When I told my supervisor that my internship would be held at an arctic wildlife park in Finland, they said they had not heard of anyone conducting their internship at a similar place. To be honest, I did not expect my internship to be at Finland’s northernmost wildlife park and the world’s second northernmost wildlife park. Ranua Wildlife Park is now much more than a wildlife park alone. The organization offers different accommodations, restaurants, activities, shopping, and safaris for its customers. Hence, they decided to put all their services under the same umbrella and rebrand as Ranua Resort. As the organization offers a variety of services to its customers, communication is a central function of the organization. The organization started out in 1983 in the municipality of Ranua, in Lapland, Finland.
With a large organization such as Ranua Resort, taking into account sustainability and evaluating environmental responsibilities is paramount. I learned this, as the central part of my internship turned out to be a part of the EcoCompass – team. The EcoCompass is an environmental certificate reflecting the organization’s environmentally friendly occupation and corporate social responsibility through concrete measures. The EcoCompass certificate demonstrates a commitment to continuously improving and complying with the environmental standards and criteria of the EcoCompass by building an environmental management plan. The application and acquisition of the environmental certificate are substantial in communicating, not only externally to clients and the public, but internally the organization’s values and vision.
Through the documentation and work done for the application and acquisition of the EcoCompass, I learned what an integral part communicating about corporate social responsibility (CS) plays for an organization. Hence, I also decided to conduct my research on the effects of communicating CSR – activity and corporate reputation. When meetings began to discuss the EcoCompass – project, my understanding was already complemented by previous courses at the UvA, namely, corporate communication. I was thankful to be able to understand terminology and topics regarding CSR and other corporate matters.
The EcoCompass has multiple areas of responsibility. Due to my studies in communication science, the areas of responsibility I worked on were communication and influencing. This meant, that along with the head of marketing, I worked on how to communicate internally and externally on sustainability at Ranua Resort. How could we create concrete objectives and measures to ensure we are environmentally responsible at Ranua Resort? When we started to ponder this question, we noticed that we are already doing many things for the environment behind the scenes, but more noticeable work can be done. This is when I started to develop ways to better customer communication on sustainability at Ranua Resort’s accommodations and restaurant. We realized this was only the beginning of the various work we can do to better environmental communication at the organization.
My internship at Ranua Resort was a first look at communicating corporate social responsibility at a real organization. I realized that this is a area of work I would be interested in my future career. My research conducted at the internship is going to be used to better marketing and customer communication at Ranua Resort. Due to the passion shown in my work during my internship phase, I was offered a job there for the summer. If you ever find yourself in Finland, take an unforgettable trip to the North and go say hello to Finland’s only polar bear at Ranua Resort.
ps. There are 49 other arctic animal species to go experience too..!