Transcript for Cutting Through podcast Season 2 Episode 2

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Jonathan Holt  This is Cutting Through, the podcast for corporate digital communicators. You’ve probably heard about web sustainability, the idea that the internet has a carbon impact greater than certain countries, and that if we all work together to do digital communication more sustainably, those efforts can have real impact.

But do you have a plan to make that happen? Where should you begin, and is it even possible to communicate sustainably in a time of AI and its famously energy-gobbling footprint? We’ll dig into these and many other questions in this episode of Cutting Through. I’m Jonathan Holt, Head of Strategic Insights at Bowen Craggs, here with Scott Payton, Chief Executive.

And together, we know a bit about this topic, since it’s one of the benchmarking metrics in the Corporate Digital Communications Index. But it’s a real privilege to have with us a true expert in the field of web sustainability, Tim Frick. Tim’s credentials in this area are huge. For the past 12 years, he’s co-chaired the World Wide Web Consortium Sustainable Web Group, where he’s been instrumental in creating and evolving sustainability guidelines for the web.

He helps organisations communicate more sustainably through Mightybytes, the Chicago-based agency that he founded. And he has also literally written the book on web sustainability. Tim, welcome.

Tim Frick   Thanks for having me.

Jonathan   So, Tim, I wonder if you would tell us how you personally came to be so involved in web sustainability. It’s quite a niche cause to tie yourself to, and one that you’ve managed to be very influential with. So how did you get there?

Tim   Yeah, thanks. When you think about things like ecological overshoot and climate change and kind of all of these big things, it gets to be pretty overwhelming. And I was very much in that spot in the early 2010s. Also, as an individual, it can make you feel very helpless. Like, this is a big, huge worldwide global problem. What can my little agency of a few people do to even impact anything?

And I was thinking about a lot of those things, and we discovered B Corp certification. And so the company became a certified B Corp in 2011. And that’s, for those who aren’t familiar with it, basically a rigorous certification that helps companies adhere to very high levels of transparency and accountability around social, ecological, and economic impact.

And so we went through that certification. It was eye-opening. The process itself was eye-opening. And around the same time, there were all these reports coming out about the ecological and environmental impact of the internet, and that it was huge, and that it was bigger than some countries’ impact and all that kind of stuff. And we were like, well, that’s kind of what we build for a living, so maybe we can do something there.

You know, maybe that might be the area where we can actually make a meaningful or even a measurable difference. And so we started exploring what that actually meant and what that could mean. And more importantly, if we’re doing it, and there are almost 500,000 agencies around the world, if other agencies started doing it too, there could be a very large collective impact around this kind of thing.

So we spent years working on processes and practices and all of this kind of stuff. And as you mentioned earlier, we started a group within the World Wide Web Consortium that at the time was just a community group, but then turned into an interest group to create the web sustainability guidelines. So, over time, we’ve been able to create all of these kinds of assets and resources for organisations to follow suit with the things that we’re doing.

Jonathan   It’s been a years-long commitment then. And people may be familiar with the World Wide Web Consortium because of the accessibility guidelines that have also emanated from there, and which have gradually become more and more official, with now being backed into law in many countries in different ways. And I think that’s the idea behind these guidelines.

So what’s the latest on the web sustainability guidelines?

Tim   Sure, yeah, and you’re spot on. I mean, think: if you’ve used the web, you’ve been impacted in some way, shape, or form by the World Wide Web Consortium’s work. HTML, CSS, JavaScript – kind of all of the baseline open standards of the web – they’ve influenced things greatly.

And as you mentioned, accessibility was huge and has been around for 25 years now. And the European Accessibility Act and other countries around the world have already started incorporating those guidelines into standards and regulations and legislative guidance and all that kind of stuff.

Our goal with the World Wide Web Consortium’s web sustainability guidelines was to essentially do the same thing, but for sustainability. The idea being that we could learn from both the successes and mistakes that the W3C accessibility guidelines have made.

