Challenge
In alignment with their parent company Microsoft’s carbon negative pledge, LinkedIn set an ambitious goal to reduce their scope 3 carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. Business travel is the second largest contributor to LinkedIn’s indirect emissions. They needed a way to accurately measure travel emissions and set a baseline for future KPIs, as well as find a way to mitigate travel behaviors that would keep them from meeting their aggressive targets.
“As we get back on the road and develop an understanding of what our new footprint looks like, the GATE4 dashboard will be critical for us. First, we need to understand our travelers’ behavior and what our emissions will look like going forward, then we can start to give those data-driven recommendations to our travelers to shift their booking behaviors.”
Leslie Hadden
Director of Global Travel and Transportation, LinkedIn
Approach
Advito’s Sustainable Collaboration team created an interactive dashboard, powered by our ISO-certified methodology, GATE4, to measure the footprint of LinkedIn’s travel program across air, hotel, car and rail. With a thorough understanding of how traveler behaviors impact company-wide emissions goals, LinkedIn decided to spearhead an industry-leading initiative to set a carbon price for business travel at the point of sale.
Setting an internal carbon price is one of the best tools available to combat climate change. After working with Advito to determine how to make the biggest impact, they decided to implement a $60 per transaction fee on each air ticket. While the carbon price itself is a very progressive, forward-thinking policy, LinkedIn has also excelled in their engagement strategy with both business travelers and employees from across the organization to promote buy-in and change behavior.
target reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030
carbon fee introduced per air booking
Results
The carbon price initiative will help LinkedIn fulfill their goals as part of Microsoft’s carbon negative pledge. To ensure success, LinkedIn reports their impacts and tracks their journey against the larger goal on an annual basis. Now, LinkedIn can utilize funds from their $60 internal carbon fee on business travel to purchase renewable energy credits or offsets that counteract the impact of their operations.
Advito’s Traveler Engagement experts have also been able to utilize data from the GATE4 dashboard, as well as behavioral economics and digital marketing best practices to create a sustainability-focused communications strategy. The campaign takes an omnichannel approach to reaching LinkedIn employees with the right information at the right time to drive sustainable booking behavior and promote purposeful travel. This includes everything from infographics to help travelers choose whether they should or shouldn’t head out on the road, to dynamic merchandising directly in the OBT that presents travelers with personalized information directly in the booking path. The most important piece of a successful sustainability strategy is employee engagement, and Advito has partnered with LinkedIn to ensure that the mindset shift to purposeful travel resonates across their entire organization.
