If you have some great environmental or social initiatives at your hotel, you may well want to tell people about them. But how to do that? A challenge which all of our Green Key sites face on a daily basis. Green Hotelier published a Know How Guide with useful tips to help you get your message to your guests more effectively.

A few tips.

- Don’t just list what you do. So you do stuff, so what? What difference does it make? Why should anyone care? Answering the ‘so what’ is key, in particular for the guests who care about these issues. Environmental initiatives are often just a list of details, but if you want to engage your guest, tell them what you are doing to reduce your impact and then invite them to help support that effort. Don’t make the guest feel guilty or that all responsibility lies with them.

- When communicating about your carbon footprint, or citing other figures, bear in mind who your audience is - 31kg CO2e means nothing to most people. We love this communication from Westin where guests can really appreciate the difference they and the hotel are making. It also shows you have done your homework and know what you are talking about

- Make it visual or relate facts and figures to something tangible, e.g. the equivalent number of trees planted, the number of cars taken off the road, 5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, etc.

- And always remember that if you want to be credible, no numbers without stories, no stories without numbers…

- You need to place your messages where the people you are wanting to engage are most likely to read them. You also need to think about which communication platform is best suited to each message and how best to present that message. When will guests realistically have time to read lots of info, when would an image be more powerful and where are infographics most hard hitting?

Read the full Guide here.