Introducing the Umbraco Sustainability Challenge

The digital industry uses huge amounts of power & water to keep our infrastructure up and running. In real terms, the impact of digital is equivalent to the entire airline industry, or the same amount of carbon as Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangladesh, The Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia combined. 

In an evolving digital world, where it is expected that our emissions will increase, we need to take a stand collectively to make a difference in the digital products and services that we are creating. 

So here lies the opportunity to be creative, and we’re encouraging you, your clients, and your Umbraco websites to sign up for the Umbraco Sustainability Challenge; Shaping Sustainable Umbraco Websites Together!

The goal

As an industry, we’re still working on what are the best approaches to make our websites more sustainable. We want to see creativity, collaboration, and thinking outside the box. 

What are your great ideas to make your websites more sustainable? 

How you do that is up to you! You could:

• Write code, you can clean up your website content & data, 
• Educate teams, clients & users
• Make changes to your production processes (such as turning off your testing environment outside of office hours).

The winners will show new and unbound ways of thinking and demonstrate measurable impact. Don’t limit yourself!

Don't be afraid to communicate, work within the community and ask questions. Share your progress and results and inspire each other to make a bigger impact. 

The dates

The startup phase -starting October 4th 2023 (World Energy Efficiency Day)

We’ll start the first phase of our challenge together! Today, we kick off and share some first best practices and some hints and tips. In the first 20 days, we’ll help you to inspire your organization, teams, and clients to participate. By raising awareness you’re already on to a winner! Then, at the end of this first phase, you can let us know which website(s) you’d like to use for your part in the challenge.

Once you’re ready, submit for the challenge by October 24 Update 25/10/2024: based on feedback, we have decided to prolong the deadline until 1/11: https://feedback.umbraco.com/sustainability-challenge-sign-up 

The get-your-hands-dirty phase - starting October 24th 2023 (International Day of Climate Action)

With all participants signed up, we’ll enter the next phase where we’ll get our hands dirty and our websites more green!

We ask you to start with some research on your participating sites. Gather some benchmarks, screenshots, and statistics to show the current state. This is a really important step so you can make an accurate comparison and show what has improved and the impact you’ve had.

Now is the time to get going! What you do, what tools you use, and where you’re focusing is up to you. This challenge is all about your own ideas so be creative.

There’s no rush, but to make a meaningful impact you’ll have 3 months for this phase. This will give you enough time to invest, adjust, measure, and improve.

Tip: for inspiration, please check out our brand-new Sustainability Best Practices. Here you can find hands-on tips and inspiration to get you going.

Sharing-is-caring phase - Deadline for sharing results: February 19th 2024 (Umbraco Day Umbraco’s 19th birthday)

The final phase of the challenge consists of sharing your results with the world! Optimizing your website is nice, but sharing what you did is even more important! By sharing your insights, your successes, and your failures, we will grow as a community! 

As a participant, you need to share the results with us. We’d like you to share this in a green format, so think carefully about how you could do that (more info on this will come). 

The we-all-won-but-a-few-won-a-bit-more phase - On March 23, 2024 (Earth Hour)

The Sustainability Community Team will review and announce the winners of the challenge. By signing up for the challenge you already won, because you made a bit of impact, H5YR! 

But in this phase, we want to give the ones making the biggest impact more attention and award them with some amazing prices!

The rules

• Everyone can participate (end users, organizations, agencies, Umbraco HQ employees, sustainability team members).
• You can only participate with an Umbraco website URL (we do not care about the version)
• We’d like to share your learnings and the final impact that you have made with the wider community through Umbraco’s public channels (blog, SoMe, etc). 
• The winners will be picked by members of the sustainability team. We do not use specific metrics to pick the winner; it’s all about what you did & what you shared!

Go make a difference!

We can’t wait to see what you end up doing to improve your projects. 

Remember that you can find best practice tips right here and remember to submit your project by the 24th of October

 

Join the Sustainability Challenge 

 

Good luck, go make a difference!