The above quote is from guest speaker Ulrika Lyckman-Alnered, Deputy Director, Sustainable Business, Anti-corruption, Business and Human Rights at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs at the Online ECCO-conference on Friday the 26th of March. ECCO-members from all parts of the world met to discuss the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which are the seventeen goals that aims to make the world a better place by 2030 and was signed by all member states of the UN in 2015.   

How can communication play a part in realizing these ambitious goals in such pressing matters as poverty, climate and equality? There is of course a clear and obvious correlation between communication and action any way you look at it. If the decisions and resolutions shall matter and be more than just paperwork and pretty words there is a lot of work to be done. It will also be necessary to get the messages across and create a real impact. This will call for strategic and smart communication to win the hearts, minds and wallets of people and businesses.

Firstly, the awareness of the goals are not very high among the general populations around the world. Secondly, there is a great need for coherence between the private and the government sectors if there is to be the significant progress the goals suggests. To have any success, many different stakeholders need to come together and cooperate. This is a big task but the motivation to improve the lives of the many could not be better!

In the conference call, Ulrika guided the ECCO-members more in depth about the seventeen goals and broke them down into indicators and how they can be interpreted. She shared some examples from companies that have started to implement these sustainable development goals (SDGs), for example, the Swedish state-owned energy giant Vattenfall.

In the discussion afterwards, it became clear that awareness of the SDG’s was quite different between the countries that participated in the call. We also concluded that some of our clients have come further in adapting the SDG’s and even make use of them in their sustainable profiles.

We all like to extend a warm thanks to our guest speaker and her effort to shed light on the foundations and progress of Sustainable Development Goals. And to our Swedish partner agency JOI Communication to organize the interesting and important dialogue on SDG’s and the significance of communications in obtaining them.

How can the ECCO-network play a part as experts in communication and how can member agencies be of help to our clients in this matter? This discussion will continue at the ECCO-Network Spring Conference. So stay tuned! More will follow after the ECCO-conference in May.