Welcome to the Edinburgh Festivals Green Venue Guide

Skip to: Joining the GVI / Using the Site

The Green Venue Initiative aims to reduce the carbon emissions of venues in Edinburgh’s Festivals. It encourages, supports, facilitates and recognises venues that are ready to monitor, measure and reduce their environmental impact, or who are already doing some of this work.

The Green Venue Guide is aimed at managers of venues who are using buildings (or creating venues) in order to present a programme of festival events or performances. These buildings will often be used for some other purposes during the rest of the year or owned and run by someone else, but the suggestions and tips should be practical for anyone managing a venue even for a short period. The Guide is also applicable to owners of buildings used as year-round venues.

If you're a venue in one of the Edinburgh Festivals and you're interested in joining the Green Venue Initiative, the first step is to contact us and let us know. We can arrange a starter meeting with one of our Environment Team to talk over the GVI with you and get you started.We ask everyone who joins the GVI to sign off on four commitments and also agree to take a few particular concrete actions to improve their environmental performance. In return, we offer staff support to help you become greener, access to deals we've arranged with some green suppliers, and eligibility for our Green Venue Award, which we're planning to launch in 2012. This webtool is here to help you meet those commitments and plan your green actions: read on to find out how it works and how to get started.

Skip to: Having a Browse / Joining the Site / Updating Your Guide

We've built a site that's simple to use and which can help you plan your environmental actions. Here's how to get started. And remember, if you're ever having trouble, just contact us and we'll be able to help.

Having a Browse

You can start just by reading through what the Green Venue Guide has to offer. On the front page you'll find links to different parts of the site. Click Browse the Guide to have a look through all the ideas, information and tips.

You'll find at the top of the menu a few links to help you get started, introducing your commitments, the points system, and some starter actions; the core of the guide, which is a series of action lists from Data Gathering to Catering, packed with ideas about greening your venue; and also Appendices with more information about everything in the guide, including links to some  of our partner green suppliers.

All of this information can be downloaded in the pdf version of our Green Venue Guide, so you can read it offline too.

Joining the Site

First, click sign up from the top menu bar to provide account details. You'll receive an automatic verification email, and once you've clicked the link you'll be able to log in to the site.

Second, once you've logged in, go to the Venues page and click on the venue you're working for. There, you'll be able to click "apply to manage this venue", a request which can be approved by one of our site admins or by someone from your venue's team. Once you're approved, you'll be able to update your venue's action lists.

Updating Your Guide

Once you've joined a venue, you can click on Update your actions on the front page to begin using the interactive part of the site. On your venue's front page, you'll see some information about your venue and its festivals, your action lists and current star ratings, and a list of your venue's users, which you can add or remove as needed.

If you click on one of the action lists on this page or in the left-hand menu bar, you'll see a series of the actions we've suggested you take to improve your environmental performance. These are listed under 'Green', the first steps for every venue, 'Greener', for venues already well on the way to becoming sustainable, and 'Bright Green', for venues who want to lead the way in environmental management. Here's how the actions work:

1. The title and description of the action you can take.
2. Click here for ideas about how you can achieve the action, and links to more information.
3. Click one of these options to tell us what you're doing with this action: a box will pop up for you to tell us how you're getting on. For "We have done this" you can tell us how it went and you'll get the points for that action; for "Planning to do this" you can give yourself a deadline and we'll send you helpful reminders; for "We can't do this" you can tell us what problems you've encountered and we'll try and find a way to help; and for "Not relevant to us" you can tell us why the action doesn't work for you.
4. Tells you the current status of this action, according to what you've clicked in 3.
5. Tells you the points available for this action - obviously, the more important the action and the more work it involves, the more points you can gain. Your star rating for each task list is calculated from the percentage of the overall points available you've achieved. You can read more about this on the About Points page.
6. Click one of these tabs to see the different task lists.

To help you get started on your actions, we've put together a list of Top Ten Actions: the things you can do that are the most important and quickest to begin with. If you're just beginning environmental work in your venue, or find the size of the project daunting, then this is definitely the place to start.

When you've started completing the actions, you might want to download a summary of everything you've done or planned so far. On the front page, click Download your summary to get a pdf summary of your interactive guide.