Fact checker? Cato the Censor? Cheerleader? Tightrope walker? The Amapola 2022 Impact Report opens with a reflection on the agency’s increasingly complex role. “Today, reviewing data, information and stories requires the expertise not of an editor, but of a tightrope walker.”

What were the main benefit data last year? Including days of corporate voluntary work, activities to promote a sustainability culture, projects in collaboration with other benefit corporations and in-house initiatives, Amapola devoted more than 920 hour to its benefit objectives. Among its 2022 projects, Meet the CSR Leaders, in collaboration with Il Salone della CSR e dell’innovazione sociale, created opportunities for young people to meet sustainability professionals over three days of meetings and 10 hours of one-to-one orientation. The agency also provided free sustainability training for more than 470 senior-high-school and university students. Internally, Amapola confirmed its commitment to its people, with flexibility policies, bonuses for employees and co-workers, and in-house training and skill-sharing projects.

A question of identity

«At a time of omnipresent sustainability – in the form of action, fortunately, but above all at verbal level – communicating sustainability in a coherent and transparent manner becomes a distinguishing value,» says Amapola founder Luca Valpreda. «It is no coincidence that we are convinced supporters of the movement to add an 18^th goal to the current 17 SDGs: responsible communication. Because there has to be an indissoluble link between our intentions, the words we use, and the facts generated by those words.»

Drawn up in accordance with the latest update of the Global Reporting Initiative and with reference to the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, the 2022 Impact Report sets out the agency’s results and sustainability projects, with a focus on the common benefit objectives Amapola pursues as a benefit corporation. Now in its second year, the publication has also been transformed into a voluntary sustainability report, enlarging the reported dataset and taking a more participatory and dynamic approach to data collection.

«This is a complex journey,» notes agency partner Sergio Vazzoler. «For example, the environment is the focus of many of our cultural and educational initiatives. At the same time, however, our environmental impact as a services company consisting of just under twenty people is relatively modest. Is this a contradiction? Not necessarily: the point is to organise our commitment in an authentic and credible manner.»

This year, the Amapola Impact Report takes the garden as its theme, which it extends to the storytelling and to the graphics-visual project (the work of Daniele Cavallero at Za!Factory).

«Not just any garden,» say Micol Burighel, Beatrice Coni and Elisa De Bonis, the leaders of the agency’s under-36 Impact Board, «but a place where differences are discussed and accommodated, which is open to outside stimuli and influences. And to the unexpected: in our first full year as a benefit corporation (Amapola changed its corporate status in November 2021, ed.), we optimised our internal processes at every level, from strategy to accounting, with the increasing involvement of the whole team.»

The Amapola Impact Report is available here.