by Brianna Crandall — March 13, 2019 — The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) recently announced the launch of a new campus sustainability website and Benchmarking Tool for the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS).
STARS is a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. STARS is intended to engage and recognize the full spectrum of higher education institutions, from community colleges to research universities. The framework encompasses long-term sustainability goals for already high-achieving institutions, as well as entry points of recognition for institutions that are taking first steps toward sustainability.
Relaunched STARS website
The campus sustainability website was redesigned to make it easier for institutions to learn about STARS and get support during the reporting process as well as to offer advanced tools to facilitate benchmarking with STARS data. The site also provides recognition to STARS-rated institutions and is designed to increase participation in the program.
STARS campus sustainability website preview courtesy of AASHE
The new website boasts a clean design and intuitive navigation system with improved menu functionality that directs you to the information most applicable to you. It is also fully responsive to mobile devices, making it easy to navigate on a wide range of web browsers and portable devices.
New STARS Benchmarking Tool
A key feature of the new website is the STARS Benchmarking Tool, an application that allows AASHE members to compare colleges and universities based on the scores and metrics reported through STARS. You can use the Benchmarking Tool to:
- Select institutions or create groups of institutions for comparison;
- Select data points and generate charts to compare your selected institutions or groups;
- Save your benchmarks for later use or to share with others; and
- Download data for further analysis.
An informative “how-to” section provides an overview of the tool and helpful campus sustainability videos.
Another feature of the new website is the Help Center, which features over 100 articles organized by level of knowledge and by STARS main categories. Each article contains helpful information including FAQs, templates, examples and additional resources.
No changes to the design or functionality of the Reporting Tool or STARS Reports have been made at this time. Users can still log in and submit their data in the same format as they did before the redesign. AASHE plans to refresh the Reporting Tool and STARS Reports in a phase two of this project at a later date.
View the new STARS website and Benchmarking Tool online.
