What we’re already doing

Dotsunflower initiative

This Earth Day we asked some of our customers and partners if they’d like to join us in planting sunflowers this Earth Day, to all those that said yes we’ve sent out some seeds for planting. To do this we used ReachDesk, who are a carbon neutral company themselves.

A small gesture, but one we hope encourages us all to get outside more and enjoy the natural beauty of our planet. If you didn’t spot our email but would like to get some seeds, you can fill in our form here and we’ll get some seeds sent out to you too.

Why sunflowers?

Sunflowers, as well as looking pretty, also provide food for wild birds and are a firm favorite for under-threat British bees to get their pollen. They’re a great choice if you’re looking to plant something hardy.

The sunflower is one of the most resilient flowers there is. Did you know sunflowers can absorb toxic heavy metal contaminants and poisonous chemicals in the soil? Making them an excellent choice to grow anywhere with less than ideal soil. Sunflowers can grow in the desert, salt marshes, and of course, your back garden.

Sunflowers have shown interesting developments in recent years, with scientists exploring their adaptation to changing weather patterns. The sunflower has shows signs of adapting to the change in climate, and may well be the flower that outlasts us all if climate change continues. Let’s hope we don’t find out.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an authoritative group of climate experts, issued their starkest warning yet this month that we are dangerously close to running out of time to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis and ecological emergency.

Dotdigital is listening, so we have committed to becoming net-zero by 2030.

What are we doing at Dotdigital?

In December 2020, Dotdigital became the first carbon neutral, ISO 14001 certified marketing automation platform in the world.

At Dotdigital, we’re engaging with the science to make sure everything we are doing is the right thing. We understand that as a business, we have the power to help with the changes needed to address the climate crisis, and we will not be shrinking away from that responsibility.

On top of our existing actions, we have committed to being net-zero by 2030. That means we will systematically eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sources at Dotdigital so that only residual emissions – necessary to continue business operations – remain by 2030. We will make sure to offset those residual emissions with high-quality GHG removal projects.

In other words, we’re looking to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement 20 years ahead of schedule.

What does “net-zero” actually mean?

Becoming “net-zero” means going above-and-beyond our carbon neutral status. It’s sort of like “carbon neutral plus”. In meeting the requirements of net-zero, we meet and exceed the requirements of being carbon neutral.

It means we will:

1. Reduce our absolute gross GHG emissions to only “residual” levels.
2. Continue to measure and offset our Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions.
3. Offset all residual emissions with GHG removal projects.

There are a few things to make explicit about the above. When we say “we’re engaging with the science”, we mean it, and we believe we’re accountable for our claims and actions. So we want to be explicit about what we’re aiming for and how we know whether we’ve succeeded.

Absolute emissions vs emissions intensity

First is that we are aiming to reduce our absolute gross GHG emissions. This means the total amount of GHG emissions to the atmosphere from our business activities will decrease to residual levels.

This is in contrast to reducing our emissions intensity, which is often measured as the GHG emissions per $1000 revenue or similar proportional metric. It’s entirely possible for absolute gross GHG emissions to go up while emissions intensity goes down, which doesn’t help towards the world’s climate goals.

GHG emissions scopes

When we count our GHG emissions, we count them in three separate categories, referred to as “scopes”.

Scope 1 includes our emissions due to heating our offices with fossil fuels. Scope 2 includes our emissions due to electricity use in our offices. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions, which are the emissions in our supply chain and due to other business activities not included above.

To be carbon neutral, a company only needs to offset scopes 1 and 2. To be net-zero, a company also needs to include scope 3. Dotdigital already does this for major scope 3 sources, so we’re well on our way to being net-zero.

Removal vs reduction projects

The final additional requirement reflects the Oxford Offsetting Principles that we already follow to guide our offsetting decisions. This is that we must offset all residual emissions with GHG removal projects, not just GHG reduction projects.

GHG removal projects draw GHGs directly from the atmosphere and sequester them for a meaningful amount of time; preferably permanently (for all practical purposes), but for hundreds or thousands of years at a minimum.

How will Dotdigital get to net-zero?

All of the above complexity and nuances can be simplified to the table below, which shows how Dotdigital is making progress from being “carbon neutral” to being “net-zero”.

