Engaging sustainably is the future. At dotdigital, we’re doing everything we can to minimize our negative impact on the planet and help you do the same.
dotdigital is now a carbon neutral company, making us the first and only carbon neutral, ISO 14001 certified marketing automation platform. The grass can’t get much greener than that!
At dotdigital, we recognize that action on climate change is everyone’s responsibility. Not just our people’s, but the organization’s too. That’s why we decided to fast-track our efforts towards becoming a greener, more environmentally friendly business. In less than a year we’ve made significant and necessary changes to minimize our negative impact on the planet. Our hard work has been recognized and we’re proud to be an ISO 14001 accredited and certified business.
Combatting climate change is an important issue for our staff and our customers alike. As climate change finds its way onto agendas around the world, we wanted to lead the way and help our customers and partners on their own journey.
What does being carbon neutral mean?
Carbon neutrality is one of the key metrics to measure the global response to the climate crisis and includes reducing other harmful emissions that contribute to the greenhouse gases damaging the planet.
A business’s carbon footprint is determined by the total amount of energy it uses and the associated emissions created by its activities.
For many businesses, it can be difficult to understand how much carbon their activities produce. It can be even harder to completely remove carbon generating processes from day-to-day business. Still, we weren’t going to let anything deter us from our goal.
Through using green technology and offsetting our carbon usage, we’re committed to counterbalancing our carbon generation and remain carbon neutral.
Why is it important to be carbon neutral?
Greenhouse gases – of which carbon dioxide is a major contributor – are driving the process of global heating, a primary component of climate change. Becoming carbon neutral means that we’re no longer directly contributing to global heating.
To have a significant impact on the problem, a lot more needs to be done than simply going carbon neutral, but it’s a good place to start.
It’s our hope that by becoming carbon neutral we’ll not only be doing our part to help improve the health of the planet, but we’ll also be helping our customers and partners achieve their green goals too. By using our sustainable marketing automation platform, brands will have one less thing to worry about as they go green.
How did we do it?
In December 2019, we kicked off our campaign to ‘go greener’. Led by a dedicated team of environmental champions, our offices around the world came together in a united effort to improve the impact our business has on the planet.
Defining our goal
We set out with a lofty goal, to reduce our environmental impact by putting in place internationally recognized management standards and become carbon neutral. As a key way of measuring our impact on the environment, we knew that this was the first milestone we had to achieve to begin making a positive impact on the Earth.
Measuring our impact
With the help of external expert consultants, we began assessing our greenhouse gas emissions. During these assessments, we concluded that we, like most technology businesses, emitted most of our carbon from our computing that runs our technology, offices, staff commutes, and third-party vendors and service providers.
Setting our targets
Knowing that we wanted to lead the way with our carbon neutrality, we wanted to align with international best practice and target the right accreditation for us: ISO 14001.
ISO 14001 is an internationally recognized environmental management system standard, that helps businesses become environmentally friendly. With its rigorous annual assessments, it ensures that our certification is up-to-date and pushes us to make ongoing improvements.
Once we had a clear understanding of where we were and where we wanted to go, it was time to get to work.
Our first mission was to make our offices, cloud services, and data centers carbon neutral. We switched to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, both of which are powered by renewable energy and are pioneers in sustainable computing. Our products are now powered 100% by renewable energy in Europe. In the Americas and APAC regions, we are 90% powered by renewable energy, and we aim to achieve 100% for these regions later this year.
To entrench our green mission across the company, we launched a new environmental policy to educate our people about our impact on the planet. As we adapted to working from home, so did our policy, helping our staff make informed decisions about their energy suppliers.
We also wanted to go further than just offsetting our direct carbon emissions, so we included emissions relating to our data centers, major third-party cloud providers, and all business travel in our mission for sustainability.
We developed a carbon offset and mitigation strategy following the Oxford Offsetting Principles. This involves supporting international initiatives and working with our longstanding customer, The Woodland Trust, to protect nature and address the climate crisis.
What’s next?
We’re proud and delighted to announce that we’re now ISO 14001 accredited and certified!
But we’re not just content with changing the way we work. We want to empower our customers to join us on our mission to create a more sustainable future.
As part of our constant drive to improve and innovate our platform, we host a Hack Week every year, to let our developers’ creative juices flow. The winners for our most innovative idea created an ‘eco-mode’ which would allow customers to become a certified green user.
By choosing to work in ‘eco mode’ users would be able to save energy by working in dark mode, receive tips, advice, and guidance on how to be more energy-efficient while using the platform, and receive green rewards for choosing to join our mission to go green.
This is just one example of how we’re committing to helping our community, as well as the planet. As we work towards a greener future, we’ll continue to innovate and provide the tools marketers need to engage with customers sustainably.
