The initiative for AlmenKompas originated in Domea.dk’s management. The idea was that if meeting the new ESG requirements was complex and resource-intensive for domea.dk, which is a relatively large organization, it must be a challenge for others in the social housing sector.
ESG stands for Environment, Social and Governance. It acts as an extension of traditional accounting, where companies measure not only their financial success, but also their non-financial impact on society.
It sounds complex and it was, quite rightly, an almost insurmountable task for many of the hundreds of public housing associations in Denmark.
A common approach
It quickly became clear that it didn’t make sense for 500 housing associations to each invent their own approach to ESG. They had to find a common approach and solution. Therefore, what later came to be called “AlmenKompas” was conceived from the beginning as a joint project for the entire industry.
Ulla Jensen from domea.dk was put in charge of a small secretariat and a program group that was tasked with developing the solution and with keeping track of the many wishes and needs. There were many.
The project had very different stakeholders, including housing organizations and administrations, the Danish Housing Fund, BL (Danmarks Almene Boliger), financial partners, municipalities, the real estate industry and advisors.
It would be critical for the project to keep track of this diverse stakeholder landscape.
The project was financed by Forenet Kredit and Landsbyggefonden, and at the beginning there were slightly different expectations about what a common approach to ESG should be.
But the Steering Group quickly reached a consensus that AlmenKompas should be developed as an ESG framework with a focus on what was significant and practically applicable in the public sector.
This also meant some deliberate opt-outs from the long wish lists of what stakeholders wanted to measure. Instead, they chose to base their work on the data that already existed – or that they expected to be able to establish within a reasonable time frame.
And here it helped that Landsbyggefonden made its extensive data base available.
Thomas Holluf Nielsen, CEO of domea.dk, a non-profit, customer-owned housing administration company that manages, develops, and rents out tens of thousands of affordable non-profit homes across Denmark.
The link between data and practice
Access to Landsbyggefonden’s data made it possible to think of AlmenKompas as a shared and neutral infrastructure that could also continue after the project ended.
The work was organized into two overall tracks: One that dealt with measurement points, data and tools, and one that dealt with people, use and implementation. Because it quickly became clear that Landsbyggefonden’s data was not enough on its own.
The program group needed help to translate technical possibilities into something that could be used in practice in the housing organizations. This is where the collaboration with VENZO came into being.
Ulla Jensen describes VENZO’s role as exactly what the project was missing in the middle of the two tracks: a combination of technical understanding, process insight and a sense of user-friendliness. Not as a classic supplier, but as a collaboration partner who constantly pulled the strings and always had the users’ practical needs in mind.
“VENZO could speak both data language and human language. They helped ensure that the solution wasn’t just numbers, but something users could actually work with,” explains Ulla Jensen.
VENZO also contributed to creating more structure and systematicity around the collaboration with the Landsbyggefonden and supported the program management with decision-making proposals, facilitation and content for both steering group and advisory board meetings.
This became important in a project with so many stakeholders, parallel tracks, and the need for ongoing coordination and common direction.
But something else was at least as important.
"VENZO has a rather unique ability to understand the technology while being at eye level with the organizations and end users. They asked the right questions and helped us to constantly focus on how the tools should be used in practice. In this way, they have been crucial in making AlmenKompas a powerful, accessible and recognized tool that makes a real difference for the many thousands of users in the housing organizations."
Ulla Jensen
Program Manager for AlmenKompas
Head of Strategy, Governance and ESG
Program Manager for AlmenKompas
Head of Strategy, Governance and ESG
Shared ownership paved the way for success
It was also important that the end users felt ownership of the solution.
The program group therefore consciously worked to balance high professionalism, data quality and standardization with close involvement of the people who would subsequently work with the tools in practice.
A central advisory board with representatives from various housing organizations and administrations played an important role throughout the development process. At the same time, housing organizations, management, employees and other key players were continuously involved through analyses, workshops, pilot programs, events and dialogue meetings.
It was crucial that AlmenKompas was not developed as an expert tool alongside the sector, but as a joint decision-making tool that housing organizations could recognize themselves in and take active ownership of.
Here, VENZO again played a special role in building a bridge between data complexity, user understanding and concrete workflows.
The combination of high professionalism, usability and broad involvement ultimately became one of the most important reasons why AlmenKompas achieved legitimacy and support across the sector.
When AlmenKompas was launched in April 2026, it was not just a collection of tools. It was the culmination of extensive collaboration across organizations, professions and interests – and a concrete example of how common standards and common data can support better decisions in a complex sector.
And for Ulla Jensen, the success is not just the 20 ESG metrics or the dashboard that AlmenKompas consists of. It is that the public sector now has a common starting point for the important work on the sector’s current and future sustainability goals.
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