Requirement	Carbon neutral	Dotdigital now	Net-zero
Measure scope 1 and 2
Offset scope 1 and 2
Measure scope 3
Offset scope 3
Reduce absolute emissions to residual
Offset with removal projects
Justify residual emissions

There are lots of things that we’re considering at Dotdigital to get us to the column on the right.

We’re:

• Switching our offices to use only renewable energy.
• Making technical changes to our service infrastructure so it relies only on renewable energy.
• Thinking about how we can apply some of the lessons we’ve learned during the pandemic about flexible working to reduce our GHG emissions e.g. by taking fewer business flights and using virtual collaboration tools instead.
• Carefully choosing suppliers that share our environmental goals.
• Starting to research which GHG removal projects we should help fund.

And we have many other ideas too.

How is being net-zero helping above being carbon neutral?

Being carbon neutral is not sufficient to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement and limit global heating to no more than 1.5C. Becoming net-zero means we should prioritize not producing GHG emissions ahead of offsetting GHG emissions. In other words, offsetting should be a last resort.

This reflects the current scientific understanding that natural systems respond differently to emitting and then removing the same amount of GHG emissions, compared to having never emitted those GHGs in the first place.

Why is net-zero important to Dotdigital?

A heavy burden rests on national governments to legislate and regulate, but corporations and other organizations can listen to the IPCC’s advice and act quickly and decisively without being made to.

We’re hoping that our actions today will mean that future generations can continue to enjoy Nature in the way that we have and live prosperous lives free of climate disaster.

By choosing Dotdigital as your customer engagement platform you’re reducing your emissions footprint. You can read more about this here.

And with us moving to net-zero, you can be confident that we’ll continue to exceed growing customer expectations when it comes to the environment.

Sustainability is not a passing fancy. It’s not a buzzword or a tick-box activity. It is at the top of the agenda for businesses, marketers, and consumers alike.  

As a mainstream concern, the importance of sustainability and environmentalism cannot be overlooked. It is the subject of discussion everywhere, from the water cooler to the White House. Its meteoric rise has resulted in businesses having to look inwards and truly consider their impact on the planet. Brands that embrace sustainability today and review and update their business practices will get ahead of the curve in 2022. 

So, let’s dive into this new trend: 

What is sustainability?

Simply put, sustainability refers to the ability to meet your specific needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. This is not just about natural resources but also includes social and economic resources. As a result, as well as being concerned with environmentalism, issues around social equality and economic development are also embedded in the ethos of sustainable living. 

What is environmentalism?

Environmentalism is the part of sustainable living that has rooted itself in the public consciousness. It is concerns and actions aimed at protecting the environment. With fears about global warming and the impact of our carbon footprint on the Earth, people are demanding clear and actionable environmentalist policies from governments and businesses alike.  

What does it mean to be a sustainable business?

Being a sustainable business extends beyond the “obvious” sustainability concerns. It’s more than just the carbon footprint of shipping products or the waste created by physical products. Not every impact of your business is tangible.  

Digital businesses, virtual events, online interactions – they all have an effect on the environment. Everything digital is powered by energy and therefore generates emissions. Similarly, associated activities like travel and office waste can also be tracked. All carbon emissions need to be tracked to understand your business’s impact and plan steps to counteract it. 

Take Dotdigital as an example, we’ve taken great efforts to ensure our global business operates sustainably. That included ensuring our offices, cloud services, and data centers are carbon neutral and powered by renewable energy. As a result, every email, SMS, push, and display ad that’s sent via Dotdigital is sustainable, helping all our clients get one step closer to achieving their sustainability goals. 

There are a lot of new tools emerging to help businesses calculate their total carbon impact. Carbon calculators such as the one created by AdGreen can help you calculate the carbon footprint of your digital ad activity. Scope3 is a corporation aiming to assess and reduce the environmental impact of digital ad production with a particular focus on “scope 3” carbon emissions generated by partners in your supply chain.  

There’s still a long way to go before completely sustainable practices become commonplace, but digital industries such as marketing and advertising are being offered more and more tools to understand their impact. By embracing them today, the digital and online branches of your brand can demonstrate their commitment to eco-conscious action and raise the bar for wider teams and industries.  

What are businesses doing?

