Impetus Digital: A Women-led Sustainable Virtual Collaboration Software Company

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Purpose-driven Virtual Collaboration Software

Impetus Digital is a Toronto-based, privately-owned, women-led company that provides virtual and hybrid meetings, events, and programs for pharmaceutical and life science companies worldwide.

Founded in 2008, Impetus Digital has over a decade of experience in virtualizing meetings and events and offers a full range of strategic, medical writing, and digital services to help make the transition from in-person to virtual as seamless as possible.

Today, Impetus Digital is a Green Business Benchmark° Platinum Certified sustainable business, a Great Place To Work certified brand, and a winner of Waterstone Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures with even more accomplishments on the horizon.

Virtualizing Meetings, Events, and Programs

Impetus Digital partners with Pharma clients at all stages of the product lifecycle, working closely with marketing, medical affairs, market access, medical education, clinical development, and many other departments to virtualize their internal and external stakeholder meetings and programs.

They have combined their large portfolio of life science-specific asynchronous (over-time, anytime) and synchronous (real-time) virtual collaboration tools, with their industry-renowned strategic, digital, and medical writing services to create an array of programs. These include everything from virtual medical education, conference engagement, advisory boards, and online community boards, to new innovative programs such as digital content councils, ambassador programs, and more.

Impetus Digital’s Sustainability Story

Impetus Digital strives to become a carbon-neutral and fully sustainable company. With this goal in mind, Impetus Digital has focused on three major initiatives, detailed below.

Impetus Digital's Tree-Planting Program

Impetus Digital’s tree planting program was launched in 2021. At least one tree is planted per new client project (depending on the project fee and scope). Trees are also planted to celebrate employee milestones, such as birthdays or work anniversaries. Impetus Digital also hosts challenges or competitions where the winner can receive their very own planted trees.

In addition, Impetus Digital typically donates money to a medical or environmental charity at the end of each year; for the past two years, this money has been used to plant even more trees.

To date, Impetus Digital has planted more than 1,800 trees – and the team is only getting started.

Annual Earth Week Celebrations

Since 2021, Impetus Digital has hosted virtual Earth Week celebrations, which are complete with challenges, tips and tricks, trivia, and prizes. Typically, team members take a few hours during the week (in paid time) to do something nice for the environment such as planting their garden, cleaning up trash, cooking vegan and vegetarian meals, building something from recycled materials, and more.

The team is also encouraged to include their families and friends in their chosen activity; many use it as an opportunity to teach their children or other loved ones about sustainable practices.

Educating Stakeholders

Impetus Digital’s Green Team works hard to educate employees, clients, and followers by sharing relevant articles and resources, as well as writing about sustainability topics for the brand’s blog and various industry magazines. The climate crisis directly affects human health, and as such, Impetus Digital views this as a timely topic in the life science industry.

Looking into the Future: Reducing Business Emissions Using Carbon Offsets

Impetus Digital is striving toward carbon neutrality, and as such they’ve started to review carbon offset options for 2023.

Being a 100% remote company and one that specializes in virtual meetings, Impetus Digital’s carbon footprint is already much lower than the average company. But, because Impetus Digital views sustainability as a platform for continuous improvement, they are committed to reducing emissions even further. With this aim in mind, Impetus Digital has begun working with GBB partner Alcymate as one option for offsetting its carbon footprint.

Challenges

Accounting for and reducing business emissions has proved to be challenging for Impetus Digital. While calculating carbon emissions – such as those related to the employee’s home office and travels – seems straightforward, they want to make sure their online platform and client portals are fully and accurately offset.

Plus, now that hybrid meetings are resuming, ensuring all aspects of the in-person component (e.g. catering, meeting room space, AV equipment) are as sustainable as possible and/or properly offset will require additional work and thought.

Commitment Through Certification

Green Business Benchmark° software has given Impetus Digital the framework needed to build a sustainability program, while also helping them obtain buy-in from leadership. For instance, Impetus Digital’s Green Team wrote a list of suggested initiatives to the brand’s CEOs for review and approval, and how many points each initiative would be worth. This helped drive immediate action and enabled them to build a sustainability program organization-wide.

They consider themselves to be pioneers in their industry with a demonstrated commitment to sustainability and hope other brands will follow suit.

“It’s been remarkable seeing the progress we’ve made in just a few short years. We’re averaging well over 800 trees planted per year, we have cleaned up whole streets and parks, and now we’re getting close to carbon neutrality. GBB has been an invaluable partner in making this happen.” – Cecilia Petrus, Communications Director, and Green Team Leader at Impetus Digital

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