Karys Orman, Production, Data & Insight Analyst shares updates on our organisational journey to better environmental responsibility...

One year ago, our newly formed Environmental Responsibility working group, consisting of staff and trustees, wanted to make a difference in reducing our negative impact on the environment. However, we were unsure of how to begin.

As the Production, Data & Insight Analyst, I regularly witness the advantages of having evidence and information, and how we can gain knowledge from them. I believed that data would be the essential first step in our progress, so we decided to start there.

Calculating our carbon footprint

Being a small team with limited resources, it felt daunting embarking on a new project like this, but I didn’t have to look too far afield for inspiration to help get started.

Our website developers, Supercool, are a brilliant example of an organisation leading the way in transparent sharing about their own sustainability journey. I started with a free online course via Futurelearn, on how to measure, reduce and offset your company's carbon footprint, which was recommended by Katie at Supercool in one of her blogs.

Within a couple of weeks, I had calculated an approximation for our organisational carbon footprint for the last few years and was able to see tangible evidence that changes to working practice (including more staff working from home because of the pandemic) had made an impact on our carbon footprint.

Calculating a carbon footprint can be complicated because many factors contribute to it, not just what an organisation directly produces. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that getting a rough idea of the carbon footprint is easier than I thought. While it's not an exact measure, it provides a general indication. Instead of obsessing over the accuracy of our calculation, it's more important to focus on seeing a positive trend of reduction over time. That's where we can strive for progress.

Digital sustainability

Peer support has been an important aspect of our learning journey this year, and we combined forces again with Supercool to explore more about digital sustainability in a shared learning project with the Arts Marketing Association and The WOW Foundation.

With a bit of moral and technical support from Supercool, it was quite straightforward to estimate the carbon impact of our website and we quickly discovered what content was contributing to our website carbon footprint the most.

We found some quick wins to reduce the ‘page weight’ on our heaviest pages and discovered that improving the sustainability of our website could also improve user experience; by changing embedded videos to hyperlinks we reduced the page weight of our heaviest page by 67%, which had the bonus of increasing page load speed by 71%. That’s not to say never have an embedded video, it’s about keeping in mind which content is most important.

I chat with Kate Mroczkowski from Supercool about digital sustainability in the arts and discussing our learning on the project so far in this Teabreak episode.

What’s next?

In the space of a year, we’ve gone from understanding very little about our environmental impact to and how to reduce it, to:

• Achieving a basic understanding of our carbon footprint for 2022/23 with comparison to previous years back to 2019/20.
• Improving our understanding and creating tangible actions for better digital sustainability, particularly for our website
• Beginning to place focus on environmental responsibility through our communications with partners by introducing our ‘Environmentally Responsible’ partnership principle, and integrating this as a value in our 23-26 Business Plan.

We are starting to take action by:

• Updating our website, with green digital guidelines in development for a more sustainable online presence.
• Seeking to improve the accuracy of our carbon footprint and looking for ways to begin to reduce our impact.
• Sharing learning about our journey.
• Encouraging partners to engage in conversation about this topic, to understand more about the impact of our project activity.
• Undertaking carbon literacy training opportunities for staff and trustees.

This is very much the start of our journey, and we plan to keep learning and sharing as we go.