Climate Tech Gets a Communications Crash Course from These Two Strategists

Dozens of climate founders, startup employees, investors and consultants from around the world joined Megan Fraser and Lucia Schweigert on Wednesday morning to understand how they could communicate their leadership more effectively to investors.

Fraser, executive coach of climate pioneers, and Schweigert, strategic director of the main communication agency for climate technology in Europe, led participants in New York, London, Hong Kong, Panama City and beyond in a two-hour virtual workshop, “Leadership ready for investors for the founders of climate technology: skills and strategy to secure funding”.

“We are going to bring together two subjects which are generally considered to be fairly separate things, leadership and pitch,” said Fraser at the top of the event.

Climate investors around the world are faced with investment challenges as economic pressures and political landscapes more uncertainty among investors, who react with caution.

A July Zero Insights report revealed that global investment in climate technology was down 19% in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024. Dealroom.co data, a data and information provider in the start-up space, show that the financing of the capital of climate venture capital has decreased in 2023 and has constantly decreased. The trends show after reaching $ 75.6 billion and $ 75.2 billion in 2021 and 2022, VC financing fell to $ 49.8 billion in 2023 and $ 39.1 billion in 2024.

Wednesday’s workshop was one of the hundreds of events that take place as part of the climate week in New York.

Nowsweek organizes its own events on September 24 and 25. The pillars of the green transition, which should take place next Wednesday, will bring specific case studies on energy storage, food systems and bioenergy to the public at the magazine headquarters in New York. Powering Ahead, which is scheduled for next Thursday, will focus on innovations in energy and plastics technology.

Wednesday, Fraser and Schweigert argued that success depends on much more than technology.

“Investors do not only support your technology, they also support you,” said Fraser. “They read your leadership signals whenever you speak to them and interact with them. [The problem is] Most founders do not know how to make these signals intentional. “”

To start things, Fraser invited participants to describe how their weeks were spending in an emoji. A Panama participant used a sowing emoji, while another in London used a rocket emoji. A third in Cambridge used a bee emoji to report that they were “occupied and pollinated”.

Participants were all impatient to learn which leadership signals that investors were looking for and how to be anchored under pressure. Fraser reminded the founders that even if he can be tempting to get everything over their business, what matters most is to determine what their potential investors are concentrated.

“If you don’t know what your investors are careful, you fly blind,” she said.

She added that investors evaluate not only ideas, but the person behind ideas and if they believe that the individual can transport a business by a storm. She urged the founders to cultivate clarity, conviction, self -awareness, team leadership and adaptability in their land.

Schweigert then offered real means to the founders to work on these concepts in their land, suggesting that they keep their elements of design simple and accessible, that they demonstrate their consciousness through their strengths rather than their weaknesses and that they use visuals to transmit who their team is and what is their story.

The participants burst into small groups to discuss the most difficult idea for them to move to investors, before returning with a consensus: clarity. The participants explained how easy it was to articulate the problem they were trying to answer, but how difficult it was to present the specific solution that their work has proposed. One person said that he had found comfort when he learned that everyone was faced with the same problem.

“It is as if you were advancing in a big regatta. You see other people rowing, and you say to yourself:” Okay, we are all going to go in a direction “”, they said.

Fraser and Schweigert also presented a model of four quadrants on how to approach situations with high issues. The two women said that the founders of climate technology have often found themselves stuck in what they have described as “high intention and high attachment” scenarios which caused significant anxiety about decision -making. They warned that in these situations, because each “no” can feel existential, the founders are likely to push too loud in conversations, over-indexing on key measurements and feeling burned.

Instead, they advised the founders to put themselves in scenarios “High intention and low attachment”. In these situations, the founders are clear on their objectives without clinging desperately to specific results. This allows the founders to rotate without a spiral and adjust the course in the case of the reverse, said Fraser.

She led participants through an exercise that forced to recall what it was to be under pressure, before Schweigert offers back and made during the delivery of a land. Schweigert highlighted the importance of speaking slowly, before returning the participants to the pause rooms to reintroduce themselves with a more deliberate pace.

In the end, the participants all signed by sharing the biggest point to remember from the event. And although this is a simple strategy, the most popular answer was to “slow down”.