There’s a group there that we’ve met with multiple times to actually learn from them and understand what to do, what not to do. They’ve been super helpful in giving us some guidance around that kind of stuff.

And as I mentioned earlier, the group was started originally in 2013 to share resources, to just say, “I’m thinking about sustainability. Are there any resources around?” And in 2013, there really weren’t.

And so for us, it was like, all right, well, let’s start to create some of those resources and find like-minded individuals and build community around those resources. And by the time the pandemic rolled around and people started being marginally cognisant of the fact that we’re spending all of our time online, and that that all uses electricity, and that there generally tends to be a little bit more awareness around the impact of our digital products and services and daily lives and stuff, the number of resources related to that by 2021 versus 2013 was just overwhelming.

It was a much, much larger group of academic papers and studies and blogs and all kinds of resources. So at that time, we decided the time was finally ripe to create these guidelines—to basically collect all that knowledge and distill it down into a set of recommendations that digital teams and businesses could use to create better products and services that incorporate sustainability principles into design, development, product management, et cetera.

Jonathan   I want to bring in Scott and ask if you would recap a bit about Bowen Craggs’ journey in relation to this area of communication. I mentioned earlier that we have a benchmarking metric that focuses on this. Where did that begin, and where have we gotten to?

Scott Payton   Yeah. Hi, Jonathan. Hi, Tim. Thanks, Tim, for joining us. So our web sustainability journey began in 2022, I think. It was around Bowen Craggs’ 20th birthday as a company. And we got to know Tim and some others.

We were just starting to recognise that a lot of our clients at the time were unveiling big company-wide climate change strategies. And it seemed important for those companies to be walking the walk in all aspects of their communications activities, as well as their other areas of their business.

And clearly, we advise companies on their online channels, and those channels have a carbon footprint. They have an impact on the environment. So it seemed to make sense to incorporate an analysis of that as part of our overall benchmarking activity.

And what we discovered through working with Tim and others and learning more about this is there is a wonderful correlation—a tight correlation—between web sustainability and accessibility and good usability. And so a lot of the things that make a website easy to use and impactful are entirely correlated with sustainability and accessibility.

So it’s been a great fit, really, because there are lots of win-win-wins.

Jonathan   Yeah. And at the same time, it’s a slow journey. I mean, it’s been a percolation for people. Some people have more instantly gotten it and wanted to excel in this area, and some, I think, have been a bit slower on the uptake.

But there have definitely been some positive effects from Bowen Craggs’ advocacy, and a number of companies in our Index have done some quite visible things to try to both raise awareness and improve their own impacts.

But still, I think there are a lot of communicators out there that are probably new to this. What would you advise someone who hasn’t really started assessing and trying to improve their web sustainability?

Tim   Sure, yeah. I think the most important thing—and this was kind of what we did way back when as well—is just figuring out what it is, focusing on what it is that you can actually have impact on.

That could be moving to a greener web host, or that could be making your page weight a little bit lighter. It could be a number of different things. And I think it’s also important to understand who the other stakeholders in your organisation working on sustainability are.

Really, sustainability should be one of these things that weaves itself throughout the entire DNA of an organisation, including its digital communications department. So figuring out what other people are doing and understanding how that could – or maybe doesn’t – align with the work that you’re doing or want to do.

And then just finding those kind of like-minded, values-aligned people who can start to champion the cause. We’ve heard lots of organisations doing lunch-and-learns and creating affinity groups, like cross-functional teams, around advancing sustainability within an organisation.

And that looks different for a digital team than, say, it does for a packaging team or a transportation or logistics team or whatever. However, the principles are generally the same. Understanding what you’re already doing is a great way to know where you are today, to figure out where you want to go tomorrow.

And then also, it’s a learning journey. Sustainability is always a learning journey, and it’s a constant focus on continuous improvement. A lot of communicators especially have made the unfortunate mistake of banging the drum on something without really understanding what it is that they’re doing.

