Abstract

A common goal of sustainability administrators is to raise environmental awareness and sustainability efforts by sharing the data that they collect with the public. However, they generally encounter many challenges in publicizing data and promoting environmental awareness to their campus due to the lack of an efficient system. Berea College’s Office of Sustainability, like many sustainable departments in higher education, struggled to provide data in a meaningful way to the community, despite a wealth of data being collected. The major challenges include time and labor intensiveness in organizing large datasets, data entry errors, and publishing it to a common platform. In response, an integrated platform for managing and displaying sustainability data, known as the Sustainability Dashboard Management System (SDMS), has been constructed to raise awareness around campus about ways in which the community can improve their conservation habits. The system serves as an effective means to promote environmental awareness and to encourage sustainable behaviors in individuals on the campus. Additionally, the system enables administrative duties to be efficiently executed by resolving conventional challenges encountered in storing and organizing large data, entering it into a system, conveniently illustrating it in meaningful graphs, and promptly sharing it with the community via a website. Not only does it provide a valuable form of environmental assessment, integral to strategic planning and decision-making for the sustainability data stakeholders, but it also serves as a communication tool to society by means of comprehensive graphical displays.