Measuring the Impact of Digital Communications

Alisa Bonsignore, the founder of Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC, has spent the last few years increasingly focused on sustainable digital communications. As a content strategist with more than 25 years’ experience with a multinational clientele, Alisa was becoming increasingly concerned by the amount of digital work that her clients were generating for the sake of creation-based metrics. We need apps! Videos! Huge banner images! Daily email campaigns!

We have been raised in the era where paper was seen as dirty and wasteful, while digital was perceived as clean and harmless.

Eh, maybe not so harmless.

If every bit and byte of the digital work that we create is nothing more than energy, our work has a measurable carbon footprint — and not a small one. Alisa’s content strategy work for clients has increasingly incorporated sustainability metrics alongside other best practices for content design that focus on usability and accessibility. It has resulted in significant reductions in carbon emissions for those organizations, and good stories to tell in their ESG reports.