Digital Sustainability: How to Get Started

Welcome to Conscious Marketing Insights! Every other week, I share actionable conscious marketing insights to help you deliver digital experiences that matter. My goal is to inspire brands to adopt a more positive, sustainable, impactful, accessible and inclusive approach to marketing.?

This week, I'm happy to introduce Chris Thornhill , James Gill and Scott Stonham , who are speaking at an upcoming event. They are such an inspiration, and I’m so grateful for their participation.?

Event Details

Date: Thursday, 25 April 2024

Time: 2 PM CEST (Find your timezone here)?

Duration: 1 Hour

Why Attend?

Learn how digital sustainability benefits both your business and the planet.

What Will You Learn?

In this 1-hour session, you'll discover how to:

• Understand why it matters
• Learn practical steps to get involved
• Get inspired by successful brand examples

There will also be time for questions at the end. ??

Interested in Attending This Event? Here's How.

If you're part of the Conscious Marketing Movement, you can join this event for free. Go to the community to get the details. ??

If you're not a member, you're invited to contribute €25 EUR for your ticket to attend. And remember, we give back 1% of all sales, not profits, to 1% FOR THE PLANET. ??Click here to register.

Interview with Chris, James & Scott

… And I had a chat with Chris Thornhill , James Gill and Scott Stonham to give you a sneak peek into what you can expect:

What is the driving mission behind your business or work?

Chris: At Growth Animals Marketing | B Corp our driving mission is to educate people around the idea that good marketing should absolutely grow the bottom line of a business, but it should also grow the company's positive impact, whether that be linked to the environment, community, or people in general. We champion the fact that marketing is best when it is helpful and inspiring, not manipulative or intrusive.

James: At EcoSend , our goal is to build the planet’s favourite email marketing platform. This means building great software that enables marketers to send their most effective digital campaigns, but it also means considering the climate in everything we do —?from how we build our software, to how we inspire and educate customers to craft their campaigns. We believe by impacting email marketing, we can ultimately make a positive impact on 100s of millions of consumers.

Scott:?Our mission is to empower individuals and organisations with knowledge about the broader impacts of digital technologies.?

Through innovation and communication we aim to promote informed action, help avoid future regrets and cultivate positive impacts for people, nature, and the planet.

Digital Carbon Online serves as part of our quest, enabling informed decision-making and fostering collective action towards a more sustainable, lower-carbon digital future.?

Why is digital sustainability important to you?

Chris: In a world where the carbon footprint of the internet has now exceeded that of the global airline industry, it’s crucial that we all start paying attention to our digital carbon footprints. I think we’ve all got used to going paperless, throwing everything online, and assuming that this is the right way to be good for the environment. Unfortunately this has gone relatively unnoticed until recently, but with the emergence of more and more energy intensive digital technologies, that footprint is set to rise even more steeply. I have three young daughters and I want them to know that I’ve done my part in helping to ensure that the planet they inherit will be worth inheriting.?

James: I feel like a relative newcomer to the world of digital sustainability. I’ve been building software all my life, and it was only in 2022 that I became aware of the concept — and when I did, I felt embarrassed to have not come across it sooner. It can be all-too-easy to criticise others without first reflecting on the impact we can make ourselves. I never realised how much impact I could have with the software we make, and now that I do, I want to bring as many people along on this mission as I can. There are still far too few people even considering the planet in their digital lives.

Scott: I am passionate about technology - I have been since my earliest memories. However, in more recent times I’ve reflected on the challenges our world faces, from poverty and hunger to pollution and climate warming. I realised that if you look at technology in the simplest forms, it can be attributed as a catalyst for today’s problems - from the taming of fire, through the agricultural revolution and onwards to the industrial and information revolutions.?

With that said, I have an unwavering belief in the good that technology can enable.

For me digital sustainability encapsulates all of this: repairing past harms, ensuring better futures and mindfully tackling negative consequences before it's too late.?

Why should entrepreneurs and marketers care about digital sustainability?

Chris: Aside from the fact that it’s simply the right thing to do, entrepreneurs and marketers should care because the principles behind making digital platforms more environmentally friendly are very much the same principles that make for better and more effective marketing. In essence, to make a website cleaner, it needs to be fast, so that it uses less energy. If it’s fast, it tends to be better for SEO and better for user experience. If it’s better for SEO it’s easier to find and if the user experience is better, it will likely convert better. Therefore it’s really a win-win scenario.

James: Similar to Chris’s points, it’s because the caring about digital sustainability is often a win-win. The idea that you have to sacrifice performance or impact in order to achieve sustainability goals with your digital marketing is often nonsense. From what we have seen, there is a correlation between highly effective email campaigns and those that are crafted with a focus on digital sustainability. More thoughtful use of imagery, faster loading pages and assets, and a focused audience — these are all components that make for highly effective campaigns that minimise energy consumption.

Scott:?Looking at both sides of the digital sustainability coin; digital technologies have a tremendous power to enable new business models, to reach populations, to create efficiencies at scale, and lower carbon emissions when compared to other activities.?

These are all essential ingredients for modern entrepreneurs and marketers. However, none of this comes without environmental, human or nature cost.?

In the very near future scrutiny of our environmental impact will intensify. We’ll see legislation and ethics combine to shine spotlights on unethical, environmentally damaging practices - think about how the Modern Slavery Act is implemented.?

Those who deliver sustainable technology solutions and mindfully aware and transparent about their impact on people, nature and the planet will flourish. Those who aren’t, will find it a lot harder.??

To use the “carrot and stick” analogy; the carrot is the huge potential and opportunity for digital technologies to do the right things. Whereas the stick is regulation and rapidly changing buyer ethics.

