Social impact firm Purpose joins Capgemini

Founded in New York in 2009, Purpose has spent the last decade building a footprint and reputation for enabling impact across six continents by creating purpose-driven campaigns, branding, creative content, and participatory social impact strategies to a blue-chip client roster. It has launched major initiatives on issues ranging from refugees to international LGBT rights and established relationships with global brands and corporations, major philanthropies, the UN system, and many of the world’s leading civil society organizations.

“Heightened demands from stakeholders have driven a major shift towards building business with purpose. For many large companies, this has evolved beyond corporate social responsibility to business transformation and the need for a redefinition of business models, practices and culture,” comments Cyril Garcia, CEO of Capgemini Invent and Member of the Group Executive Board. “Purpose joining Capgemini will bolster the capabilities of our teams that are working closely with senior executives and boards, to envision and build what’s next for their organization. Placing a positive contribution to society at the core of what they do, rethinking their commitment to Sustainable Development Goals, and committing to strong action on climate change, are the new imperatives for a sustainable business in the coming years.”

As an agency Purpose helps clients harness participation for meaningful social impact. Its market-leading capabilities will offer the Capgemini Group’s clients a critical dimension to their business transformation strategy as well as new sources of shared value creation. Purpose’s approach consists of four key components: its Labs that develop new public engagement innovations on the most important issues of the day such as climate change and international development; the agency team which develops social impact strategies, builds campaigns and crafts creative content; innovative technology that underpins its services including measurement and training tools; and finally, a host of methodologies that foster participation and help move people to action. Each of these elements work hand in hand to shape and deliver effective and impactful campaigns.

“Operating at the intersection of purpose, participation and digital, our teams of experts have spent the last decade collaborating with the world’s leading nonprofits, philanthropists and companies – helping them to put purpose and participation at the center of what they do,” comments Jeremy Heimans, CEO and co-founder of Purpose. “By joining the Capgemini Group, we can truly take Purpose to the world — dramatically growing our scale and impact at a crucial moment for so many of the issues we care about. Capgemini Invent, combined with the wider Group’s scale, offers us access to vast technological capacity, unrivaled data and analytics, and a deep understanding of how to change organizations and business models from the inside out. This opens up extraordinary possibilities for the campaigns that we can create and the global organizations that we can advise and support.”

Purpose will continue to operate as a Public Benefit Corporation[1] in pursuit of its mission of advancing a more open, just and habitable world. The parties intend for Purpose to be run independently as previously, and for senior management to remain in place. It will operate within the Capgemini Group under a policy of “Editorial Independence,” ensuring that Purpose retains its own unique and prominent voice and perspective on major global issues.

The transaction is subject to customary conditions precedent and is due to close in the coming weeks.

About Capgemini

A global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation, Capgemini is at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud, digital and platforms. Building on its strong 50-year heritage and deep industry-specific expertise, Capgemini enables organizations to realize their business ambitions through an array of services from strategy to operations. Capgemini is driven by the conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. It is a multicultural company of over 200,000 team members in more than 40 countries. The Group reported 2018 global revenues of EUR 13.2 billion.

Visit us at www.capgemini.com. People matter, results count.

[1] Public-benefit corporations are a specific type of corporation that allow for public benefit to be a charter purpose in addition to the traditional corporate goals