3. Raising awareness and onboarding supporters

In order to implement an eco-design approach, it is necessary to find allies within your organization (colleagues, CSR department, directors, etc.). There are a number of strategies you can employ to achieve this. That being said, it is once again more realistic to start small (with a conference for instance) before implementing a broader strategy.

a. Your team

There are already a lot of initiatives that can be built within your team or your department:

• Provide feedback after participating in a training program.
• Organize mini-workshops/training programs within your team to learn how to use resources and plugins.
• Offer to audit the service during a team meeting.
• Have an "eco-design commitment" workshop as a team.
• Analyze technical criteria from GreenIT with the development teams.
• Seize every opportunity to raise awareness among coworkers: discussions about editorial content, features, components, a given webpage, etc.
• Share professional resources with your colleagues (e.g. lists of best practices in web development).
• Continue to motivate your team to achieve regular improvements, which is a pillar of the eco-design approach.
• Propose a department-wide policy of digital sustainability.

b. Your organization

When a core group of people promote the eco-design approach internally, it is often possible to start influencing the organization as a whole on the following points (depending on its maturity with the topics):

• Get involved with other teams to present eco-design tools (GreenIT Analysis, etc.).
• Give a talk on eco-design for the members of your organization.
  • Share feedback on the eco-design's implementation on a website.
  • Spread awareness about content redundancy.
  • Explain the impact of eco-design on user journeys.
  • etc.
• Organize a Digital Cleanup Day.
• Organize workshops to raise awareness: Designers Ethiques' Fresco, the Climate Fresk, the Digital Collage, atelier 2 tonnes (French), etc. Help the digital teams and the sales teams adapt to these issues.
• Establish an eco-design training program with the organization's corporate university.
• Spread awareness among decision makers to secure budget. This can be done with a benchmark of what competitors have already implemented on the topic.

c. Your clients

Many of you work in BtoB or with agencies. Clients will exhibit a wide range of receptivity to environmental concerns: it will be up to you to gauge what is achievable for them!

• Mention eco-design, or better yet, spread awareness about it, depending on how receptive they are.
  • Talk about eco-design and sustainable digital technologies in the presales phase.
  • Include a "light" eco-design audit in your UX audits.
  • Propose a free one-hour conference or workshop about eco-design.
  • Connect eco-design criteria to performance criteria to persuade them with the expected gains in loading times (See Persuading and Spreading Awareness).
• Define eco-design targets with the client.
• Master the most convincing arguments in favor of eco-design in order to better be able to challenge the client when they express their needs/requirements (See Persuading and Spreading Awareness).
• Conduct an in-depth analysis of your client's website from an eco-design standpoint (assessing user journeys' impacts, etc.).
• Apply the eco-design approach without mentioning it when working with reluctant clients: only mention eco-design at the end of the project to highlight the added value.
• Prepare contributors' guides for all clients in order to avoid any performance loss over time.