About Acutis

OUR ACUTIS STORY

In 2007, I had a dream job in a traditional marketing role for a Catholic organization. Our team’s main business goal was the transformation of society through the growth of the human person. And that became my personal mission. 

We offered Christian leadership and personal development training. Our product was something truly life changing for our clients. I remember organizing a mission trip to Mexico in 2008 for almost 75 young adults. I was honestly amazed that so many people signed up. It was transformative for those who came and those we served. 

That’s what great marketing does – it creates experiences that captivate the soul and move people to action to make the world better.

But around 2008 marketing was changing at light speed, and a lot of small organizations like ours were getting left behind. See, as good as we were at printing flyers and running events, we lacked digital skills needed for online marketing, with Facebook, YouTube and Google just starting to take off. 

The world of secular advertising was exploding, and we were still wondering how to get our brand and message out to the world in the increasingly competitive digital landscape. So we never truly stood out. And we didn’t have nearly the impact we could have had. 

During the Great Recession, I left that job to go back to the corporate life. For all intents and purposes, I had given up on the idea of combining faith and a career in business. I spent the next 12 years in digital marketing, international relations, strategy consulting and PR for gigantic organizations where I was merely a number.

Sure, I got to do some cool stuff, like representing the Air Force at the largest aerospace expo in South America, leading product development teams at a Fortune 100 financial services firm, and working with cutting edge creative agencies in Washington, D.C. and New York City. 

But despite the apparent success, I was miserable. Personally, I found the work soul crushing, because it was not virtue-driven. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t find any meaning in the secular approach these organizations had to business, based primarily on economic value. I knew business could be a force for good in society, but I just wasn’t seeing it in my own life. 

I felt stuck climbing a corporate ladder that was not firmly planted on a foundation of Christian values. In short, I was on the wrong ladder. I often found myself questioning the ethics of it all, wondering whether it was okay to bill a client (or tax payer) for time spent on corporate inclusivity training that was not aligned to my view of marriage, for example. Deep down, I knew there had to be more to tech, to marketing and to digital consulting than I had experienced up until then. 

Then in 2020, I heard about Carlo Acutis, a young man who died after a bout with leukemia in 2006. Bl. Carlo fervently believed that Christian faith can and should be shared online through modern digital experiences. He was a self-taught programmer at the forefront of the new evangelization through digital media. 

Considering his story, I realized that over the past decade I had learned many of the skills needed to bring modern digital marketing to virtue-driven organizations and businesses. Skills like website design, user experience, photojournalism and agile product development. Skills to help solve the digital marketing challenge for organizations that have have real impact in the world.

Bringing my faith to business means helping organizations with a life-changing product or service grow and thrive in a global, digital economy. That’s what inspires me every day. That’s why I founded Acutis Digital Media. 

— Stephen J. Caruso, Founder