Five in-depth features on the 2025 Social Report. In the fifth feature on events
Fewer events, more participants: the 2025 figures show that impact does not necessarily correlate with the number of initiatives carried out. Do more activities necessarily mean greater impact? The data from the 2025 Social Report suggest a less obvious answer. The number of events organised by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale fell from 102 in 2024 to 93 in 2025. The number of speakers also decreased slightly, from 326 to 321.
At the same time, however, the number of participants rose from 10,444 to 14,759. Fewer events, therefore, but a larger audience overall.
The same trend is evident in digital communications. Unique visitors to the website rose from 93,728 to 141,670, whilst views of content on social media channels grew from just over 2.1 million to over 6.1 million.
These are different metrics, which cannot be added together and which describe different forms of engagement. Yet taken together, they suggest an interesting shift: the ability to reach people no longer depends solely on the number of opportunities created.
What matters is the quality of the networks through which those opportunities circulate. What matters is the ability to combine in-person and digital engagement. What matters is the ability to produce content and formats that can be reused, shared and adapted to other contexts.
This is an approach that the Foundation has been exploring for some time through a model that integrates physical activities and digital environments. A lesson can begin in a classroom and continue on a platform; a local event can simultaneously involve local communities and audiences connected remotely; content produced for a project can become a resource available to a much wider community. This also changes the way we interpret the figures.
Simply counting how many initiatives have been organised risks providing an incomplete picture. It becomes equally important to observe how many connections each initiative manages to forge, how long it continues to generate value, and how far its impact extends.
In 2025, a total of nearly 200,000 people were involved in the Foundation’s programmes, within an ecosystem comprising 800 schools, 161 project partners and around 1,000 organisations in local networks.
Perhaps this is precisely what ‘scaling up’ means today: not simply doing more, but ensuring that what we do can reach more people, extend to more places and generate new connections.
Find out how the Fondazione Mondo Digitale transforms research, innovation and education into shared value for people and local communities.Browse the 2025 Social Report
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