The Data Conversations project is tackling the challenge of environmental sustainability by establishing a practical and reliable set of sustainability Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to provide other European projects consortia with actionable tips, hands-on recommendations, and transferable practices for evaluating sustainable procedures. Read on for a summary of our main findings.

Real-world lessons

While environmental responsibility is a widely discussed topic across the EU project ecosystem, our specific goal is to build upon existing guidelines, pilot a tailored approach, and learn directly from the practical challenges and missteps of implementation. In other words, we want to learn from our own attempts and mistakes to provide real-world lessons for other European consortia.

As described in our previous article, 23 KPIs grouped into five areas have been set up: digital sustainability, materials and design, events and venues, awareness and knowledge sharing, and artistic and cultural sustainability. Targets and straightforward monitoring steps have been designed for each KPI. Alongside these metrics, we introduced an evaluation framework specifically designed to assess how relevant, feasible, and reproducible each indicator is, to ensure that our toolkit can be seamlessly transferred to other projects.

Because effective sustainability is a team effort, the entire monitoring process was co-designed from the ground up, encouraging active and collaborative contributions from all consortium partners.

In February 2026, we completed our first round of data collection (the iterative process involves two further monitoring phases). Immediate perfection is not our goal, and we are still far from claiming that our project has a zero-impact footprint. Instead, we believe it is far more realistic to focus on testing a shared methodology, embracing challenges as learning opportunities, and continuously refining the framework to make it clearer, more effective, and easily reusable without reinventing the wheel.

To evaluate this initial phase and understand how our consortium experienced the process, we conducted a feedback survey among the partners. This survey did not merely yield data on the framework itself, it served as a tool for partners to reflect on their own needs, shortcomings, and strengths throughout this monitoring journey, prompting critical questions: do we have the data we need? Have we implemented the right process to collect it? And is our organisation truly receptive to this type of activity?

Our four main takeaways

Here are the key points for other consortia operating in the creative sector:

1. A lightweight process

The effort required is surprisingly limited. Most partners completed the monitoring process in less than two hours, confirming that it is possible to implement real sustainability standards without taking precious time away from our daily activities.

2. The relevance

A rigid list of indicators is ineffective for the heterogeneous nature of European projects. It is essential for each partner to focus only on the KPIs truly relevant to their role (for example, distinguishing between those organising physical events and those dealing with digital research), thereby avoiding unnecessary cognitive load.

3. Ongoing documentation

Ex-post data retrieval is the main source of friction and potential loss of information. The lesson learned is that sustainability should be managed as a continuous ‘journal’ throughout the lifecycle of the project, rather than as a task to be carried out at the end of the reporting period.

4. Towards digital sustainability

As Artificial Intelligence becomes central to the cultural and creative sector, it is essential to establish clear indicators for the ethical and sustainable use of AI. Reflecting the increasing reliance on AI and data, European project consortia should incorporate specific KPIs to monitor and evaluate the sustainable and ethical application of AI across their workflows.

Stay tuned

Our pilot experience is demonstrating that integrating environmental monitoring practices can result in a collaborative process, transforming monitoring into a moment of shared reflection on one's own impact.

Stay tuned as we continue to share our progress on this sustainable journey!

12 Jun 2026

Measuring our footprint: insights and lessons from our first KPI monitoring round