Karys Staddon, Production, Data & Insight Analyst, shares an update on Orchestras Live’s digital sustainability journey.

Back in Summer 2023, I wrote about the start of Orchestras Live’s digital sustainability journey, which came about through a peer learning project with Supercool, the Arts Marketing Association and the WOW Foundation. I shared our learning and progress so far, along with the actions we were planning to take.

Several months later, I wanted to see what difference we had been able to make and whether our efforts had been worth it! So, I got to work, rerunning our green content audit and reviewing what progress we have achieved.

Have we reduced our website carbon footprint?

Following an initial content audit in August 2022, the estimate carbon footprint of our website (based on calculations incorporating page weight of our most visited pages, and average visits per year) was c.9kg CO2e per year. Although this is relatively light, there were still improvements we identified that we could make.

As a result of our first content audit, the following changes were made:

• Changed the background colour of website from white (most energy intensive) to a light grey
• Removed all header images from news pages
• Replaced embedded videos with hyperlinks on news pages and limited to one embedded video per project page
• Removed old and unnecessary content (including news pages older than 2 years)

We also used our learning over the last couple of years to produce internal ‘green website guidelines’, which we can refer to and help keep ourselves on track.

Re-running the content audit in February 2024, the estimate carbon footprint of our website is now c.4kg CO2e per year. This means we have reduced the carbon footprint of our website by just over half.

Headlines from our 2024 content audit

• Our average news page weight (for our most read news items) has reduced by 62%
• Our average project page weight (for our most read project pages) has reduced by 52%
• Almost all our pages have reduced in weight – changing our background colour has likely impacted this.
• Our heaviest pages are still those with embedded video, and we are reviewing those internally to make sure these videos are still useful and relevant.
• We did a lot of recruitment in the past year, and our recruitment pages have got heavier with the use of more assets (embedded video and images) – this accounted for about a third of our total website carbon footprint, so it’s likely that our footprint would be even lighter in a year without so much recruitment.

How this has affected our user experience:

Header images were taking up space at the top of our news pages and weren’t always adding to the user experience; removing them means the user can read more of our news items without having to scroll down the page.

Whilst many of the changes we made had a positive knock-on effect of improving the accessibility of our site, we ran an accessibility audit in summer 2023 and discovered that changing the background colour of our website (from energy-intensive white to light grey) reduced the colour contrast between some other elements of our website, making it less accessible. This is something that we are addressing.

This has reminded us that it’s important that we consider sustainability, accessibility and user experience together when we are making changes to our website.

Our sustainability pledge for 2024/25

We are pleased with the progress we are making so far, and want to publicly commit to the following actions over the next financial year:

• Put our ‘green website guidelines’ into practice for our day-to-day use of digital communications, including:

• Using lighter image files (.WEBP) where possible
• Limiting embedded video to one per page, using hyperlinks for additional video content
• Remove old content (e.g. old news items) when it is no longer useful to have it hosted our website
• A 6-month review of our guidelines, updating them as required to reflect our learning

• Commit to an annual content audit of our website to ensure that we don’t start to introduce too much unnecessary ‘heavy’ content to our website
• Consider both sustainability and accessibility when generating new digital comms content
• Explore the use of AI tools that can help us keep our digital presence sustainable (and accessible)
• Share our learning with our staff team to help them to use digital more sustainability, including for our internal systems

We look forward to sharing more with you as we progress on our journey!