A producer of environmentally-friendly home care products since 1988, Seventh Generation strives to protect the planet and human health for generations to come. Seventh Generation is a leader of corporate climate advocacy, using its voice as a company to lobby for climate protections, and encouraging its consumers to join the advocacy movement, too.

Phoebe Merrick from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program had the opportunity to sit down with Kate Ogden, Advocacy and Movement Building Manager at Seventh Generation, to learn more about their approach to climate communication, successes and challenges of engaging their consumers in climate advocacy, and their partnership with YPCCC.

Kate: I’ve been involved in climate work in one way or another since I graduated from university in 2005. I jumped directly into the advocacy world with a bunch of different organizations, and worked on a variety of different campaigns, but the bulk of my early career was at Greenpeace. I was hired as a field organizer in 2007, working on climate legislation. I spent 12 years at Greenpeace, and held a variety of jobs. At the end of my time there, I was leading their grassroots department, which was a number of teams organizing different constituencies in-person and online on college campuses. I think that I honed my point of view and my campaigning skills and practice through a lens of corporate campaigning, which is a place that Greenpeace really excels. I think that that was influential in the development of my own theory of change – how I understand the role that corporations play in either accelerating or preventing the progress of the type of systemic change that I want to see, and that I advocate for. 

I could imagine that the step from Greenpeace to Seventh Generation seems like an abrupt change, to go from a strong anti-corporate campaigning organization to a corporation. But I think, in many ways, we’re operating within the same theory of change. And I think it’s just understanding the potential that a values-led corporation can have to define what it could look like to be the tip of the spear within the corporate world for the type of systemic change that we’re seeking. And so I’ve now been in this role since the end of 2018.

Kate: Yes, I’m the head of advocacy at Seventh Generation. I sit on a pretty small but mighty team, which is our corporate consciousness team. The work that we do is split into impact and influence. My colleagues who work on impact are leading our sustainability strategies, and they’re really responsible for developing and then holding the line on some very rigorous standards that we have for our materials, ingredients, packaging, and supply chain. All of that work lives within impact – how we are addressing the direct impact of our business on people and the planet. 

Then I sit on the influence side. We’re responsible for leveraging the huge amount of influence that we have as a leading sustainable business to create the type of systemic change that we seek. There are a few different work streams we use to leverage our influence. 

One is within the business community, so with our peers. We have done a lot of work around the decarbonization of corporate cash. Seventh Generation is the first corporation, as far as we know, to ever disclose our financed emissions, so we do a lot of work in partnership with other businesses and other organizations to help socialize and mainstream the methodology around the decarbonization of corporate cash. 

We also work with other businesses on policy. We do a lot of policy work at the federal level, when it makes sense, but in recent years, and I think, continuing to the future, our work focuses primarily at the state level. When we’re doing that work, we are often showing up as business leaders and representing the business voice in state houses, and organizing our peers in the business community to do the same along with us. 

We also organize our consumer audience, and give them opportunities. If we’re working in New York State, we’ll reach out to our New York-based consumer audience and ask them to take action alongside us. 

And then I think there’s a big stream of this work that really is around narrative strategy. That’s where some of our work with you all at YPCCC has been really impactful. Our consumer audience is composed of folks who are really worried about the climate crisis, but they’re not doing a whole lot about it at this particular moment. Also, a lot of them don’t necessarily have a really detailed understanding of it. So much of our work right now is focused on, how do we rein in the influence of the fossil fuel industry? So our work to decarbonize corporate cash is very much about, how do you, as a values-led business with a rigorous climate strategy, not inadvertently fuel the climate crisis by sending your corporate dollars to ancillary business service providers that are tangled up with the fossil fuel industry? Our work at the state level this year was really focused on passing climate change superfund laws in Vermont and New York, which work to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for past damages in order to fund resilience and mitigation. A big goal of our work with our consumers is helping them understand the role that the fossil fuel industry has played and is playing in driving the climate crisis. How do you make that information easily digestible and accessible? How do you provide that information in a way that spurs people to action instead of leading them further into despair or paralysis, or just makes them want to tune out?

Kate: That’s the biggest thing we think about. We’ve done a lot of work to map out our consumers – not nearly to the level of sophistication that YPCCC has done – but we know that there’s a spectrum from low to high understanding around the climate crisis. On each end of the axis, there’s low to high willingness to take action. And so, when we are thinking about who we want to talk to, we do have folks who are ready to take action, who understand what’s going on, and are ready to take action right now, and we see our job as helping provide opportunities for them to take that first step off the curb and hopefully then get into deeper engagement with one of our advocacy partners. So I think we also see ourselves as, hopefully, serving as something of a pass-through to organizations who are really leading in the climate movement. There are some folks who are several steps behind that. I think you know that before someone is going to jump into action, they want to feel like they really understand what’s going on. So, then, for a different segment of the audience that we’re speaking to, our focus is on increasing their awareness of how the fossil fuel industry is driving the climate crisis, and we hope that they will take action at some point down the road.