My work at Digital Carbon Online embodies this. We all know the power and benefit of websites, but few of us understand the negative environmental consequences. While these might be individually small, they matter and they add up. With Digital Carbon Online, we give companies the opportunity to raise awareness of this important topic, and provide the tools to take action to reduce their website carbon emissions.

Can you provide examples of success stories or key achievements from your focus on digital sustainability?

Chris: We’ve found that we can make a huge impact on the carbon footprint of a site once there's a willingness to improve. For example, when we’ve been given the opportunity to redesign a site from scratch, we’ve averaged a 71% reduction in the CO2 emitted vs the original site. And perhaps more startlingly, when simply given the remit of improving the low hanging fruit on a live site (eg. resizing images, etc), we’ve also been able to make a reduction of 38% on average, just highlighting how much savings are easily within your grasp.

James: I’m excited to share a little info about a project we’ve been working on for some time —?it’s a tool we’re bringing to EcoSend soon and is currently in a testing phase. We’ve seen countless email campaigns across hundreds of different customers and types of business.

One thing we know: marketers love images and they love complex HTML emails. What we didn’t realise until we did some deeper research was just how much code was in even relatively simple emails being sent out to thousands of people. Due to the convenience of “WYSIWYG” editors, it’s all-too-easy for large amount of essentially invisible code to be generated behind the scenes.

With the project we’ve been working on, we’ve seen some customer’s HTML emails reduce to 1/5th(!) the size without ANY visual change whatsoever —?highlighting just how much unnecessary code can be thrown away. In turn, this has meant a reduction in the number of emails getting clipped by Gmail, and increasing deliverability rates across our customer base.

Scott: One Digital Carbon Online user spotted a sudden spike in their website’s carbon emissions. During one month they noticed the emissions of their entire website went up from around 3-4kg CO2e/month to over 6kg.

When they investigated it, they discovered increased traffic to an old, unoptimised web page. The web page in question was from a previous version of the website and contained inaccurate information about products they didn’t sell anymore.

This meant that the increase in CO2e emissions was not only unnecessary, but also potentially brand damaging - the product didn’t exist, was presented in an old brand and if the visitor tried to buy the product it would have led to failure and frustration.

Once updated with the correct brand and product and optimised, the monthly emissions reduced to just under 1kg CO2e/month.

More details can be found here: https://www.digitalcarbon.online/reducing-website-carbon-emissions-example/

What are some key metrics that businesses should use to measure the success of digital sustainability?

Chris: The most relevant one is CO2 emitted, which is possible to record via a number of tools, including Scott Stonham ’s. Another key metric to look at is site speed, which can be easily determined by using the free to access Google Lighthouse report. And finally, whatever core commercial metric you would normally use, such as conversion, as this will ultimately back up the case that doing what’s right for the environment is also right for the commercials of the business.

James: Of course CO2e is one KPI we tend to discuss in the world of digital sustainability, but it should be paired with other business KPIs such as conversion rate, click-through rate, and more —?not because it’s a trade-off, but to highlight the correlation between caring about one and the impact on the other. I agree wholeheartedly with Scott Stonham ’s point on the need for considering other measurements beyond “carbon” to ensure we address more of the issues caused by our digital lives, including the impact of datacentre construction, energy use, and cooling.

Scott:?When talking about the carbon emissions of websites, the primary factor is carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions. There are other things we could and should consider, but the methodology for measuring these is currently even more nascent that website carbon emissions.?

If we look for CO2e, then we need to look beyond single page emissions and understand the cumulative CO2e emissions of a website over time.

On the broader digital sustainability topic we need to extend beyond CO2e emissions to include other greenhouse gasses, water and land use, and both human nature health - as technology has a footprint in each of these.

What resources or tools would you recommend to someone new to digital sustainability?

Chris: For a quick sense of how clean and fast your site is, our online calculator on our sister site, www.carbonconsciouswebsites.com is a useful starting point. For a more in-depth look at your site speed and other elements of good digital housekeeping, I’d recommend using the Google Lighthouse report tool. And if you’d like to read up on the area, I’d recommend the book from the ‘Godfather’ of digital sustainability, Tom Greenwood, Sustainable Web Design.

James: I can’t recommend Tom Greenwood’s book enough! I would also reference Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick, another of the “godfather”s of digital sustainability and someone who has championed for the W3C web standards to incorporate digital sustainability for the best part of 10 years. Understanding the impact of your website is one of the best first steps —?and Scott and Chris have mentioned some great tools. If you want to understand the impact of your email campaigns then we (of course) offer a free tool to help you get a ballpark. https://ecosend.io/carbon-calculator

Scott: Tom Greenwood’s work should be a starting point. If you’re more technically oriented, then follow the Green Web Foundation as they are setting the direction for this work.

If you want to dig deeper into your website’s carbon emissions then I would clearly recommend Digital Carbon Online , you can even get a free carbon assessment of the cumulative CO2e footprint of your home page and the 50 pages it links to.

Interested in Attending This Event? Here's How.

If you're part of the Conscious Marketing Movement, you can join this event for free. Go to the community to get the details. ??

If you're not a member, you're invited to contribute €25 EUR for your ticket to attend. And remember, we give back 1% of all sales, not profits, to 1% FOR THE PLANET. ??Click here to register.?

Become a part of the Conscious Marketing Movement

The Conscious Marketing Movement is a global online community shaping the future of marketing for a better tomorrow. We bring purpose-driven entrepreneurs and conscious marketers together to learn, connect and grow so that we can create social impact and profits.? ??Learn more here

That's all for today!

If you would like to show some love for this newsletter, you can consider buying me a cappuccino with oat milk right here ?. I'll happily sip while writing the next edition, in my favourite local café here in Dresden, Germany.?

See you soon ??