Back in November 2020, a partnership between the British Advertising Association, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) launched a brand-new initiative called ‘Ad Net Zero’. Its goal is to “achieve real net-zero carbon emissions from the development, production, and media placement of advertising by the end of 2030”.  

A report released to support the launch of this initiative estimated that the UK’s ad industry alone exceeds 84,000 tons of CO2e per year. That means that the carbon footprint of the global advertising industry could be over a million tons.  

It’s not just marketing and advertising making these kinds of pledges. Striking a balance between legislative requirements and consumer expectations, the automotive industry is driving towards its sustainable future. Ford Motor Company is aiming to be completely carbon neutral by 2050, while Volvo has made a similar pledge to achieve its goal by 2040.  

Car brands all over the world are investing in technology and sustainable supply chains to be able to provide consumers with 100% electric vehicles.  

The beauty industry, widely renowned for generating a significant amount of plastic waste from product containers and packaging, is also making headway towards becoming more sustainable. A consortium of industry heavyweights is teaming up to set industry-wide sustainability standards. Plans to develop a scoring system where shoppers can be able to compare and contrast the environmental impact of cosmetic products will empower them to make more environmentally friendly decisions.  

The key takeaway here is that collective action is essential for the success of wide-reaching sustainability. Sharing learning and working together will help businesses all over the world achieve the environmental goals consumers are demanding.  

Taking it seriously

Increased awareness of environmental issues has sadly led to an increase in “greenwashing”. That is, communicating false or misleading information about how a business’s products, aims, and policies are more environmentally friendly than they are.  

Fortunately, associations like the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are on hand, looking after the public’s best interest. The ASA has officially announced that it will be launching inquiries into sustainability claims and will research ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘net zero’ claims made in ads. Ultimately, greenwashing in marketing and advertising will be harder, so to reap the benefits, brands have to put the work in.  

Another indication of the seriousness and longevity of this trend came with a recent update to Google’s Ads Policy. It has now prohibited advertising for, and the monetization of, content that promotes climate change denialism. While to most this may seem logical, it could preclude further action being taken against brands misrepresenting their eco-credentials. 

Ultimately, it’s not possible to approach this trend half-heartedly. Public pressure is ensuring governments and business take their demands seriously. Thankfully, there are an increasing number of resources around to help brands as they transition to sustainable business practices. Similarly, brands that have already grappled with the issue are willing to help others take the meaningful steps required to get ahead of the curve.

The sooner businesses embrace sustainability and environmentalism, the greater success they will have in the future.  

Hack week is an annual celebration of creativity and innovation at Dotdigital. It’s an opportunity for our engineering teams to step away from the ordinary and build something outside of the norm. A time to use new technology, with different people, to improve things (and a good reason not to write unit tests, if only for a short while)!  

We give a flexible mandate to the teams by asking them what they could do to the Dotdigital application, processes, or practices to make them faster?, friendlier?, greener?, smarter?, easier?, or a bit more fun?. 

We’ve had a lot of great hacks in the past and many of them have made their way into the app. Transactional email started as a hack back in 2014 and dark mode was a hack last year, both of which are now firm favorites in the Dotdigital platform today.  

This year's entries

Launch Dotly

Team “Masala Steak” made up of Luke van Blerk, Agata Jezewska, Weronika Kucharska, Amiena Allie, Piotr Nowakowski and Pedro Mateus. 

Releasing new features to customers is a tough thing to get right. Who do you invite for feedback? How do you manage the rollout? Masala Steak’s idea was to improve feature management in Dotdigital by creating cohorts to group accounts and enable features. 

Low carbon campaigns

Team “Green Hat Hackers” made up of Ash George, Alex Webber, Brayan Blanco, Wayne Parker, and Adhir Ramjiawan. 

We’re always looking at ways to reduce the carbon footprint of our platform and this hack gave email campaign senders the option to send their campaign at a time when electricity and gas supply data shows the highest percentage of renewable energy. 

That’s a bit graph-ic

Team “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” made up of Danny Rendle, Fanis Strezos, Kelvin Hiorns, and Dylan Viranyi. 

Our current API is great, but with the rising trend of GraphQL, this team looked into how we could add a GraphQL layer over our platform. 

