Page Center funds 9 projects to examine sustainability communications

September 16, 2015 • Jonathan McVerry

Nine of 21 grants funded by the Arthur W. Page Center will support research related to the Center’s sustainability communications initiative, which promotes analytical study of public communication on sustainability topics. Results will provide a look at the general public’s attitudes and awareness on what corporations are doing (if anything) in the realm of sustainability. Also, they will depict how these companies are communicating their initiatives to the world.

What words work? Does “sustainability” mean anything to people anymore or has it become stale? What’s most important to customers, employees, stakeholders and partners? The answers to these questions will help corporate communicators build the strategies that can successfully reach their most important audiences.

“People expect major corporations to be involved in the sustainability conversation, whether it’s for PR or economic reasons,” said Page Center senior research fellow Lee Ahern. “We are backing important research that will advance how leaders make decisions and how the public responds.”

Some of the projects are examining emotional responses to climate change, best visual practices, third-person effects on decision making, how people determine what is true and other aspects of corporate-to-public communications. (View the full list of funded projects.)

Principle investigators represent all levels of researchers from around the United States. The Reinvention Fund for the College of Communications Sustainability Communication Initiative (SCI), which Ahern manages, provided matching funds for this group of projects.

Unique to this call for proposals, the support stretches beyond only supporting individual research projects. Funds sponsored national conferences and guest speakers like Joel Makower, CEO of online environmental resource Greenbiz.com, who spoke to Penn State classes, gave campus lectures and met with leadership to discuss sustainability communications.

Perhaps the most significant role of the funding was providing survey data for funded researchers to share. Through a collaboration with Penn State’s Sustainability Institute, Ahern used some of the funds to purchase Qualtrics data in order to prevent researchers from overlapping efforts. Qualtrics is an online program used to collect and study survey data.

“I wanted to group the researchers around a large scale sustainability survey,” Ahern said. “We are able to access data on 10,000 participants at a discount, and provide it for the funded researchers.”

Results from these funded projects will be available in June 2016. A call for the next round of proposals for 2016-2017 grants will be announced this fall.