Alistair Paul, Director“This year has been a big year for Bright, and with it have come some major changes. Our focus on our employee engagement expertise has strengthened our position in the market. Updating internal processes ensures that not only are we delivering stronger, more effective work for our clients, but also work that has a lower impact on the environment as a whole.”
A review from last year
Two of the key reasons we produce an impact report are to track progress and hold ourselves to account. We’ll go into more detail in the rest of the report on how everything is going, but here is a short overview of how we’ve been doing.
- Embed capturing environmental policies into our venue and supplier sourcing process. (Complete)
- Reviewing overall operational processes to fill sustainability gaps (On track)
- Track and measure the environmental impact of our deliveries/couriers (On track)
- Increase the amount of client projects that use TRACE to measure their environmental impact. (On track)
- Have all Bright employees take their two volunteering days (On track)
Planet
2025-26 Emissions
Over the last year, we have produced 19.76 tCO2e in emissions. Although this is up by 65% from last year, this is due to a change in our reporting rather than a reflection of a massive output increase.
This year, we aligned the categories of our financial reporting with our carbon measurement tool, which has allowed for a more accurate representation of our Scope 3 emissions. As a result, these emissions have ‘increased’ by 84%, but moving forward we should be in a place to more confidently compare data year on year.
Which we offset via Ecologi.
Events as a whole industry naturally generate waste, most of which is unavoidable. We offset our own business emissions and recommend that our clients offset their events’ emissions by funding landfill projects through Ecologi.
These projects capture potent methane from landfills, which is 34 times more harmful than CO2 and turn it into clean renewable energy.
Find out more about our supported project
Commuting & Travel Data
One third of our employees commuted entirely by active or public transport. 50% use a mix of car and active/public transport, which has decreased our total commute distance via car by 16% over the last year.
As an event business that works across the world, business travel is a necessary aspect of our work, but due to initiatives such as ride-sharing, our business travel emissions decreased by 45% (to 3.02 tCO2e) and accounted for 15% of our overall emissions.
Internal Changes
Over the last year, we have made some changes to reduce our environmental impact:
- Switched to Octopus Energy as a more sustainable energy supplier.
- Started only charging devices in the afternoon, where the energy sources are more sustainable.
- Starting building and using a suite of event assets and decor that can be reused across projects and clients.
- Onboarded a B Corp with extensive substainability credentials as our preferred supplier for print services.
- Made a concerted effort to consolidate all orders where there isn’t a clear address of origin (e.g. Amazon) and track and report the impact of the rest.
- Started producing post-event sustainability reports as standard for projects of sufficient size and with enough data.
Over the next year, we will be fully onboarding TRACE business operations to more accurately measure our emissions, including more accurately measuring our waste.
Client Measurement
35% of our events last year were tracked using TRACE, a market-leading emissions measurement tool. This is an increase of 28% from last year. As part of our licence with TRACE, we can produce 10 reports annually, and we pledge to use all of these over the next year, which will be roughly half of our events.
Many of our events are hybrid, online or repeated formats from previous years, so to maximise the impact of sustainability reporting, we have created new criteria to determine which events will be measured based on event size and potential available data.
People
We welcomed Sarah, our new Operations Director.
Sarah Bryers joined us in July from integrated creative agency TMW, where she served as Director of Live Experiences & Business Operations.
In this new role for the business, Sarah’s focus has been on making sure we operate efficiently, look after our people, and deliver great work for our clients.
She has helped design systems and processes that enable the team to do their best work, as well as embedded our sustainability initiatives to ensure we’re delivering events responsibly.
“True progress happens when good intentions meet everyday operational reality. Navigating supply chain reporting has its challenges, but we're staying focused on controlling the controllable and bringing our partners along with us. We’re taking steady, deliberate steps to ensure our sustainability goals aren't just aspirations, but the baseline for every event we deliver.”
Sarah Bryers, Operations Director
Giving our Employee Engagement processes a refresh
As an employee engagement event company, we need to practice what we preach, so over the last year we’ve made some changes to support our team better:
- Widened and encouraged the use of our flexible work policy to allow for better work-life balance.
- Revised and restructured our 121 process to allow for more consistent opportunities for feedback.
- Developed a skills framework for better learning and career progression opportunities.
- Created more regular socials to allow for team bonding outside of the day-to-day.
100% of employees would recommend working at Bright.
Although the results of our Employee Engagement Survey overall were positive, as a small team, small changes in team numbers result in a large variance in results, making the information less useful for comparison YoY.
Therefore, moving forward, we will be looking into more quantitative measurement for our employee engagement as part of our 121 process, especially when it comes to data on purpose, progression and development. Though this may pose a challenge with how we report our data, we believe it will allow us to make more actionable changes that will have larger impact on our employees.
We have partnered with The MAZI Project as one of our supported causes for 2026.
The MAZI Project are a local charity that supports Bristol’s most vulnerable young people by providing access to fresh ingredients, culinary skills, and the community of the dinner table. For 2026, we will help with end-to-end production support for The MAZI Project’s key fundraising and community awareness events throughout the year.
Read more about our partnership here
Alongside our company-supported causes, each Bright employee has two optional extra volunteering days to use for a charity personal to them, and one of our targets for this year was to find the time so that people take them. At the time of writing this report, we are on track for all employees to take their allowance in 2026.
Other causes we've supported this year are:
Caring in Bristol is a local charity in Bristol that works to prevent and end homelessness. They team up with the community and partners to support people facing housing emergencies. Their goal is to make a safe and warm home a human right for everyone in the city.
Serving Bristol is a community-run non-profit supper club raising funds for gender-affirming care. Since launching, they have donated over £11,000 to individuals and other local community groups.
At the heart of every event is human energy.
At the heart of great culture is connection.
We’re Bright. An event management and production partner specialising in internal and employee engagement events.
With over 21 years of experience, we create moments that bring your people together and create connections as a powerful tool for building culture, engagement and business success.
