence. It's the amount of impact that you've had, which will go up over time as we've picked on with all of these different badges.

Things need to be simple. It needs to work in black and white, needs to work when it's been reduced down to a very small scale. And perhaps more important than all of this, if we're trying to get people to be proud of the commitments that they're making, proud to be a member of Glad, they need to be proud to use the badge to wear it, whether that's wearing it on their website or in their emails or in their pitch decks or even maybe in time wearing it as a pin badge, who knows? But they need to be proud of it.

So it needs to be well designed, well crafted, something that they instinctively want to show off. Um, and we've picked on a lot of these things what to avoid, but let's not make things too text heavy. Let's avoid the use of gradients, the reliance on colour for differentiation creation, um, and try to avoid falling into the trap of drawing a picture rather than using symbolism and very simple, simple shapes and simple designs. So there we go. Perhaps a little bit deeper dive than we'd planned. James, but that's our thought process on Badgers.

>> James McQuarrie:

It was certainly a deep dive. But hopefully that highlights to everyone listening and watching the amount of effort and detail that, uh, goes into what we're building here for our community and for our members. Yeah, uh, there's many, many topics like this that we could go very, very deep on.

We promised an update on the Season one Totalizer for you all. And I am very excited to say that we have broken the 16,000kilogram mark on the Totalizer. So we're currently at time of recording 16,144 kg of greenhouse gas will be removed at the end of season one.

Very, very happy with that.

Thank you to all of our members who have helped make that possible. And that brings us to the end of this podcast. So thank you for listening and watching wherever you are in the world.

Please keep giving us your feedback on the podcast and everything that we're doing at Glad, we listen to all the feedback we get from all listeners, watchers, members. It's super helpful for us to hear that from you. So please, please do keep on sharing.

If you'd like to help us out, there are three ways that you can do that you can join us. For individuals who would like to join and become members, go to gladclimate.com and find out all about the individual membership there.

If you are a business owner or you'd like your business or company to join the cause and help us clean up our climate, you need to go to gladclimate.com/business where you can find details of all the business membership options that we have available.

Now is a really good time to join us because season one will close at the end of March. So if you'd like to get a Season one supporter badge on your profile, you've only got a few weeks left to do so.

If you have already joined us or you can't do so in season one, please consider sharing this podcast and what we're doing at Glad with that one person that you know, a friend, a family member, a colleague who really wants to play their part in cleaning up the climate and tackling climate change. Pass our details on to that one person and explain what we're doing and why they might be interested. It really helps get the word out there for us and helps grow the membership. And the bigger the membership, the more impact that we can have faster. So we really appreciate that.

And if you have already told all your friends, colleagues and family members who would like to play their part in cleaning up the climate, uh, the final thing to do is follow and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're getting it, whether you're watching or listening, please do follow, maybe even leave a review that really helps get the word out. So yes, please share as far and wide as you can. That's it. That's the end of another episode. Thanks, Ben.

>> Ben Wynn:

Thank you, James. Good to chat to you as always. Speak soon, guys.

>> James McQuarrie:

See you on the next one.

>> Ben Wynn:

Bye.