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GreenCare Environmental Performance Accountability Reporting

The Environmental Performance Accountability Report (EPAR) is an annual report voluntarily compiled by the GreenCare Energy and Environmental Sustainability (EES) team (on behalf of the four Lower Mainland health care organizations in B.C. (LMHOs)) for transparency of and accountability in environmental sustainability work. The purpose of this report is to summarize and relay initiatives, progress, and results for the calendar year, and provide an overview of the team and the health organizations being served. This report also highlights the successes, challenges, and future opportunities for LMHOs to pursue.

The EES team first hired Be the Change Group in 2017 to conduct a discovery of best practices for reporting on environmental sustainability via key informant interviews with central stakeholders at the health authority and provincial levels, a market review of sustainability reporting across public and private sectors globally, and a brief scoping literature review. The recommendations from the discovery allowed us to develop the 2017 EPAR, and, subsequently, the 2018 and 2019 EPARs, each of which is easy to use, informative, and visually appealing.

In the 2019 EPAR, we’ve honed the report’s story, refreshed the content strategy and design, improved data visualization, added custom illustrations, and advanced key EES communications and change management objectives to ensure that target audiences are engaged and informed about sustainability challenges and solutions in their organizations and sector.

Sector

    Services

      See the 2019 reports

      IMPACT

      The Change

      • The reports have increased engagement and knowledge translation around GreenCare’s sustainability efforts at the organizational and health authority levels.
      • GreenCare now has a new, interactive, easy-to-use report template that can be used for years to come.

      Discovery

      Our discovery process

      Because everything we do is evidence based to ensure that design and writing reflects the needs of our stakeholders, before we provided recommendations on best practices, we spoke to target audiences at the health authority and provincial levels, and conducted a best practice review of existing resources and literature. The recommendations from the discovery were presented at an insights presentation and allowed us to develop a 2018 EPAR that is easy to use, informative, and visually appealing.

      Our solution

      Report Design: 2018 Environmental Performance Accountability Report (EPAR)
      Using the recommendations from our discovery, our team produced a unique look and feel and designed an interactive 2018 EPAR. We included several rounds of edits with the client team, and provided services that included data analysis and visualization, original design, and copyediting. With environmental responsibility in mind, we created a digital report to save on paper. Given that this potentially changed how users would interact with the report, we designed and implemented a side-bar navigation tool that allows users to easily identify where they are in the document and move to other sections as desired.
      See the 2018 report

      Our Solution

      2019 Report

      Given that we had already established an innovative and sustainable template for the report to be used for years to come, to create the 2019 EPAR, GreenCare hired us to build on the 2018 design and strategy by improving data visualization, adding custom illustrations, and rewriting and restructuring text to reflect the changing political and environmental landscape.

      See the 2019 report

      The Solution

      EPAR content strategy and mapping
      The groundwork laid in the 2018 EPAR aided in the development and refresh of the 2019 report. Our team incorporated the strong storyline and call-to-action from 2018, while restructuring some sections of the report, eliminating superfluous content, and advancing our data visualization to improve the accessibility of the report.

      THE SOLUTION

      Due to technical nature of the report, a large amount of data needed to be conveyed visually through graphs and tables. Our design team collaborated closely with the GreenCare project team in an iterative process by which we created custom graphics and then refined them to ensure that they conveyed all information with complete accuracy while targeting core concepts appropriately.

      The Solution

      Custom Illustrations
      To ensure that the people who are integral to building sustainable practices in the workplace played a central role in the 2019 EPAR, we included custom illustrations to accompany their success stories. These illustrations not only personalized the report, but also struck an aesthetic balance with the significant amount of technical content.

      Be the Change helped our team generate a stunning and strategic report. The process was well-organized, fun, collaborative and adaptable, and the design team created new and exciting ways to visualize our targets and graphs. We finished the project with a high quality, meaningful report that we are excited to share.

      — Sonja Janousek