The final element of the project was to make the project’s findings widely available.
Rather than produce and circulate a project report, it was decided to develop two websites. The first site (this one) is written mainly for sustainability standards practitioners – people who are directly involved in developing, researching, implementing or promoting the use of sustainability standards systems. This site has a technical role – it describes the project, explains our methodology, and presents our results.
The second site Sustainability Standards 101 is intended to be a sustainability standards and certification communications demonstration website.
The demonstration site has two main purposes.
- The site’s primary purpose is didactic: the site is intended to illustrate how the framing tools developed during the project can be used in practice. The hope is that this will help and encourage practitioners to use the same tools in the development of their own websites and communication documents.
- The second purpose is to provide an easy reference point for anyone who wants to know what sustainability standards are, how they contribute to sustainability, and how they could be used to make a greater contribution in the future. A kind of ‘sustainability standards 101’.
We hope the site demonstrates the validity of the framing tools that we have developed. If you found the site to be clear, simple and convincing, then we are on the right track. We should emphasize, however, that the site is highly preliminary. If the feedback is positive, then we would like to develop the site further – in an ideal world we would like it to become the first reference point for members of the public seeking a clear explanation of sustainability standards. We would like to make it a hub, connecting to other sites that use a similar approach to communications.
But that’s for a future project – in the mean time, please tell us what you think of the site so far…