In the year to March 2007

In the year to March 2007, there were five interlinked elements to our community support:

1. Financial donations – supporting community groups and charities with financial donations from Experian, but this is rarely something we do in isolation, a donation is frequently tied in to a programme of involvement.
   
   In the last year we directly donated $728,843 to community and charity projects in the UK and US. These monies were given directly from the Experian business.
   
   
2. Employee involvement – whether it is the fundraising activities of our people in the workplace, our people signing up as mentors to local schools, or using the expertise of our people who volunteer to sit on the boards of charity groups or social enterprises. We encourage our employees to use their energy and skills in support of our programme.
   
   We recorded 5,190 hours of employee volunteering time last year during the working week, with 766 separate employees engaged and involved. When translated into an equivalent salary cost this equates to $156,917. In the US there were a further 4,583 hours recorded outside work time.
   
   
3. Gifts in kind – sometimes we are able to benefit community groups via a simple donation of goods or help them out by providing access to our products and facilities for free.
   
   Last year, we donated goods or services to the value of $331,934 to charities and community groups. The most significant contributors to this figure were a number of free uses of our Mosaic software for local community groups, an in-kind staff contribution to a Government-sponsored environmental programme in the UK, and the gift of almost 250 computers from our US business.
   
   
4. Employee fundraising – our people often donate directly themselves to charities that Experian supports, or perhaps raise funds in other imaginative ways at work. We record these figures to give us the complete picture, but we never lose sight of the fact that this is our people, their friends and families parting with their own money, not a company donation although we do match fund and encourage giving via our payroll.
   
   We recorded a total of $211,587 raised by our staff, principally in the UK in connection with Experian’s projects. $118,740 was raised by employees in the US in support of a variety of projects with more than 15 non-profit organisations.
   
   
5. The GUS Trust – the GUS Trust was the principal vehicle for community giving by GUS. The Trust was funded by donations from GUS plc’s profits, roughly half of which were generated by Experian. Experian also proposed a number of community projects to the Trust during the year in question and was granted funding for many of these projects. Since the demerger, profits are no longer donated to the Trust although it is still discharging its final funding.
   
   Before our company demerged from GUS it received funds from the GUS Trust to donate to community projects. The total donated this year was $517,170.

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