So what does a company do with over a million pounds to give away?
Howard Lake | 12 June 2017 | Blogs
This year Euromonitor International launched an extension of its CSR programme: giving 1% of turnover to good causes – well over £1 million in this financial year.
As Euromonitor’s CEO Tim Kitchin states: “We are a successful, growing and profitable business. Meanwhile the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ widens. Companies such as ours need to be doing more to address this”. Our programme is not motivated by business need but the desire to make a real difference.
So how will we be giving away this amount to the sorts of organisation we want to support, without being inundated with unsolicited applications from every charity under the sun? Unfortunately we are not inviting you to apply for this funding. We have a very lean CSR team and could not easily cope with ad-hoc applications. We also need to be able to properly carry out due diligence on any charity which we are sponsoring.
We are therefore following six key principles when considering who to support:
1. Staff engagement
Staff engagement is key to the choices of organisation which we want to support. We have 12 offices and 1600 staff worldwide and we solicit nominations for both international charities and for grants to organisations operating just in their region or even just in their community. Many staff already support or volunteer for different organisations and are keen to do more. So far all our supported partners have come from this route.
2. Does it fall under our basic criteria?
As signatories of the UN Global Compact we are concentrating on the environment, health and the alleviation of poverty.
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3. A clearly defined project
We look for a project for which our donation can make a real difference rather than be swallowed into a general pot. We need to understand the project: where will the money be spent; is it a project which has a clearly defined start and finish date? Can the project be easily understood and shared with our staff?
4. Communication links
We need the organisations to communicate progress with us; at the same time we need to be able to support a project which can be clearly communicated to and understood by our staff.
5. Relationship building for the long term
We are keen to build relationships with the organisations: for example we have a programme of volunteering (staff have two volunteering days a year) and hope that we can with at least some of these charities open up the possibility of carrying out volunteering projects with them. We are also looking at core funding support for some of our more established partners beyond our project support.
6. Sustainability and a local context
It is important to us that organisations work with local partners to provide local employment and that the end result is sustainable: our partners keep continuous contact with their projects long after they have finished the work.
An example of one of our partners is Just a Drop. Just a Drop provides water supplies and toilets to communities in different parts of the developing world. One of our staff had come across the founder in a work context and proposed them as a small organisation to which we could make a big difference. Importantly the organisation works with local suppliers and NGOs and with the indigenous communities. They are concerned with working with the community to provide the kinds of facilities which are really effective and are sustainable in that community, alongside hygiene and health education. We have sponsored a number of projects with Just a Drop in India and Nicaragua: one project in India has been visited by staff from our Bangalore office.
Our First Project with Just a Drop in India is Completed! https://t.co/C42bE73Ybc #csr pic.twitter.com/7Yku1GSB4G
— Euromonitor (@Euromonitor) February 16, 2017
Advice to charities
So our advice to charities would be: think about how you present your fundraising proposals and whether a project is easily understood and has clear, measurable outcomes. Make sure you have the answers to any due diligence questions to hand: expect plenty of searching questions. And above all else, good, regular and clear communication with the funder is key.
Sarah Hunter is CSR Director at Euromonitor International.
Euromonitor International is the world’s leading provider for global business intelligence and strategic market analysis. We have more than 40 years of experience publishing international market reports, business reference books and online databases on consumer markets.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.