Marley Finnegan, Founder of Purpose Sustainability Strategy and Purpose Net Zero
Sustainability continues to be top of mind among today’s event marketers, as attendees and consumers, particularly millennials and Gen Z, increasingly keep tabs on how brands are showing up and acting eco-consciously. From menus to venues, planning an event encompasses myriad choices that can affect its overall footprint, so what should event professionals consider to design more responsible and sustainable events?
In this episode of Event Peeps, our guest Marley Finnegan, founder of sustainability-focused event firms Purpose Sustainability Strategy and Purpose Net Zero, sheds light on events’ environmental impact and strategies that can mitigate emissions and reduce waste. A certified sustainability professional, Marley comes from a background in events and now consults with corporate events teams and vendors on how to best tackle sustainability. Her Purpose Net Zero tool helps event hosts measure, monitor and manage attendee travel emissions data.
Marley points to circularity as a key area in looking at designing more responsible and sustainable events, and throughout the episode, she defines relevant sustainability buzzwords, outlines the three scopes of emissions, speaks on eco-conscious culinary, digs into travel footprints, and offers insight into what the SEC’s proposed climate risk disclosure rule means for events. Lastly, Marley shares trends and considerations event professionals should note for 2023 and the coming years.
“I think that sustainability has gotten a bad rap … where it’s like sustainability is not cool or trendy or beautiful or it has to be sort of granola or not aesthetically pleasing, which I vehemently disagree with. I think that it’s about innovation, it’s about thinking, it’s about doing things differently, and it’s about people,” she says. “I just think there’s a lot of opportunity to really think creatively around how to engage people in new and different ways that we really haven’t been utilizing so far.”