Segment Visualizer

Team “Edgelords” made up of Dave Russell and Grant Lodge 

Segmentation is a powerful tool for marketers and Dotdigital supports this in a variety of ways. The goal of this hack was to utilize graphs in order to give a more insightful and detailed overview of how customer segments are made up. 

Dotty and the tooltips

Team “Binary tree caterpillars” made up of Andrei Constantin, Tom Westwood, Darya Yemzhina, Pablo Miletich, and Mubin Chachia. 

Our in-app help articles and support docs are already awesome, but what if there was another way to present tips to our users? This hack aimed to create a friendly tooltip dispenser called Dotty (anyone remember Clippy???) to present automated tooltips to users. 

Better databag keys

Team “Unexpected item in the databag area” made up of Simon Capewell, Andrew Morozov, Joe Webb, David Goodwin, and Tomasz Bursztynski. 

Behind the scenes, settings and configuration options can be hard to manage. This team looked into ways we could improve our existing settings editor into something more descriptive and easier to use. 

Project Armadillo Trousers

Team “Oh god how did this get in here I am not good with computers” made up of Jennie Long, Crystal Preston, and Rikki Gullick. 

We use NPS scores to gauge engineer happiness, maybe you do for your customers too? This hack tried to make collating NPS data as easy as possible. Investigating ways to integrate data capture into our Pages and Forms tool and be able to report on the data in an insightful way.

Winners

• Best video demo: Team Armadillo trousers

• Most valuable idea – Dotty and the tooltips
• Most innovative – Segment visualizer 
• CPTO award – Launch Dotly 
• Best team name – Oh god how did this get in here I am not good with computers 
• Best hack of 2021 – Better databag keys 

Thanks

Many thanks to everyone that helped make hack week 2021 a success! If you’d like to get involved in this sort of thing, then head over to our careers page and see how we can help. Don’t forget that you can see what’s coming up for Dotdigital and submit your ideas on how we could improve the platform by checking out our roadmap. 

Holiday gifting

This year our EMEA team did something a little different when it came to holiday gifting. We wanted to say thank you to all of our wonderful clients, partners, and prospects for being a part of our community this past year, but we also wanted our gifting to make a positive impact and reflect our company’s sustainability values, so we had to think outside the box.

Enter Ecologi. A fantastic charity that supports global tree planting projects. Research shows that tree planting – when done right – is one of the most effective climate crisis solutions available right now, so it was a no-brainer. We donated the money we’d have spent on gifts to Ecologi, who then planted trees on our behalf. This year’s holiday gifting campaign sowed the seeds of our Dotforest, planting enough seeds for a whopping 12,500 trees to grow! The trees have been planted in the most climate-effective places around the world. These include mangrove planting in Madagascar, Afromontane tree planting in Kenya, and forest restoration in Nicaragua and Uganda.

Our Dotforest is only at the beginning of its journey, and we plan to expand the forest by planting more and more trees over the coming months and years. If you want to show your support and get involved you can add to our forest, or start your own here.

Our pledge on climate change

At Dotdigital, we are constantly working to minimize our negative environmental impact and do our part in addressing the climate crisis and ecological emergency.

Ash George, Sustainability Lead at Dotdigital “Our green ambitions at Dotdigital reflect a simple truth: we must collectively learn a profound respect for nature if we wish for a prosperous future. We are making changes to our own business to this effect, but think also of the necessary systemic changes that we can influence.”

We are the world’s first, and the only carbon-neutral, ISO 14001 certified marketing automation platform. If you’re a Dotdigital customer and would like to shout about how your emails are carbon-neutral, we’ve already done the work, so you can celebrate and tell everyone about it – learn more here.

As well as being carbon neutral, we are committed to being net-zero by the end of our financial year in 2030 – a full 20 years ahead of the timeline set out in the Paris Agreement. So, it makes sense then, that our gifting reflects our beliefs, and supports the planet.

To a greener future

Choosing gifts everyone will enjoy is tricky, but if there’s one thing we are all invested in, it’s the future of our planet. Combating the climate crisis is an important issue for our staff and our customers alike. As climate change finds its way onto agendas around the world, we want to lead the way and help our customers and partners on their own journeys. We hope that you enjoy our new take on holiday gifting and that it may even inspire you in your own gifting in the future.

Here’s to a greener future.