Our sustainability pledge for 2024/25

Orchestras Live 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.

Sustainability website guidelines

Why do we want a ‘greener’ website?

A more sustainable website can help reduce our digital carbon footprint, lessening the energy required to host and interact with our website content, and the impact on our planet.

Many actions that improve digital sustainability can also improve the user experience on our website and make it easier for visitors to our website get the information they need.

What will we do?

Design​

• Consider digital sustainability when making future design changes​ – weighing up the benefit of visual design versus increased page weight/carbon footprint to make informed choices

Video​

• Limit to one embedded video per project page where possible​
• Change embedded videos to hyperlinks for news items older than 2 years​
• See video guidelines document for further suggestions​

Images​

• Use .WEBP file format for all new uploaded images​
• Remove header images from news items​

Content​

• Set word limits/page weight budgets for different types of pages (e.g. news, project)​
• Schedule annual audit to remove old pages (e.g. news items older than 2 years)