Inspiration

My name is Sophia Sebastian. My time observing corporate communication has led me to a consistent pattern of recognizing brilliant strategies to lead consumers in the wrong direction. Whether that direction is toward the wrong idea, the product with the most profit, I have found that marketing and generalized communication in corporate spaces is becoming more difficult for consumers to distinguish truth. After all, after almost six years at the School of Journalism and Communication, I’m hit again with the fact that we are in a consumer trust pandemic.

As I approach graduation with a Master's in Strategic Communication from the University of Oregon, I'm equal parts relieved and energized because my capstone project feels like just the beginning.

The ECTF is built to scale. What I applied manually here can potentially (hopefully) be operationalized as an AI-assisted scoring pipeline, with the framework serving as the evaluation logic layer.

My curiosity about corporate climate communication started during my undergrad, where I minored in Sustainable Business. I kept noticing the same pattern: companies with bold environmental marketing and nothing concrete behind it.

What frustrated me wasn't that companies were lying , it was that they didn't have to. The gap between what a company says about its sustainability efforts and what its own data actually shows is largely legal, largely unregulated, and largely invisible to the people it's designed to impress. It's subjective enough to be untouchable.

The ESG Communicative Transparency Framework (ECTF) is a systematic coding instrument I developed to evaluate corporate sustainability communications not on how a company performs, but on how honestly it communicates. I applied it across seven major corporations, built a scoring methodology with verified reliability, and produced findings that I think matter beyond my graduate program.

No existing ESG framework evaluates communicative integrity as a distinct measurable variable. MSCI, SBTi, Sustainalytics, and CDP rate what companies do. None rate whether companies describe it honestly. The ECTF fills that gap not as a performance rating, but as a communication audit instrument built specifically for the media and communications field.

This is the project I'll be working on long after graduation. Greenwashing persists because it's hard to name precisely. The ECTF is an attempt to name it precisely.

This project is built primarily for consumers making purchasing decisions. In addition, my hope is that journalists covering corporate accountability, communications professionals working in ESG, or just generally anyone who is curious will find this framework educational and easily digestible.