Dickinson College
IN-24: Innovation A

Dickinson has broken new ground in higher education sustainability reporting by launching an interactive public online dashboard to display sustainability performance metrics in 2016. The purpose of Dickinson's Sustainability Dashboard is to provide, in an open and transparent way, quantifiable and accurate metrics of Dickinson’s current and historical sustainability performance for use by a variety of constituencies. These constituencies include (i) members of Dickinson's sustainability staff and committees, (ii) members of the all-college committees, (iii) senior officers and administrators of the College, (iv) the Board of Trustees, (v) members of the Dickinson community, including students and their families, alumni, faculty, staff and retirees, (vi) prospective students and their families, (vii) members of the Carlisle and other communities that are affected by the College, (viii) external evaluators and (ix) current and prospective donors and grant funding agencies. Intended and expected uses of the information are to monitor Dickinson’s sustainability performance, identify areas of high and low performance, enable the College to make decisions to improve performance, hold ourselves accountable for our sustainability performance, and enable others to hold us accountable. Additionally, all data will be housed and be visible in one location to improve ease of use and data reliability. Our Sustainability Dashboard allows users to explore up to date performance metrics for student learning, campus operation and community wellbeing as it relates to sustainability. Example metrics included on the dashboard include greenhouse gas and campus energy use, college farm production, waste minimization, water consumption, diversity of student body and employees, and sustainability across the curriculum outcomes, and sustainability faculty development projects to name a few. The dashboard has received great feedback from within Dickinson, inquires from other institutions as to how it was built, and has served as an internal tool in countless instances. This tool also provides a single source for auditing and validating AASHE Stars reporting in a transparent way.

Dickinson is monitoring our performance over time and holding ourselves accountable for advancing sustainability. Our Sustainability Dashboard allows users to explore up to date performance metrics for student learning, campus operation and community wellbeing as it relates to sustainability. The Sustainability Dashboard serves as both an interactive web-based tool for internal college administration and research and external audiences to the college. This dashboard is really the first of its kind to use the Tableau software platform to visualize sustainability performance throughout the institution.