Why I decided to integrate SustainabilityForum.com into TheEnvironmentSite.org

The last few months have been quite eventful to say the least. Our move back to Germany and the consequential life-change nudged me to make a decision what to do with the other websites I was running over the past years next to this blog.

The problem I was facing was, that I had lots of interesting ideas and things I wanted to do with the sites but I simply did not have enough time anymore to actually make them happen. I just could not fulfill my own high quality expectations anymore.

Integrating SustainabilityForum.com topics into TheEnvironmentSite.org
As a consequence, I decided to integrate the most popular topics from SustainabilityForum.com into my new but much larger website called TheEnvironmentSite.org. I recently finished the redevelopment of TheEnvironmentSite.org and the community has been steadily growing ever since.

SustainabilityForum.com was constantly growing as well but in the end it was a clear choice to pick the site with the most traffic, the largest community and the website that was most suited for further development. And this was TheEnvironmentSite.org.

I also had the possibility to sell SustainabilityForum.com for a nice amount but this was out of the question for me as well as I did not want to give the site into someones’ hands, not knowing what they would do with it and because the purpose of SustainabilityForum.com always was to promote Sustainability and CSR, and not to make lots of money. I am currently in the process of integrating SustainabilityForum.com in terms of content into the other community, but this will be finished soon.

The new TheEnvironmentSite.org

The purpose of the new TheEnvironmentSite.org will be to promote Sustainability, Environment and CSR as best as possible while at the same providing a central place for sustainability-minded people to share their thoughts, information and opinion.

These are the links you need to have to find out more about TheEnvironmentSite.org:

Please let me know your thoughts on this and I hope to see you on TheEnvironmentSite.org soon.

Veronica

Hi Fabian, thank you so much for the explanation – although personally, I’m still confused, but that may be due to how I personally look at sustainability? To me it goes beyond the environment to still include profits and people and a sustainably way to run a whole organization and relate to stakeholders on the inside and the outside. The name ‘SustainabilityForum’ would have suggested to me that all my interests as explained above would have been at home there. The name ‘TheEnvirenmentSite’ now rather suggests to me a focus exlusively and only on the environment?
http://www.fabianpattberg.com FabianPattberg

Hi Veronica. Very good points. I personally understand Sustainability the same way but in the end I had to decide what website had the largest audience, was easiest to manage and what term was accepted the most.

I especially found it interesting that people when I asked about what they had a better understanding of: Sustainability or Environment, 90% had a clear understanding of the term ‘Environment’ but only about 50% of the term ‘Sustainability’. This also influenced my decision.

My intention is for the site to be a hub for all sustainability and environmentally related information. In the end the name did not matter the most but the overall purpose and chance of success.

I hope this helps.