Nielsen Celebrates 2024 Earth Day and Global Volunteer Month

Originally published on Nielsen News Center

In April, Nielsen celebrated volunteerism and environmental action by recognizing our first-ever Global Volunteer Month, culminating in our annual Earth Day tradition on April 18, 2024.

Global Volunteer Month was an opportunity for Nielsen to encourage employees to volunteer and engage with their local communities—part of our company focus on sustainability and growth. Nielsen employees enjoy 24 hours of annual volunteer time to join in dozens of community events throughout the year. Volunteering helps to drive social and environmental impact in our communities while supporting employee engagement and team-building for our people.

More than 750 Nielsen employees across 29 countries participated in volunteer activities and educational events to clean up public parks and beaches, learn about sustainability issues including rainwater harvesting and recycling, reduce their carbon footprints by going vegan for a day, identify animals to contribute to conservation efforts, and much more.

In partnership with the Corporate Citizenship team, our Green Business Resource Group (BRG) organized events around the world, totalling almost 3,000 volunteer and engagement hours across 166 events and individual activities.

“As Wendell Berry said, ‘The Earth is what we all have in common,’ and this year, I saw everyone coming together to achieve a common goal of promoting and developing better awareness and thankfulness for Earth,” said Zohaib Ahmed Sayed, Manager, Content Solutions, Gracenote and Local Green BRG Leader for India. “I became a Green BRG leader to meet and work with people who share the same enthusiasm and interests, as well as passion and care for the environment. When I see so many like-minded people, it makes me incredibly delighted. I feel a sense of belonging and connection to something meaningful.”

In April we also celebrated the launch of a new report from Nielsen and the nonprofit Climate Central, which analyzed local U.S. television coverage of extreme weather and climate change. Report findings were presented to employees in a community conversation with the lead researchers: Jocelyn Azada, Director of Business Diversity, ESG, and Risk, Nielsen; Dana Siler, Software Engineer, Nielsen; and Kaitlyn Trudeau, Senior Research Associate, Climate Science, Climate Central. This report is the culmination of months of research and data analysis from more than a dozen Nielsen employees who contributed 1,000+ volunteer hours to the project through our Data for Good® skills-based volunteering program.

Beyond our Global Volunteer Month and Earth Day celebrations in April, Nielsen’s commitments to sustainability and community engagement extend year-round. For example, we continue to work towards our 2024 environmental and community engagement goals:

• Reduce our on-premises application server footprint to 10%.
• Reduce our business travel spend by 25% from our 2019 pre-COVID baseline.
• Ensure that all of our e-waste managed through our field operations team is diverted from landfills and is recycled, refurbished or reused.
• Increase employee participation in community-oriented programs to 30%.

We look forward to sharing our latest progress on these goals in our 2024 ESG Report.