I think back on that COP28 website where they created a low-carbon mode that you had to turn on. They got a lot of slack over that because it wasn’t really—it ended up being a form of digital greenwashing, ultimately, because they didn’t make the commitment that was needed. It was really just kind of a hat tip to this kind of stuff, as opposed to a fundamental core, which you would think for a climate change conference would be core to the being of the organisation.

And that’s fine. They can evolve and learn over time and make different mistakes, and make better mistakes, maybe.

Jonathan   Well, I know from some of our previous conversations that even you, who spend so much time thinking about this, have found that there’s a bit of a dearth of live case studies of websites that are doing this really, really well, who are not doing the greenwashing thing. So you’ve used your own website as a living case study.

I wonder what you learned through that process that might be transferable for others who want to make some legitimate progress on this.

Tim   Yeah. I mean, thank you for bringing that up. And I think that’s a good example. Mightybytes has been around for—it’ll be 28 years in February. So we’ve been around for a while. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, so we’ve learned a whole lot of things.

But you would think a 28-year-old web design firm would know a thing or two about designing websites, and yet here we were faced with redesigning our own website. And we ended up deciding that learning needed to be a really core part of that journey, and that we were going to give ourselves a little bit of flexibility around that.

And we learned a ton of stuff—things that we thought we knew, things we didn’t know—and just kind of experimented with them. We realised how finicky, for example, SVGs can be. That was just one thing that we were like, well, we typically had used SVGs when we could, but this site had both a light mode and a dark mode, and the SVGs needed to change colour based on the mode they were in.

So we had to programmatically change those based on the colour mode. There were a lot of levels of complication that we went through as part of that journey. And we probably could have just said, no, let’s find a neutral colour that will work in both. But we wanted to experiment so that we could find the best possible way to make the most sustainable website possible.

Jonathan   Well, it’s interesting you mention dark mode, because that’s one of the things that I think some people may wonder whether it is a form of greenwashing in itself if it is put forward as, for example, the sole act that someone is doing to try to depict seriousness there.

Do you think that has a significant impact, and are we at a point where those initial efforts to do something fairly simple—although you’ve just told us how it can be quite complex—are we moving beyond that initial stage in review?

Tim   I’d like to think so. I think dark mode is a good example of things that could potentially be construed as greenwashing. It does reduce energy on some kinds of screens, but not necessarily on others. So understanding the nuances of those things is a many-layered onion, and again, a continuous learning journey.

However, dark mode also works well for people with some visual disabilities better than light mode does. It gave us an opportunity as part of this process to create an accessibility control panel for the sustainable web design site. When we built that a few years ago, we decided to apply that to our own site.

And so it gives you an opportunity to highlight important elements of web design, like accessibility, which people might be a little bit more familiar with than sustainability, which is a little bit more emergent. Being able to highlight those things and put them front and centre in the interface and the UI and the experience makes our website not just a marketing site, but also an educational tool.

So I think anything that organisations can do to foster that is going to be good in the long run.

Jonathan   Well, let’s take a short break, and when we come back, we’ll talk about the implications of AI on web sustainability. 

[interlude: A new era of corporate communications is here and the good news is that the digital team is at the forefront like never before. The bad news is that, the digital team is at the forefront, like never before. At Bowen Craggs, we only do corporate digital communications advice, and we’ve got all eyes on the twists and turns and opportunity zones in this particular corner of communication, working with many of the world’s largest corporate brands all over the world. For our latest insights on everything from AI search to how our corporate estates are evolving, visit our website. Bowencraggs.com]

Jonathan   Scott, I wonder if you would like to take over and ask some questions about AI as well.

Scott   Yeah. I've got one question actually about the Web Sustainability Guidelines. The thing that fascinates me... Well, first thing, I would definitely recommend that if you’re involved in building or managing a corporate website, do read those draft guidelines now, because they’re full of practical tips and advice.

I always see them as almost like the sibling to the accessibility guidelines that came before them. And if you look at those guidelines now, they are very much seen in the web industry as the standard by which every company is expected to meet those standards.

