Introduction to PAS 2020

My role in PAS2020 very simply is I’m a contributor to the component parts of the standard both as a former industry practitioner and somebody’s who’s received formal environmental science training.

Well PAS2020, the PAS part stands for Publicly Available Specification. And what this actually is; is a document that clearly outlines for industry practitioners exactly what they have to do to be more environmentally sensitive with their direct marketing activity.

PAS 2020 is for the direct marketing industry. We’ve looked at lots of different channels including what many would consider to be traditional channels such as mail, inserts and unaddressed mail as well as new channels such as email and SMS texting and field marketing.  So it’s for the whole industry to look at the different channels of communication that they use and come up with a coordinated more environmentally sensitive campaign.

I think what we actually have to recognise is that there’s a question of efficiency and performance that comes into this. If your campaigns, regardless of the channel that they use, do what you design them to do that is likely to be more environmentally efficient, in that if you do decide to use a channel that is inappropriate with the wrong message means that it’s going to get a very poor response rate. Regardless of the channel that’s been used that’s waste. So whether it’s electronic or paper, creating something that doesn’t do what it was designed to do creates waste. What’s actually much more fundamentally important is to think about your audience, how they’d like to communicate with you, how they’d like to receive information in from you and use that knowledge to derive something that is much more efficient.

It’s difficult when there’s a recession on to think of anything else other than the returns that are required to keep my shareholders happy. PAS 2020 is about efficiency - efficiency of the business, efficiency in terms of how I use my investment money. Well, PAS 2020 is a clear signal to those investors that this organisation has got a very keen eye to how it uses its resources. It is focused on eradicating waste out of the process.

There is of course always the misnomer that one channel has a better environmental story than another, and that’s simply not necessarily the case. What is much more environmentally friendly is to do something which is effective, and that is at the heart of what the PAS is all about is efficiency and effectiveness.

The key contributing partners to this process involved Royal Mail, ISBA, Acxiom, the DMA and TPS. And outside of that, two groups were actually formed to make the standard. The first group was the steering group and then there was a second group, the review panel. The steering group consisted of national and local government, including Defra and BERR, and the Local Government Association. There were other industry trade bodies involved in that, of course, ISBA and the British Print Industry Federation as well as key industry practitioners and consumer groups. And just as importantly a number of environmental organisations such as Envirowise and IEMA, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment.

The start of the process is to obtain a copy of the standard. People can do that by going directly onto the DMA website and there’s a link on there or directly onto the British Standards Institute website. Once you have a copy of the standard you need to make an assessment of the requirements of PAS 2020 against your own management systems.

For many organisations I think they’ll be quite surprised just how compliant they already are with PAS 2020. Once you’ve made an assessment of your own systems against the PAS it should be possible to identify any gaps that need to be plugged and once you’ve plugged those gaps it’s simply a question of calling in BSI to come and give you an external audit to check against what you believe are your management systems.