Plan to avoid tokenism

Some days and events will pop up in 2023 that pop up every year, such as:

• Clean Up Australia Day
• World Water Day
• Earth Hour
• World Environment Day
• Plastic Free July

…and lots more. Here’s a list of Aussie and International ones.

If this year is anything like past years, you’ll see lots of tokenism on these days – people and companies posting in socials to either genuinely support these causes, or just look like they do.

Either way, while it’s great to help bring awareness to these days, posting one time for all of them can appear tokenistic – maybe even lazy.

Instead, try something that I bet no one else will likely do (until they see you do it, then wish they’d thought of it first):

1. Pick a handful of awareness days for the year, maybe 1-3.
2. Spend a week, or a month, or the quarter, doing activities that support that day in the lead-up to it.
3. On the day, rather than just posting “Happy Earth Hour, don’t forget to switch your lights off at 8:30pm!” like everyone else will – drip out a series of posts with your accomplishments in support of Earth Hour, like your new commitment to switching off all office lights and screens after business hours (looking at you, real estate agents! 😉)

In other words, really support that day.

When others see the level of your commitment, their pithy scheduled post will hopefully be embarrassing for them – that’s great, but it’s not the goal.

It’s not intended to “beat” them in the commitment game – it’s to challenge them to step up to your level.

Raising awareness for something like Earth Hour has so much more impact when an organisation demonstrates the action that the day is meant to inspire.

Your org could be the one that inspires others to follow suit, which is kinda the point!