Now there’s the European Digital Accessibility Act, and there’s a lot – it’s a big deal. Companies, setting aside the moral obligation to make their websites accessible, now face legal and regulatory requirements.

Looking at the web sustainability guidelines, do you see those following a similar path and essentially becoming, down the line in the coming months and years, an internationally recognised standard by which all companies should meet?

Tim   That is the hope. I’m crossing my fingers here, yeah, for sure. And I think it also ties into the question about AI as well. That is changing so quickly and so fast.

In fact, the version of the web sustainability guidelines that was released earlier today actually has a new tag specifically for AI and has 38 different points of reference within the guidelines that basically say, okay…

Scott   Yeah.

Tim.  …lots of AI is delivered via the web. Here are some things that you can do to make more responsible choices around that.

So I think both AI and web sustainability can influence sustainability moving forward and influence the future of the web. Regulatory guidance is going to be key to that. And so we’re making sure that our guidelines are as rigorous as possible around that.

During this horizontal review process, we’ll be talking to regulators about what is meaningful for them. Historically, we’ve written them for practitioners who are building digital products and services, so they resonate very well with them, as well as product managers and marketers.

Those guidelines are also going to need to resonate with legislators. They’re going to need to be clear and easy to understand so legislators can say, okay, I can wrap my head around this and make some regulatory guidance around it.

So it’s a lot of spinning plates and a lot of goals, but I don’t think any of them are conflicting. I think they’re all trying to move us in the right direction toward a better web that works better for people and the planet.

Scott   Yeah, and some of the clients we’ve worked with who’ve made headway in making their web presence more sustainable and more carbon-efficient seem to have found additional benefits. Pages are faster loading. Information is easier to find. There’s less waffle or clutter or window dressing.

And the end result is more accessible. So again, it does seem to be this kind of win-win-win situation.

Tim   For sure, yeah. And if you don’t mind, I’ll share a story related to that. There are the obvious things like lighter, faster pages that UX designers and web developers focus on, but then there’s the day-to-day maintenance aspect.

One of the last steps we did in redesigning our website was embedding the email marketing newsletter signup forms. And we realised just as we were about to launch that the forms were adding a 70-kilobyte font every time they were embedded on a page.

We had a page performance budget of 500 kilobytes, and we really wanted to get down around 250 to 350 for every page. That’s pretty tight. If you’ve ever designed a website, that’s not a lot of assets.

So we reached out to Ecosend, an amazing B Corp alternative to Mailchimp, and they built a new feature that gave users the choice to use a system font, which avoided that 70-kilobyte transfer.

That one simple request now potentially affects millions of page views across their platform. And so it’s those little things that come up in the day-to-day care and maintenance of your product or service where you realise there’s a better way to do this.

Scope 3, especially, is going to require partnerships and cooperation. And this is an example of partnering with great organisations willing to work on this stuff and creating collective outcomes that are bigger than the sum of the parts.

Scott.  So to ask a massive, big existential question: what are the implications of this explosion of generative AI on web sustainability? Is it a blessing, a curse, or a bit of both?

Tim   A threat and a gift, I think. That’s the phrase that came up when we were prepping. And I think it’s both.

Without being more intentional and mindful in the way we implement AI and the tools that incorporate it, we’re running up against a big threat. But it’s also a really powerful technology that’s going to change digital communications, the world, and every business in it.

So figuring out how to strike that balance—being mindful and intentional, not “move fast and break things,” but maybe move slower and plant things—is going to be key. Every organisation is going to have to look at their own ecosystem and figure out how to make their AI implementation more of a gift than a threat.

Scott   Yeah. I like “moving slowly and planting things.”

Talking about people moving quickly and breaking things: the architects of the big AI search tools and chatbots are transforming how people interrogate the web and get information. If you ask ChatGPT a question about a company, you get an answer from the chatbot rather than the website.

Do you have thoughts on the implications of AI search specifically?

Tim   Yeah, it’s very top of mind for all of our clients and for us. I know your last podcast episode was dedicated to that topic.

