Introduction
A leading global engineering firm has sustainability deeply embedded as one of their core business values. But, to meet their ambitious business travel emissions reductions targets, they realized they desperately needed to engage their traveling employees in sustainability.
Challenge
The customer's existing travel emissions data was incomplete and they were not capturing some key sustainable decisions. Their generic internal communications were struggling to generate any meaningful engagement.
Solution
Thrust Carbon implemented a comprehensive solution to address these challenges by consolidating all the customer's travel and expense data, and sending hyper-personalized emails directly to their travelers.
Working with Thrust Carbon delivered
| 500k data points collected & analyzed |
10k+ quarterly emissions emails |
2X industry standard email opens |
Introduction
A leading global engineering firm with over 30,000 employees has sustainability deeply embedded as a core business value. As one of their many sustainability targets, they set an ambitious goal to reduce their overall business travel emissions. However, to achieve this goal, they realized they needed to drive sustainable decision making for their business travelers.
The Challenge
The customer faced significant hurdles in driving sustainable decision making within their travel program.
Firstly, they had an incomplete picture of their travel emissions data. Their data was primarily provided through their Travel Management Company, and they were not capturing all of the sustainable decisions their travelers were making.
On top of this, their internal sustainability communication to their travelers was generic and lacked any meaningful engagement. The needed a better solution to engage their 10,000+ traveling employees in order to drive behavioral change.
The Solutions
Integrated data feeds
Thrust Carbon connected both the customer's travel and expense data sources to the Thrust Calculator. They now had had a complete picture of their travel emissions, and a better understanding of their employee travel behavior.
Notably, this integration captured roughly 400,000 yearly journeys on regional public transport—a sustainable choice—that was previously omitted from their reporting. This provided the customer with a more accurate reflection of sustainable traveler decisions.
Hyper-personalized email summaries
Thrust Carbon developed and deployed quarterly emissions summaries sent directly to the customer's 10,000+ traveling employees. Each email was highly personalized with tailored sustainability suggestions relevant to the individual employee's travel patterns.
These summaries also included comparative data showing how employees performed against their teams and business units, creating healthy competition and awareness of collective impact against sustainability targets to drive sustainable decision making.
Impact and Outcomes
The results demonstrated the powerful impact of personalized, data-driven sustainability communications:
- Comprehensive data analysis: Over 500,000 data points were consolidated and analyzed to generate meaningful insights.
- Scale of impact: 10,000+ quarterly messages were delivered, creating a consistent drumbeat of sustainability awareness
- Exceptional engagement rates: Over 45% of travelers opened their personalized messages—2.5 times the industry average for automated communications.
- Sustained interest: Recipients typically read their messages more than once (1.6x average), indicating the value of the information provided.
By making sustainability personal and relevant to each employee, Thrust Carbon helped the engineering firm transform their corporate values into tangible employee actions. The solution not only increased awareness but created a foundation for ongoing sustainable travel decisions across their global workforce.
