Climate Neutral is a non-profit cofounded by the folks behind the travel gear company Peak Design. The idea behind Climate Neutral was to help companies measure, offset, and reduce their carbon footprints using data composed of research-based estimations. Although it wouldn’t be the most precise measurement, it wouldn’t be inaccurate. And Climate Neutral’s method would empower businesses of all sizes and industries to circumvent pricey consulting firms and use their savings to support carbon offsetting initiatives around the world. With enough carbon offsets purchased, companies could reduce their net carbon footprint to zero and receive the designation “Climate Neutral.”

In turn, the certification empowers consumers to shop from companies that are not just investing in sustainability, but taking responsibility for their carbon emissions. 

As a certified Climate Neutral company, we know what DEPT®’s carbon footprint is. 

Not many other businesses can say the same. 

Furthermore, as a twice-certified company, we know what our carbon footprint was the year before. This means that we’ve been able to measure the success of our sustainability initiatives as a company in terms of actual tonnes of CO2. 

Very few businesses can say that.

For this year, as we anticipate our third certification in 2023, we’re doubling down on reducing the emissions associated with our offices and our business travel, which is ramping back up post-pandemic. 

We’ve committed to goals that include acquiring at least one large office building that is either LEED or BREEAM certified and also to continue adjusting our travel policy to ensure that we’re taking advantage of more eco-friendly forms of transport wherever we can. 

We expect these actions to lead to significant reductions in our direct and indirect emissions, and have already seen the first adjustments to our travel policy (booking group flights where possible) cut those associated emissions in half.

Of course, it’s not all just about measurement and reduction. As we continue to work on our reduction goals, we’re proud to be offsetting our current carbon emissions through our friends at Terra Neutra. This year the offsetting projects we’re supporting include a wind farm in Turkey and a reforestation project in Uganda. Both of these projects may be actively working to remove carbon from the atmosphere but their missions have positive impact at the human level as well. 

The Mugla wind farm in Turkey will create long term job opportunities for locals and help reduce dependency on energy imports, paving the way for even more renewable energy projects like it. 

Restoring the Kitalu forest in Uganda also carries significant humanitarian benefits. In this region, deforestation is a major cause of poverty and the project offers a per tree stipend for farmers who participate in it. Not to mention these farmers will be able to reap the long-term benefits of the growing global market for carbon offsets. Additionally, the project also carries with it a health outreach component, helping educate local communities on HIV, malaria, and other medical issues. 

When we first became Climate Neutral certified, we took our first steps on a long road toward becoming a truly sustainable company. Our journey didn’t stop then, and it hasn’t stopped now. We still have a long ways to go, but we’re also proud of the accomplishments we’ve made en route.

We are proud to announce that we have become climate neutral certified. DEPT® became certified after working with the Climate Neutral organisation to measure and offset our 2020 carbon footprint, while proving our long-term commitment to implementing emissions reduction plans.

“DEPT® and our other Climate Neutral certified brands are leading the global shift to a net-zero economy by doing what all companies should be doing immediately: measuring, offsetting and reducing their carbon emissions,” says Climate Neutral CEO, Austin Whitman. “Our label helps consumers identify these brands. It’s a recognisable and trusted symbol that turns everyday purchases into meaningfully positive climate action.”

DEPT®’s CEO, Dimi Albers, added: “Becoming climate neutral certified holds us to account for our emissions and is the bare minimum of what DEPT® – and all agencies across the board – should be doing. It’s a signal of intent to our 1,750-strong team of Depsters and wider community that we are not only digital innovators, but also people who genuinely want to make a positive impact on the world. We are incredibly proud to be part of a carbon neutral company, and I hope we’ll inspire other companies to follow suit.”

DEPT®’s carbon footprint is being offset in partnership with Terra Neutra by providing poverty-stricken families in Kenya with clean energy cookstoves. The initiative is part of the Hifadhi Livelihoods project, which protects 18,000 hectares of Kenyan forest each year by preventing rural households from using wood to fuel their homes.

In addition to offsetting, we are reducing our emissions by rebooting the DEPT® travel policy, and hosting our IT load and client platforms in partnership with carbon neutral hosting service, Microsoft Azure. 

The certification also demonstrates a commitment to sustainability that can be seen in our work with environmentally-conscious clients, including Indigo Ag (where we developed apps and a new marketplace to drive agriculture innovations that aim to feed the world more efficiently), and Justdiggit (where we built a direct donations platform to help train African farmer communities in areas of drought).