Kate: So we have a few different ways. Nationwide, we have a small but committed crew of folks who have been pretty consistent action-takers with Seventh Generation. So those folks are on our email list. We try to provide a little bit more in-depth information about what we are doing and how those folks can get involved. We try to connect with them more frequently, and also we’ll connect them with opportunities to take action from our advocacy partners. So I would say that’s the closest concentric circle into us: folks who are Seventh Gen advocates on our email list.  

A lot of our broad consumer education is through our social media platforms. We work on both organic and paid social media around advocacy to reach folks, particularly in the states where we’re working on policy. But sometimes that’s sort of across the board. This year we did a partnership with the environmental drag queen, Pattie Gonia, which was really fun, and I think very successful, just as another way to address communications challenges. How do you package this information in a way that is compelling, easily digestible, accessible, and even fun? Even when you’re talking about a very serious topic. How do you reach someone who’s not already self-identified as an activist and interrupt them in their day? And Pattie has just been a really cool messenger on that work, and was super, super engaging. 

So those are the big ways – through organic and paid social media, and through our email list for folks who are already engaged with us. 

Kate: We’ve had formal and informal engagements with YPCCC, both of which have been incredibly helpful. We did a round of qualitative testing with our consumer insights team this year. It was the first time we had ever really engaged our consumer insights team for our advocacy work at Seventh Gen. And we had an opportunity to collaborate with Joshua and folks at YPCCC just to say, this is what we’re thinking about doing, and using YPCCC team members as a sounding board and thought partner as we developed that piece of work. Then, we were able to compare some of the conclusions that we were drawing from that at a high level. So I think that was just a really great exchange. 

We’ve also used the resources that YPCCC puts out on a pretty regular basis, whether that’s making small language tweaks, which might seem like small details, but there are such short windows to try to engage with folks. I think you know, if you’re only using 15 words, every single one needs to count. Every single word needs to meet that brief of being easy to digest, accessible, easy for folks to understand. So I think we’ve used a lot of YPCCC best practices. We also execute on the reports and suggestions coming out of YPCCC on a pretty regular basis. We say, alright, going forward, here’s a step change that we’re going to make. And I think it’s also been helpful for us to think about the Six Americas, and how that maps onto our understanding of our consumer audience. 

It’s such a challenge though. I don’t really like to think about the number of years that I’ve been working  but it’s about two decades now – of doing this work and it’s easy to lose sight. We all normalize our own experience. So many of us in the climate movement are talking to each other on a regular basis. I think anytime you have an opportunity to engage, whether that’s through something like the qualitative testing that we did, and the partnership and collaboration – I think it’s way too easy to talk to yourself and not be really mindful of who we all need to be talking to if we want to build a bigger, stronger climate movement. If we already had everybody that we needed, we wouldn’t be where we are right now. It’s pretty clear to me that we need to build a bigger, stronger climate movement, and that means talking to folks who don’t already see themselves as being in it.

Kate:  I think we are starting to get a lot better at really understanding who it is that we are speaking to, and how to speak to them more effectively. I think this year was actually a bit of a sea change in how we think about that and how we approach it. And I think if there’s one thing  that is a huge benefit and an interesting tool that we have the opportunity to utilize in a different way, it is having this wealth of knowledge within our consumer insights team. How do we take this team that is highly skilled at figuring out how to more effectively sell our laundry detergent to folks, and use those resources to, in fact, better understand what’s top of mind for them when they’re in the laundry aisle? How are they thinking about the climate crisis? What’s on their mind day to day? What do they understand about it? What are they not sure of? What are their anxieties? What do they find motivating? I think that’s a superpower that a lot of corporations have that they likely aren’t leveraging for their advocacy efforts, even if they have some sort of advocacy program. So I think that’s really valuable. But ultimately our advocacy model is partner-led. So I think one of Seventh Gen’s strengths is having really great partners in the climate movement.

Kate:  Exciting is not the word. Shocking is probably not the word either. But I think it was sobering to really understand that a lot of folks, while very aware of and even deeply concerned about the climate crisis, don’t actually have a grasp of the basic mechanics of why it’s happening on a physical level – the burning of hydrocarbons. And then to ask people to make an even greater leap to understand the nuances of political spending, or spending on lobbying, or the use of the PR machine to spread mis- and disinformation – now you’re ten steps ahead of where the folks that you’re trying to speak to are. So I think it was such a great grounding reminder to just take several big steps back and get pretty focused on what it is that we need people to understand because everything we need them to do is downstream of that understanding. So it’s really worth investing in, I would say, from our perspective. 

Kate: As I said before, Seventh Gen’s strengths are with our advocacy partners. The people that we have the opportunity to work with are what gives us hope and excitement to keep going. There are really too many to name, but I will shout out the New York Renews coalition. We’ve been working with them since 2019, and the level of commitment and care that those folks, from the staff of New York Renews to the 300+ organizations that are part of that coalition, is amazing. It’s a humbling and inspiring experience to get to organize alongside them, and they have made our work so much better. If we’ve got folks like this who are pushing and going to continue to push, then we continue to push along with them.