Our 14 actions for the Sustainable Business Charter

VCDO laureate 2022

The independent evaluation committee of the VCDO, which met on March 22, has decided to award us the Voka Charter Sustainable Entrepreneurship once again. With that award we are eligible to obtain the SDG Champion certificate this year.

The committee also accepted our action plan for 2022 without further comments.

This year, for our sixth participation in the VCDO programme, we submitted no fewer than 14 actions. The actions focus on our core business and our sustainability strategy for 2025.

Preventing misuse of domain names

A very important action is geared to increasing the security of the Belgian Internet. One of the things we are going to do this year is check the identity of those who register a domain name before it is allocated. To this end, we are building a portal where domain name owners can register themselves. The idea is that they will be less inclined to abuse domain names if they have shared their details with us. ‘Know your customer or registrant verification’ was developed in 2020, but we will roll it out operationally this year.

To increase the security of the .be zone, we are also actively seeking cooperation with institutions of education and research. It helps us learn about new technologies and implement new knowledge in our operations. We have coached a number of PhD and Masters students in their research and final projects over the past few years, and we want to continue doing so in the future.

• https://www.dnsbelgium.be/en/news/fake-webshops
• https://www.dnsbelgium.be/en/news/stage-corona

Digital inclusion

Our CSR coordinator is a member of the steering committee for the Digital Inclusion Index, along with representatives from Proximus and BNP Paribas, among others. This is a tool that companies can use to measure and improve the digital inclusiveness of their services. We are building the index and hope to release a first MVP in 2022.

Furthermore, a major media campaign about digital inequality will be launched in the spring. DNS Belgium supports this campaign through publicity on its website and by supporting it on its social media channels.

Digital inclusion of course also means that the Internet user of tomorrow has access to the Internet today and uses it in a responsible and safe manner. We do this first of all by supporting the work of Digital For Youth with people as well as resources, and promote digital inclusion and digital skills for our young people through it.

Digital skills

We also do this by campaigning to stimulate online security and responsible use of the Internet. We focus specifically on older people and young people, because we want to increase their knowledge of online security.

We will actively involve the elderly in the implementation of our cyber security campaign. For this we work together with CAS and the Flemish Council for the Elderly. We try to reach young people through such means as a film with Technopolis, content on the youth site watwat.be, etc. And because we want to increase the knowledge of cyber security among students, we also sponsor the Cyber Security Challenge and have a stand during the final days.

Fair work and diversity

DNS Belgium is developing a diversity plan to increase diversity in our organisation over the next few years, which we see this as a sustainable enrichment. With the same aim, we are replacing an employee who is temporarily out of work with a Passwerk consultant. Passwerk works with people with an autism spectrum profile and normal to high ability. Their specific qualities are deployed in various fields of expertise in the regular labour market and will soon be deployed also with us.

Philip Du Bois, general manager of DNS Belgium, is taking part in an initiative by VOKA and A seat at the table, which involves organising monthly meetings between top people from the world of business or politics and young people. The aim is to inspire young people and show them that they can be ambitious and create their own opportunities for a successful career, irrespective of their background.

Involving stakeholders

Pursuant to the ISO26000 standard with which we want to comply, an organisation must respect the interests of its stakeholders and respond to them actively. The registrars are an important stakeholder group for DNS Belgium, whom we want to involve actively in our CSR strategy. That is why we draw up an involvement plan for them, to which we link specific objectives. We naturally provide registrars with personalised reports and data in all transparency.

We are including new members in the registrar forum to involve them better in our activities. This year, the forum will have 16 members and will meet at least twice.  

Reducing CO2 further

DNS Belgium has been carbon-neutral for many years and will remain so in 2022 as a matter of course. Every year, we calculate our CO2 emissions, we reduce them where we can and compensate for what we cannot reduce through internationally recognised offset projects.

We plan to electrify our entire fleet by 2025 so as to reduce our emissions even further. This year we are already replacing eight cars with BEVs. We set sustainability targets, of course, but we also communicate transparently about our strategy, actions, goals and results on our website, in quarterly reports and CSR annual reports.

14 actions

These are just a few of the 14 actions we have submitted this year for our participation in the VCDO programme. The full list is provided in the table below, and  we will of course inform you about them in due course on our website and our social media.

VCDO laureate 2022

The independent evaluation committee of the VCDO, which met on March 22, has decided to award us the Voka Charter Sustainable Entrepreneurship once again. With that award we we are eligible to obtain the SDG Champion certificate this year.

The committee also accepted our action plan for 2022 without further comments.