Letter to stakeholders from our first Sustainability Report

Dear Stakeholders,

supporting digital innovation in companies, public administrations and more generally in society was the founding reason for DIGITAL360 and has become its mission.

This mission certainly derives from the clear business vision and profound professional passion shared by all the Group’s co-entrepreneurs, but it also expresses the profound awareness, rooted in the Group from the outset, that digital innovation is the main enabler of sustainable and inclusive economic growth, respectful of the environment and resources, and capable of enhancing even the most fragile and marginalised components of society.
This awareness will be the hallmark of our commitment to sustainability: both with respect to our internal organisation and in our approach to the market and to all the various stakeholder communities.

This first Group Sustainability Report is part of this furrow, which stems from the awareness that ESG issues are not additional aspects to our business strategy and its concrete implementation, but are an integral part of it.
This document is, therefore, first and foremost a tool to give our stakeholders a concrete account of the Group’s commitment in this direction.

In fact, it allows a reading, supplementary to the Financial Statements and the Management Report, of the ESG factors material to the sustainability of DIGITAL360’s business model: from the search for the valorisation of the contribution, unique and original, of each of our collaborators, to the care for the relationship, not only commercial but also interpersonal, with all our clients; from the security and protection of the personal data entrusted to us, to the intense and two-way relationship with the academic and associative world; from the attention to the impact – ours and our clients’ – on the environment to the search for always new projects to have beneficial effects on the community in which we operate and on the weakest components of society; from the obsession to the ethicality of our actions to the governance tools of the organisation.

The Sustainability Report is, therefore, a true statement of commitment to our innovative, ethical and sustainable actions, indicating the activities and actions undertaken to manage and improve our impact on the environment, territory and people.

The publication of this first Sustainability Report goes hand in hand with the journey that began in 2021 with the transformation of DIGITAL360 into a Benefit Corporation and, therefore, with the definition and incorporation in the company’s Articles of Association of the objectives of common benefit.

We are a Benefit Company because of a choice motivated and supported by profound reasons. The awareness of the need for a broad vision of the company’s role, which finds in its relationship with the community the completion of its “licence to operate”, has been present in the Group’s culture since its origins: in fact, if we look closely, the concrete commitment to the community preceded rather than followed its formalisation in the amendment of the articles of association and in the qualification as a Benefit Corporation.

Even in this commitment to the common benefit, which has led us to collaborate with important interlocutors from the non-profit world and academic education, digital technology as a tool for social inclusion constitutes the characterising element of our actions, in coherence with the Group’s mission.
The first Sustainability Report inevitably constitutes the beginning of a journey and, for this reason, induces us to look more at the path ahead than at the results achieved. Its narrative, however, in its numerical data and qualitative information, describes a Group that arrives at this appointment already able to boast a posture concretely and positively oriented in the right direction.

In the almost ten years since its foundation, the Group has built and made profitable its ability to create, disseminate and, therefore, transform the culture of digital and innovation into concrete change. This is shown by numbers that the Sustainability Report has given us the opportunity to organically gather and report: on the one hand, more than 100 digital assets (including online portals, web channels and newsletters) focused on innovation, used on average by 2.5 million unique users per month, and almost 900 events, also focused on digital innovation, to which 160. 000 participants; on the other hand, more than 550 customers (including companies and public administrations) who have used our services to accelerate and/or improve their digital transformation path and, thus, modernisation and sustainable growth.

At the same time, we have invested in our internal organisation: an organisation made up of a young corporate population, with an average age of 38, characterised by a substantial gender balance, with a high cultural profile – 82% have a university degree or higher – and rich in different cultures due to the variety of human, university and professional backgrounds that characterise the people we have sought out and included over time.
First and foremost, we have invested in smartworking: always inscribed in the culture and practices of the Group, it has enabled us to deal with the pandemic emergency and the change it has brought about, including in the way we relate to customers, without significant impacts on business and, in addition, with interesting reductions in emissions.

Then there is the protection of the personal data of all stakeholders, including in terms of security, pursued through the adoption of corporate policies and procedures and the identification of organisational roles to ensure their application and effectiveness.

And again, the adoption and dissemination of the Group’s Code of Ethics, the implementation of tools to protect whistleblowing, compliance with regulations on corporate administrative responsibility with the adoption of the Organisation, Management and Control Model and the establishment of the Supervisory Board.

And much more, as described in detail in this document.

The DIGITAL360 Group’s path of sustainability is, therefore, a road that has only just begun but is already rich in concrete content, which crosses and enriches the significant economic results achieved and the important growth pursued, both organically and through acquisitions.

Our future will see an increasing integration between business strategies and sustainability, with a strengthening of the tools necessary to know, understand and anticipate the expectations of our stakeholders and their needs, starting with customers and employees.

Strengthening organisational controls on ESG issues, in close correlation with statutory objectives of common benefit, will also make it possible to disseminate the culture of sustainability in strategic thinking as well as in the Group’s daily practice, in the design and implementation of services, and in the clear and comparable reporting of key indicators.

Our most stimulating challenge is to honour these commitments with our Stakeholders, in the presence of a significant growth dynamic that is an inalienable part of our DNA and that obliges the entire corporate body to continuously relaunch the effort of innovation and improvement, both internally and towards the market. On the other hand, the ability to overcome demanding challenges has been the hallmark of the Group’s ten years of existence.

Enjoy reading!

Andrea