Odense, Denmark, 4th April 2024, open-source content management system (CMS) company, Umbraco, has published its second annual report assessing the company’s impact on community, people, and the planet.

More than a million websites have been built on the Umbraco CMS over the past two decades. During that time, Umbraco’s global open-source community has grown to more than 250,000 software contributors, with 1,500 digital agency partners building solutions on the platform. As the most widely-used open-source .Net CMS platform, the company is committed to leading positive change in the CMS industry.

The Umbraco Impact Report 2023 details how the company is working with its community, clients, and partners to improve sustainability, diversity and inclusion, encourage AI stewardship, and support current and future developers.

Umbraco CEO, Kim Sneum-Madsen, observes, “We have always focused on making the Umbraco CMS intuitive for web editors and straightforward for developers to integrate, extend and customise. Because of this, Umbraco is now the largest open-source .Net CMS in the world and we recognise our responsibility to help our community to make websites more energy-efficient and sustainable.”

Sustainability:

Umbraco began calculating its carbon footprint in 2022 and, last year, applied the Greenhouse Gas Corporate Standard to improve accuracy when calculating Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Hosting Umbraco Cloud and the headless Heartcore product are the largest sources of carbon emissions and the company is working closely with Microsoft Azure to ensure the most efficient and sustainable implementation.

Twelve months ago, the company introduced the Carbon Neutral Workforce initiative, which involves offsetting each employee’s carbon footprint, with a target to reduce emissions by 10% per employee. Working with Ecologi, Umbraco also funded carbon avoidance projects in Indonesia and Eritrea.

A tree was planted for every community CMS contribution during Hacktoberfest 2023, which resulted in 13,281 trees being planted, offsetting 197 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

In March 2023, the Umbraco community Sustainability Team was formed, comprising technology and business leaders from six digital agencies, who are working together to educate clients and the community, develop tools, draft best practice guides, and share practical ways of creating low-carbon websites.

Commending these community team efforts, Kim Sneum Madsen said, “Our digital agency partners are increasingly seeing carbon-conscious web development included within client briefs as organisations prepare to comply with new legislation requiring disclosure of sustainable strategies across the value chain. We are committed to implementing sustainable products and business practices and supporting our partners, clients and community in their efforts to reduce CO2. We plan to deepen our engagement with United Nations ESG goals in 2024.”

Community

Umbraco’s highly-engaged open-source community is a vital asset. The company reports that members continued to play an active role in code contributions in 2023, as well as collectively addressing diversity, accessibility, and sustainability challenges.

Seven new community-driven initiatives were sponsored last year following the launch of the Umbraco Champions Programme, through which members put forward ideas that will benefit the community.

Umbraco regularly meets with its open-source community and publicly recognises the top contributors with Most Valuable Person (MVP) status, 17 new MVPs were awarded in 2023 and 66 were renewed.

During 2023, the number of Umbraco community events expanded to include new meetups in USA, India, Turkey and Norway, in addition to the regular calendar of events in the UK and Denmark. In total, 1,750 members took part in 111 community events over the past year.

The annual Codegarden business summit and developer conference in Odense also attracted 1,700 attendees in person and online, a 17% increase on 2022’s attendance.

Diversity and Inclusion:

Anyone can use and contribute to open-source software, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, learning differences, or socio-economic status. This promotes inclusion of people who are under-represented in the IT industry.

To encourage this diversity within the company and community, Umbraco participates in the following initiatives:
• Umbraco’s Coding Class educates local schoolchildren and encourages the next generation of coders by providing opportunities to present their ideas and gain feedback.
• Up-and-coming developers are sponsored to attend Codegarden
• Cloud Club meetups are supported to provide a platform for students and professionals to deepen their understanding of IT
• Umbraco sponsors Hack Your Future, a not-for-profit organisation that teaches refugees to code
• Free Umbraco training and certification are offered to computer science students at universities in the US, UK, Sweden and Denmark
• To help address the IT industry’s gender gap, Umbraco runs a female mentorship programme at a local university, which shares the path to leadership
• In 2023, Umbraco hosted nine interns to help them to fulfil their academic requirements.

In 2023 Umbraco hired its first team of employees in Vietnam. The workforce now includes 27 nationalities, with employees’ ages ranging from under 25 to over 60.
Forty one new employees were welcomed to the company in 2023, including sixteen women. 22% of Umbraco’s C-suite are female.

Kim Sneum-Madsen comments, “Our strategy is to create an inclusive community and workplace where diversity is celebrated and well-being is prioritised, to ensure that Umbraco continues to provide a nurturing, gender-balanced environment that empowers all employees to contribute to their full potential. We also know that by supporting a thriving, diverse, open-source community, we can collectively and creatively tackle the wider issues affecting our industry and enable more sustainable business practices that benefit people, communities and the planet. We will continue to strive for positive impact that provides a brighter future for generations to come.”

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The Umbraco Impact Report 2023 is available at: https://umbraco.com/about-us/impact-report/

About Umbraco:
Umbraco was founded in 2003 with the vision of making the complex simpler. Powering +750.000 websites worldwide, Umbraco offers a flexible, user-friendly content management system at the core of its composable digital experience platform (DXP), which seamlessly integrates with best-of-breed third-party applications to provide unlimited functionality and customisation.
A leader in open-source tools and server applications, its success lies in the open-source model, a unique community of more than 220,000 developers and users, and a well-established partner network of digital agencies. Umbraco has 100+ employees, headquartered in Odense, Denmark. For more information, visit www.umbraco.com.

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Media contact:
Josie Herbert
Phiness PR
josie@phinesspr.co.uk
+44 (0)7776 203307