A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, “From Workplace to Anyplace: Assessing the Global Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions With Virtual Meetings and Telecommuting,” is worth checking out. It includes background research on the drivers for and barriers to adopting telecommunications technologies among policy makers, business leaders and end users. Not surprisingly, saving the environment isn’t a key driver—in fact, it’s the lowest-ranked reason for videoconferencing. Efficiency, saving money and social improvements top the list, confirming that to encourage lasting behavioral change, communicators need give people a payoff beyond simply doing the right thing and feeling good about it.

As an aside, the headline, “Report: Teleworking Could Cut U.S. Climate Emissions in Half” on the Sustainable Life Media news item first alerted me to the study. It made me say “Wow!” But it tells a different story than the research report, which estimates that telecommuting and virtual meeting tools worldwide could cut CO2 emissions by about 3.5 million tons by 2050—the equivalent of half the United States’ current emissions. The headline implies that if U.S. businesses boosted telecommuting, virtual meetings and the like, we’d cut our emissions in half—I only wish that were so.

Update, 4.04: Sustainable Life Media has changed the opening sentence of its piece in response to my comments. I have to add (as I should have the first time around), SLM has terrific editorial standards, and if they were less than pros, a slip like this wouldn’t be worth a mention.

“For your convenience.” Just contemplating that phrase generates a flare of irritation and bad memories. “For your convenience, we no longer offer phone support.” “For your convenience, you must now walk around the building to enter.” “For your convenience, we can offer you a four-hour appointment window.” And so on.

I assume businesses and institutions do this because they imagine that telling us something is convenient will make us believe that it is—even if that notion runs counter to our direct experience. (I assume that because the only other alternative is to assume that they want to make an annoying situation doubly annoying by presenting it as a favor.) This is delusional, bordering on moronic.

Lying to your customers—or implying that your definition of their experience trumps theirs—is never the way to get them to support, or at least accept, new practices or difficult changes. I can’t believe I feel compelled to point this out, but the phrase appears to have become a convention—and anyone who uses it should know that it will inject an odor of bad faith into the entire customer relationship.

If you need to make a change that people won’t like, be honest, and explain why you need to do it. (Even “For our convenience …” would be better, and might generate a laugh.) If it will benefit customers in the long run, say so—as long as you have a credible case. People may still be annoyed, but at least they won’t be insulted by your dishonesty to boot.

Think that substantive, credible content goes unnoticed? Just check out this article opener: “Should anyone question Stanford’s commitment to sustainability, point them to the ‘Sustainable Stanford’ website. Then watch their jaw drop.”

The article, the cover feature in the current issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, goes on to repeat Stanford’s sustainability messages—verbatim in some cases—and quotes liberally from key facts and figures on the site.

Strong website content serves two purposes: it gives the sustainability program a high degree of control over information, and it provides a deep resource for writers. And strong information architecture makes that content easy to find: the Stanford site presents information in ways external audiences expect rather than according to internal categories.

Needless to say, we’re extremely proud of our client for getting such great PR, and happier still that the website we developed for them last year is serving them so well. Kudos, too, to the creative team at 1185 Design, which partnered with us for design and development.