Imagina Srl Società Benefit
Who we are
Imagina is a società benefit based in Camerino, in the Marche. Since 1991 it has worked in territorial marketing and integrated communication, with a clear specialisation in two sectors: agri-food, and tourism and territorial development.
It is a micro-enterprise working on an international scale, and that holds together for a precise reason: Imagina is the lead organisation of a public–private partnership that today counts around three hundred bodies, public and private, which share a belief in the value of place. It is not a network of endorsements: it is the structure we work with all year round.
Out of these three decades comes the body of work that lives under the umbrella brand Tipicità and its offshoots — the festival in Fermo, the Grand Tour delle Marche, Tipicità in Blu and EVO. Four independent projects, four languages, one network.
How we work
Contamination, osmosis, cross-fertilisation: this is the fuel Imagina uses to set networking in motion between supply chains and between places. Long networks and short ones, producing new accounts and new openings, using global crossmedia to carry local specificity.
The method has an order, and it costs time. First you listen to what a place has to say, and that takes months. Then you meet different communities and compare their differences instead of smoothing them over. Then you bring the positioning into focus — local in substance, global in outlook. Only at the end do you build tailor-made actions, because no two communities resemble each other closely enough to deserve the same format.
The work arrives turnkey: feasibility analysis, design, coordination, general organisation. And it arrives from a team of professionals with years of experience in Italy and abroad in planning, design and integrated communication.
What we do
Territorial marketing and development — marketing projects, coaching and territorial networking; creating and developing umbrella brands; cross-fertilisation between supply chains; bottom-up routes to tourism development; co-creation of a place's assets; general and thematic tourist itineraries; transnational cooperation projects.
Events and formats — turnkey design, organisation and management of festivals, congresses, conferences, trade fairs and exhibitions; hackathons; professional training courses; press tours and educational tours.
Communication — crossmedia campaigns on the web, on social platforms and through tailored direct mailing; press office and relations with local, national and trade media; public relations plans; image consultancy; video production; publishing, from guides to monographs.
Where
Imagina works in almost every Italian region. Beyond the border, a network of relationships built up over time has taken it to Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania, and further afield to the United States, Canada, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Norway and Japan.
What it means to be a società benefit
A società benefit is not a certification and it is not an award. It is a legal form, introduced in Italy by the 2016 budget law — law 208/2015, paragraphs 376 to 384 — which made Italy the first country in Europe to write it into its statute book.
Nor is it the non-profit sector. A società benefit remains a company that makes profits and distributes them. What changes is the corporate purpose: alongside the aim of profit, one or more common-benefit purposes are written into the articles of association. From that moment they are no longer intentions. They are obligations, and they bind the directors, who have to balance three interests instead of one: that of the shareholders, that of the stated purposes, and that of the people the company's activity has an effect on.
Three concrete duties follow. An impact officer has to be appointed. An impact report has to be drawn up every year, attached to the financial statements and published on the company's website. And that report cannot be a piece of storytelling: impact has to be measured against an external, independent assessment standard covering four areas — governance, workers, other stakeholders, and the environment.
There is a penalty as well, and it is the part that makes this serious. A company that calls itself a società benefit without genuinely pursuing the purposes it has written down falls under the rules on misleading advertising, supervised by the Italian competition and market authority. It is not a label you hang on the door: it is a commitment that costs something, and one that somebody can come and check.
For Imagina this means one thing, and it fits in a single line: looking after the places we work in is not what surrounds the job, it is the job. Bringing out a region's talents across the whole range — the artisans and the researchers, the producers and the students, the person keeping a shop open in a hill village and the one studying the sea in a laboratory. Profit keeps the structure standing; the purpose is that the places we work in are better off than we found them.