 The climate neutral certification coincides with the release of our first impact report and marks the opening chapter in our ongoing impact mission and quest to gain B Corp certification by the end of 2021.

If we had to give the DEPT® 2022 Impact Report a theme, it would be incremental progress.

We’ve had some stumbles and navigated some tricky obstacles over the course of the past year. Taken together, the long and short of it is that DEPT® isn’t where we wanted to be in our progress toward achieving our #goodcompany goals.

While we don’t shy away from acknowledging this in the 2022 Impact Report, in any case I’m proud that—even though our progress isn’t where we expected—we’ve still made progress.

Here’s a snapshot of what that looks like.

Our global agency continues to get even more global. DEPT® now spans 20+ (!) countries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. As of the time of our 2021 Impact Report’s release, more than 3,000 people counted themselves as Depsters. Now, we’ve surpassed 4,000!

Depsters are happier than ever. Overall employee happiness increased from 8.4 to 8.5 (on a 10-point scale) over the past year. We’re especially proud of this incremental progress given our rapid growth, because—with 4,000+ employees—there are also more Depsters than ever.

As an industry, tech is still male-dominated. But, at DEPT®, that’s changing.  The percentage of women at DEPT® increased from 46% to 49.8% over the course of the year. Additionally, the percentage of women managers and the percentage of women in leadership both increased, from 42% to 46% and 34% to 35%, respectively.

We completed a ton of awesome projects—and saw our hard work pay off. Depsters completed 6,203 projects in 2022 and overall client satisfaction increased from 8.1 to 8.3 on our 10-point scale. Our reputation for outstanding work even earned DEPT® some extra-special recognition: we were named Agency of the Year at the Lovie Awards and Agency Network of the Year at the Webby Awards!

We gave back more than ever. We’re absolutely stoked to share that, this past year, we gave back 0.96% of DEPT®’s revenue through charitable donations and pro bono work. While we’re still just a hair shy of our 1% for Good Commitment, we’re happy to celebrate a 0.29% increase from 2021.

Our carbon footprint needs some work, but we’re taking baby steps. DEPT®’s carbon fooprint increased from 10,435 t/CO2 to 11,113 t/CO2. Obviously, we have plenty of work to do to meet the reduction goals we’ve set with our climate partners. At the same time, we’re hopeful that we’re heading in the right direction: our emissions per full-time employee decreased from 4.83 to 3.25 t/CO2.

Be sure to check out our full report for the full details on each of these statistics, plus DEPT®’s strategies for approaching each of our Sustainable Development Goals.

Sustainability is no longer a buzzword, but a critical business strategy for 2023 and beyond. 

Globally, 95% of consumers consider a product’s sustainability to be important and 88% shared their intentional support for a brand that supports social or environmental initiatives.

But as climate change becomes increasingly dire, brands—together with the larger world—have also become aware of the environmental costs of technology and digital marketing. As much as 32% of an individual’s carbon footprint comes from advertising. And with $500 billion spent by marketers on advertising every year, you can understand how significant the industry’s impact on climate change is.

With that in mind, as both a digital agency and a certified B Corporation, we’d like to share some strategies for green-ifying your digital business and marketing efforts.

Tech is changing in more ways than one. Not only are innovations like Web3 emerging, so are ways of improving tech’s sustainability. 

When it comes to cloud environments and cloud-based architecture solutions, providers like Microsoft offer options that can vastly reduce your carbon footprint. Compared to old-school on-premises data centres, Microsoft Azure is as much as 98% more carbon efficient. 

Within the past several years, other cloud providers have also taken steps to increase their efficiency and reduce their environmental impact. To get a feel for how effective (or ineffective) these providers have become, it helps to use a metric called “power usage effectiveness,” or “PUE.” 

PUE is expressed as a ratio, with efficiency increasing as the quotient decreases toward a value of 1.0. The average PUE for an on-prem data centre is 1.70, by contrast, Microsoft Azure has a PUE of 1.18.

Given these recent developments in sustainability, we’re now helping clients re-assess their architecture and build a solution that keeps sustainability top of mind. 

By using a cloud environment based in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and/or Google Cloud, you’re not only able to build a greener architecture, but you can also automate key processes to eliminate overconsumption of cloud resources and better your system’s PUE. 

Thinking about sustainability can feel overwhelming at times. Let’s face it: every day the work we do in our industry inevitably puts more carbon into our atmosphere. 

That said, by encouraging folks within your team and at your company to start thinking about carbon more often, you’ll find that many small-scale changes add up. 

For instance, the video and content production team at DEPT® has started encouraging clients to donate £250 per shoot to offset the carbon emissions associated with the project. 

