The Opus Group – Lalie Marie – 2026
Summary
Lalie Marie developed a company-wide sustainable event field guide that translates The Opus Group’s sustainability commitments into practical, everyday decision-making guidance for event teams.
Goals
The Opus Group (TOG), an experiential marketing company comprising three agencies, has committed to ambitious sustainability goals, including maintaining ISO 20121 certification, developing science-based targets this year, and meeting longer-term net-zero commitments. Sustainability competed with other priorities within the organization and teams did not yet have practical guidance for applying sustainability principles to daily event-planning decisions. TOG enlisted Lalie to design a company-wide field guide that would help staff make more informed, tactical sustainability decisions throughout the entire event lifecycle, translating organizational commitments into everyday guidance.
Solutions
To build the field guide, Lalie first reviewed existing agency playbooks and past event learnings, then conducted 26 stakeholder interviews across all three agencies and nine functional areas to understand current processes and needs. She synthesized these insights with industry research and frameworks including the Waste Hierarchy, Circular Economy, Life Cycle Thinking, and Environmental Justice to structure decision guidance spanning many ESG areas. Lalie organized the guide around 11 high-impact event stages and developed 70 decision moments. She then gathered internal feedback to refine the guide’s usability before finalizing recommendations for its company-wide rollout.
Potential Impact
Initial pilot feedback showed strong positive reception. With leadership across all three agencies committed to launching and refining the guide, TOG is positioned to embed sustainability earlier into budgets, RFPs, and vendor sourcing, helping the company translate its net-zero and Science-Based Targets commitments into consistent, everyday practice across the hundreds of events it produces every year.
