Always mindful of being environmentally sustainable – it was one of the reasons we all started working from home nearly four years ago – we're challenging ourselves afresh, and making a sustainability pledge …

The inspiration for this was a fantastic session as part of the AMA’s Arts Marketing Festival – “Arts Marketing in a Climate Crisis”.

The session was led by Ruby Kvalheim from Julie’s Bicycle and Katie Haines of ArtsAdmin, with ace case study courtesy of Alison Criddle, HOME's Sustainability and Projects Co-ordinator.

Before our pledge, here's a quick recap of the session – all content pilfered from presenters’ slides.

Is digital greener?

Not necessarily!

▪ The internet consumes more electricity than the entire UK each year.

▪ Data centres, transmission networks, and devices all consume electricity

▪ Most of the internet is powered by fossil fuels, so is producing a lot of carbon emissions

How to be digitally greener:

▪ Switch to website hosting powered by renewable energy

▪ Improve user experience, so people find the info they need without visiting half your website

▪ Lighten the load of your website – reduce image sizes, remove auto-play from videos, don't use lots of font weights

▪ Ask your web agency to clean up your code, and improve SEO so users spend less time browsing

(For more in-depth info and resources, head to the Season For Change website)

It’s a tick from us for the last three of those "How to be digitally greener" points, which are primarily about good practice web design and development.

There is a tricky balance to strike when keeping people on your website. A balance between making sure users can find what they want quickly, and your organisation's business goals. (For example up-selling, and making sure people understand your full offer may well entail keeping people browsing your website for longer!)

It is good business, if not super-green, to keep people on your website for a little while … but we always make sure the most frequent 'task-oriented' actions – such as buying a ticket or making a donation – are really quick and easy for users.

Supercool’s sustainability actions to date:

• Plant trees or support woodland conservation projects for every new website launch
• Ditched the office in 2017 – that’s nearly 4 years of no daily commutes
• Meet remotely with clients if possible – easier to do this year!
• Use public/shared transport when we have to travel
• We're close to paperless – though I cannot wean myself off paper notebooks 👎
• Use 100% sustainable energy, if we can
• Use cloud services rather than hardware
• Careful that our suppliers meet sustainability – and general ethical – criteria, while making sure they also offer a reliable service
• We make websites that are as ‘lightweight’ as possible
• We're a Culture Declares signatory (A growing international movement of individuals and organisations in the cultural sector declaring climate and ecological emergency.)

Supercool's Sustainability Pledge 2021:

💚 Review our – and our clients' – website hosting

💚 Explore more ethical analytics and tracking tools e.g. Matamo

💚 Promote use of ecosia.org (internally and externally) over G**gle

💚 Review Supercool marketing emails to reduce their impact on the environment – while keeping them high-impact in terms of being informative and interesting!

💚 Regularly review progress, and whether there're any new opportunities to be greener

💚 Keep planting trees to celebrate launches! (The next of which is due in early 2021) 🌲🌳🌴🎄

Got more ideas about how we could be greener? Want to appoint an environmentally-minded supplier for your next digital project? 😉

Get in touch – we'd love to hear from you.