Earlier in the year we announced an exciting project with our friends at Supercool to study the website carbon footprints of more than sixty cultural organisations across the UK.
To give further context of this study and why it matters, we invited Supercool to tell us more about their specialist sector and the importance of digital sustainability.
So without further ado, let’s hand over a blank canvas to Supercool to paint us a picture of digital sustainability in the cultural sector.
The cultural sector is a pretty great place. It’s full of creative, ambitious people who have a whole load of grit. It’s also full of people who care a lot about society, the planet and doing good.
And it’s a huge sector; culture can be anything from live theatre to pop music, from your local am-dram society to Glastonbury. And while the emphasis on caring for the environment can differ across the sector, it plays an important part of organisations’ strategic thinking, operations and actions across the sector.
Why does sustainability matter so much to cultural organisations?
For a lot of charitable cultural organisations, sustainability has become increasingly important over the last 5 years. In 2020 the Arts Council England (ACE) launched its ten year strategy – Let’s Create – with environmental responsibility one of its four investment principles. This emphasis on sustainability means ACE’s National Portfolio Organisations, and other funding recipients, need to address environmental issues with every funding application. Other funding bodies have followed ACE’s lead, including environmental responsibility, impacts and goals as part of funding requirements.
Developing audiences is a key focus for anyone working in live entertainment. Research by Indigo shows that audiences are worried about, and they want cultural organisations to tackle the climate crisis – 72% think cultural organisations have a responsibility to influence society about the climate emergency. Audiences are also more likely to attend and donate to organisations who demonstrate they’re working to reduce their impact on the planet.
Indigo’s research aligns with other, broader, research. Gen Z are the sustainable generation. Research shows that 62% of Gen Z shoppers prefer to buy from sustainable brands, and a 73% are willing to pay more for sustainable products.
So with the promise of more funding and more audiences (and the knowledge you’re doing a good thing), it’s not surprising the cultural sector is leading the way when it comes to digital sustainability.
How are things changing?
At Supercool we’ve been working with cultural organisations for over 15 years. Almost all of our clients are not for profit organisations. They produce work for the stage, manage art collections and curate museum exhibitions across the UK.
While Supercool has always been environmentally conscious (the company went fully remote in 2016, in part in order to reduce our carbon footprint) we’ve worked hard to do more over the last 5 years. We’ve changed our hosting infrastructure, the team has undergone carbon literacy training, and we share our successes (and failures) every year via our Sustainability Pledge.
For a while, cultural organisations have focused on the operational side of environmental sustainability. A lot of cultural organisations run buildings that need to be heated and have bars and cafes with single use utensils. Some organisations take whole productions, orchestras and ballet companies on tour around the world. Guides like the Theatre Green Book help organisations reduce their environmental impact across operations. In many ways, reducing the impact of operational activities has felt easier for cultural organisations, the impacts are significant and can be seen.
Recently, we’ve noticed a greater emphasis on digital sustainability across the sector. We now get more questions about digital sustainability, our webinars and conference sessions are busy with people keen to learn, and we’ve seen some really great results from organisations working with Digital Carbon Online.
As the operational stuff becomes easier, there’s more time and energy to focus on digital sustainability. With the help of news stories about the impact of crypto currencies and AI, more people are questioning the impact of their digital activities. And a sector that is always trying to do good will be one of the first to embrace the challenge and work on reducing their carbon footprint.
What can we learn from the cultural sector?
No matter how small your budget is, how understaffed you are or how little you know about digital sustainability, there’s a cultural organisation out there doing great stuff in this area with less than you!
Sustainability isn’t an add-on for the cultural sector. It’s not something that comes after activity, it sits at the start of every decision, plan, funding bid, brief and procurement process. And this is how they can do so much with so little. It’s much easier to reduce the carbon footprint of a website if it’s built to be light on the planet from the start, than it is to unpick and reduce the impact of a website that was never designed to be low impact.
If you’d like to reduce the impact your digital activities have on the planet, here are three things you can do (that your local theatre is probably already doing!):
- Learn about digital sustainability: Attend a webinar, read a blog or sign up to Digital Carbon Online’s masterclass
- Include sustainability in any brief you send out: ask suppliers for their environmental sustainability policies, ask them to demonstrate their experience in providing sustainable services.
- Measure where you’re at: use tools like Digital Carbon Online to measure where you’re at and keep track of your emissions over time. From here you can set goals and targets for reducing your digital carbon footprint.