It’s evolving quickly. Clients are seeing drops in traffic and not getting the performance they once did, despite huge investments in search optimisation. When that investment starts to get undercut, people pay attention.

So figuring out how to build websites that provide information effectively to chatbots and AI tools—generative engine optimisation—is going to be another add-on to what SEOs already do.

Scott   Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of research into AI search optimisation. One thing that does seem to matter is lightweight, fast-loading pages.

Again, there seems to be a pleasing correlation between AI search optimisation and web sustainability.

Tim.  Sure. Ever since Core Web Vitals, that’s been an SEO concern anyway. People already paying attention to page performance shouldn’t have to pivot dramatically. They’re already doing best practices that will continue to matter as AI impacts content.

Jonathan.  You mentioned new AI guidance in the Web Sustainability Guidelines. Can you give us some brief insights into what’s being advised?

Tim.  There’s guidance across all categories: user experience design, web development, hosting and infrastructure, and product and business strategy.

Those 38 AI references are sprinkled across the guidelines. So business leaders can find strategy tips on choosing conscientious suppliers. Product managers, UX designers, and developers all have relevant guidance.

There are almost 100 guidelines total, and the expectation is never to do all of them. The tagging and filtering system—like the AI tag—helps people focus on what they can impact now.

Scott.  It’s not just technology changing the debate around sustainability; it’s also humans. Over the last 18 months, there’s been a significant backlash against ESG in parts of the world, while other societies continue to take sustainability seriously.

How has that affected progress on web sustainability?

Tim.  It’s definitely challenging, especially in the U.S. We’ve seen some clients deprioritise web sustainability due to political pressure.

In that environment, things like optimising images inevitably take a back seat. Where we’ve seen success is helping people understand that sustainability isn’t just about carbon emissions. It’s a holistic view of what works better for people, businesses, and the planet.

Scott   Jonathan, this is close to your heart. Any thoughts?

Jonathan   We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about opposing political pressures having a potentially positive formative effect.

Do you think these guidelines might ultimately be strengthened by the challenges, or is it just something that has to be weathered?

Tim   I think it’s both. The backlash is inevitable, but so is the rebuttal.

The B Corp community is a great example. They’ve been vocal in standing by ESG and DEI, and they now have nearly 20 years of data showing that companies focused on these things perform better over time.

The web sustainability guidelines fully embrace that way of thinking. So now may be a great time to reevaluate your relationship with content, websites, and AI in a more intentional, long-term way.

Scott   As part of our benchmarking, we use technical tools to evaluate web sustainability, but none seem perfect. Are tools like Ecograder and website carbon calculators getting better? What’s your recommendation?

Tim   We launched Ecograder in 2013 as an awareness tool and have continued evolving it. The current beta incorporates the web sustainability guidelines.

Many tools focus narrowly on carbon emissions, but sustainability needs to include social and economic factors too. Ecograder tries to keep accessibility and data privacy from getting lost.

The tools are improving, but they’re starting points. They’re useful for awareness and comparison, not definitive answers.

Jonathan   So people should see them as imperfect indicators, part of a bigger picture?

Tim   Exactly. People can get obsessed with numbers, but really this is about education and awareness. If you’re serious, you may need more rigorous assessments beyond just plugging in a URL.

Tools are helpful, but they’re only the beginning.

Jonathan   Finally, what should we expect in 2026?

Tim   We’ll be releasing our W3C Notes, which we hope will inspire legislation globally. In the U.S., there will be continued political volatility.

Organisations will need agility, especially communicators who are telling these stories amid constant change. Hopefully, our guidelines can help navigate that.

Jonathan.  The idea of going slow and planting things feels like the perfect metaphor for riding that roller coaster.

I hope you’ll come back and fill us in on how this evolves.

Tim   Absolutely. I hope when we have this conversation a year from now, the news is all good. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan   Indeed.

Scott   Thanks so much.

Jonathan.  As usual, you can find show notes on our website at bowencraggs.com. See you next time.

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