Although the team isn’t able to measure the exact emissions associated with a given shoot, their mission to do good has made a difference. In total, they’ve helped raise nearly £12,000 for the Woodland Trust, a British reforestation project that plants native trees throughout the country.

By learning to think about your emissions output, you and your team will start to learn how to weigh your options and make choices or create new practices that help the planet.

DEPT® helps organisations measure and reduce their footprint by becoming Salesforce Net Zero Cloud Partner

With Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, organisations can track, analyse and report on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives, including measuring and reducing carbon emissions. This emission tracking platform enables companies to pinpoint necessary improvements, such as installing renewable energy across their sites, optimising efficiency in their supply chain, or reducing the amount of carbon-heavy travel.

DEPT® is a certified climate neutral company and was the first global agency to achieve B Corporation certification in 2021, so is well versed in the complexities and challenges of ESG reporting, and has in-depth experience of building sophisticated ESG tracking and data management tools. 

“Having been through the process ourselves, we’re aware of how tricky it can be to accurately track, report, and optimise environmental impact data,” said Dimi Albers, CEO of DEPT®. “Without a doubt, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud makes it so much easier for organisations to take practical steps in reducing their climate impact; a goal which all companies should set as a priority. We’re aiming for 15% of DEPT®’s revenue to come from projects that help clients make a positive impact, and being a Salesforce Net Zero Cloud partner will support us with that ambition.” 

“Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud is helping organisations of all sizes and across industries accelerate their net zero journeys,” said Jack-Olivier Parisot, Area Vice President at Salesforce. “We are thrilled to have DEPT® as a partner to support businesses in reducing emissions at scale and supporting their climate commitments with Net Zero Cloud.”

Founded in Amsterdam in 2015, DEPT® has quickly grown across the globe, from 150 people in The Netherlands to more than 4,000 people across five continents. It has a 250+ person Salesforce team, specialising in Salesforce’s multi-cloud solutions across Europe and the Americas. The Certified B Corporation is known for delivering pioneering work and impact projects for brands including Patagonia, The World Health Organization, Philips and eBay, and became the most awarded agency at the 2022 Webby Awards and Lovie Awards.

Salesforce Net Zero cloud is an easy-to-use solution within the Salesforce ecosystem. It brings together comprehensive emissions data that allows you to understand the impact of your tech stack, travel, energy consumption, and suppliers. The system comes with predefined emission factors for calculating both carbon and necessary offsets, all according to industry standards. 

This is an ideal solution for any organization committed to measuring, offsetting, and reducing its carbon footprint. With Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, you will be able to:

• Consolidate enterprise ESG management
• Efficiently Manage Sustainability Data
• Automate Supplier Emissions Tracking
• Track progress to net zero in one place and ensure
• Receive actionable insights
• Integrate data into one fast, scalable platform

As a Climate Neutral Certified company, we have taken the next step in our impact journey by helping our clients accelerate their sustainability ambitions through the power of the Salesforce Net Zero Cloud platform.  

DEPT® provides data and technology-focused consulting services, implementing and supporting the Net Zero Cloud platform so you can manage all environmental, social, and governance impact data in one place.

We help you track, measure and monitor your scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions data. We then help you build easy-to-use dashboards so you can continuously reduce and offset your carbon footprint.

We are on a mission to dedicate 15% or more of our time to impactful and meaningful work. Helping organizations reduce their carbon footprint aligns with our ethos of doing good for the planet.  

• Data collection & integration: The discovery, collection, and structuring of emissions data and the loading of data through automation / API-based processes.
• Measurement & goal settings: Map the impact data to different scopes, locations, and value streams. Measure Scope 1,2 3 footprints, set science-based targets, and create emission reduction goals. 
• Reporting & dashboards: Enable compliant climate disclosure & ESG reporting. Visualise sustainability data in easy-to-manage dashboards to gain actionable insights on your carbon footprint across your business (and other ESG initiatives).
• Act & reduce: Enable acting on your climate impact & ESG goals using validated data to initiate emission reduction plans. Create future what-if scenario models and effectively steer on KPIs and sustainability performance.
• Brand communications: Integrate your sustainability and ESG impact initiatives into your brand identity, (visual) storytelling, digital products and services, recruitment communications, and internal communications.

We are a front-running partner on new Salesforce technology

Net Zero Cloud
Sustainability and reducing carbon footprint are important topics on the agenda of many organizations in 2023 and beyond. We can help reduce your carbon emissions and get to Net Zero quicker with net Zero Cloud.

