DO Impact: the Italian Capacity-Building Pathway Comes to a Close
di Torino Social Impact
/ NEWS
Published on:
25 August 2026
On Wednesday, July 22, the local capacity-building pathway of the European project DO Impact — Digital and Data-Driven Opportunities to Strengthen the Social Economy Impact — came to a close. The project is funded by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) under the SMP-COSME-2023-SEED-01 call.
The collaboration between Fondazione Piemonte Innova as project coordinator, Torino Social Impact and Tiresia – Politecnico di Milano led to the creation of eight workshops dedicated to small and medium-sized enterprises in the social economy. Between September 2025 and July 2026, the workshops involved 376 participants.
The Italian pathway was developed as a local extension of the transnational learning journey, jointly implemented by the European partnership of DO Impact and addressed to social economy support organisations.
The stated objective was twofold: on the one hand, to provide organisations with tools to understand the role of digitalisation, data strategies and ethical practices in data use, in order to drive positive change in the social sector; on the other, to offer practical and immediately applicable skills to measure social impact, adopt artificial intelligence responsibly and build collaborative data ecosystems. Each session addressed a different topic, with increasing levels of complexity, starting from essential basic skills and moving towards more advanced applications of artificial intelligence, data visualisation and data storytelling.
The first session, held on September 22, 2025 in Turin, laid the foundations for the entire pathway. The second workshop, held the following day, shifted the focus to data as a strategic asset for the development of organisations, moving beyond the view of data collection as a bureaucratic requirement and considering data as a strategic lever for everyday activities.
The third session, organised on March 26, 2026, provided an opportunity for networking between tech startups and social economy organisations, while the fourth workshop, held on April 17, 2026 as part of Biennale Tecnologia, allowed participants to reflect on and test themselves against social impact measurement.
The capacity-building pathway then moved to Milan, with two consecutive sessions on May 4 and 5, 2026, specifically dedicated to one of the most debated topics of recent months: artificial intelligence. The fifth workshop explored concrete applications and ethical risks of generative AI, while the sixth session focused on the role of the social economy within the digital revolution we are currently experiencing.
The Italian learning journey concluded with two online sessions designed to translate the full set of skills acquired into effective communication tools. On June 26, 2026, the seventh workshop addressed the topic of data visualisation, while the final workshop, held on July 22, closed the circle by presenting practical cases of effective social impact storytelling.
The pathway demonstrated the importance of providing concrete and practical tools, the value of direct testimonies and a growing interest — workshop after workshop — in artificial intelligence, which is increasingly present in the daily lives of participants. In the coming months, we will publish a summary document on the main themes, reflections and insights that emerged from the workshops, making the knowledge generated through the European project a shared resource for the entire ecosystem.
The Italian workshop cycle represented an important component not only of DO Impact, but also, more broadly, of Torino Social Impact’s Tech4Good strategy. As this experience comes to an end, we are already working on new projects to continue strengthening the skills of social economy organisations, making them better prepared to face the technological transformations of the current context.