Order Management (OMS)
We were one of the first in EMEA to implement Salesforce OMS and have gained extensive experience with further development of the product ever since

Personalization & CDP
Personalisation and Customer Data platforms are the next step for brands to truly understand their customers and tailor their offerings to them.

Composable commerce
We are a launch partner for the Composable Storefront Solution of Salesforce in EMEA and US. (We already have implementation experience). 

When we released the first-ever DEPT® Impact Report last year, we were still in the midst of our B Corp journey.

Since then, we’ve not only achieved B Corp certification, we’ve also been named one of the Best for the World™ B Corps in the Governance category – meaning that our score for Governance was among the top 5% of B Corps of our size. 

But, as we said last year, that’s only the beginning.

Our journey towards becoming a #goodcompany continues, but with this year we’re very excited to share the progress we’ve made over the course of 2021 in our newest Impact Report. 

Here’s a snapshot.

We’re bigger than ever, but still small enough to care. Following the addition of 10 exciting new DEPT® teams, our total number of Depsters jumped from 1,300 in 2020 to over 3,000 spread across 18 countries in 5 continents as of the time of this report’s release. Although we’ve nearly doubled in size, we’re still powered by the culture and creativity of a smaller agency.

Our 1% for good mission just got bigger. In 2021, 0.67% of our revenue was donated to charity or through pro bono work, up from 0.5% in 2020. That might not sound like much, but bear in mind that it’s not just our size that’s bigger than ever – our revenue is as well. And so is the 1% of our revenue we’re on a mission to give back, whether that’s through donation or pro bono work.

We’re confident we’ve established a better benchmark for our carbon footprint. Our footprint in 2021 measured just under 10,500 t/CO2, up from 5,500 t/CO2 in 2020. Given the impact of the pandemic on offices, travel, and commuting, however, we’ve always known that our 2020 footprint would be an outlier. In any case, we remain a Climate Neutral company, and have continued to offset the entirety of our footprint through our friends at Terra Neutra.

Gender equality is on track. The percentage of women at DEPT® has increased from 42% to 46% and we’re confident that we’ll reach 50% in 2022. Additionally, 42% of DEPT® managers identify as women or nonbinary – meaning we’ve achieved the incremental goal of 40% we set last year!

Other aspects of DE&I – including race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation – are making steady progress. While challenges with our previous people data system prevented us from collecting data on these aspects of identity last year, we’ve already made the switch to a better system. Furthermore, we’ve come to realise that DE&I looks different depending on the country or region of the world we’re working within. We’re now pivoting toward a series of regional DE&I Strategic Planning processes, assisted by global initiatives like anonymous recruitment.

Helping other good companies do more good. Our work pioneers tech and marketing to help brands stay ahead. But we specifically want to make sure our pioneering work is helping purpose-driven companies achieve their missions of creating a more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive world. To that end, over the course of the past year, 8.6% of our revenue came from purpose-driven work and we completed 99 impact projects.

As the world evolves, we’re determined to evolve with it in a positive way.

Great Place to Work®, the global authority on workplace culture, has ranked global digital agency DEPT® 29th on the Best Workplaces in Europe list in the Large Organisation category.

The list is based on confidential survey data representing 1.4 million employees from over 3,000 companies across 37 countries in Europe. The survey assesses employee experiences of trust, innovation, company values, inclusivity and leadership. The results indicate that over ninety per cent of DEPT®’s employees would strongly recommend the company to family and friends. 

“Congratulations to the Best Workplaces in Europe for putting the well-being of their employees first,” said Michael C. Bush, Global CEO of Great Place to Work®. “During a challenging time for the region, these companies created equitable workplaces by providing flexibility and supporting their employees through strife.”

Founded in Amsterdam in 2015, DEPT® has quickly grown across the globe, from 150 people in The Netherlands to more than 3,500 people in seventeen countries across five continents. “Despite growing super-fast, our culture is always to be ‘big enough to cope, but small enough to care,” said Dimi Albers, CEO at DEPT®. “We work hard to make sure every Depster feels part of the family. We know we can always do more, but being named as a Best Workplace is a great sign that we’re on the right track.”

The digital agency has been a certified B Corporation and Climate Neutral Certified since 2021, and has extensive DE&I and educational programs for its employees. “We’re dedicated to being not only the best agency in the world, but for the world too,” said Marjan Smit, VP Regional Head of People & Culture at DEPT®. “We listen to our people, and are always working hard to improve our processes, benefits and employee experience. Receiving a spot in the Best Workplaces in Europe is an incredible achievement we hope to keep up for years to come.”