Volunteer matching - service makes cents. Read more

National Education Awards. Read more

Community partnership agreement. Read more

National Education Awards

Each fiscal year, the Heart of Experian will award one school neighboring the primary office locations* with a grant of $5,000 to support a major educational initiative. This donation can be split into two donations of $2,500 to support two neighborhood schools.

Applications: Local Heart of Experian Committees will invite neighborhood schools to apply for the awards. Schools must submit a written request on school letterhead detailing the initiative and the required funding.

Selection: The Heart of Experian Committees will select the schools to receive the award after reviewing and evaluating all applications.

Restrictions:
Monies cannot be used to support staff salaries, uniforms or athletic equipment.

Timing: April/May

*Primary Experian North America offices include Costa Mesa, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Schaumburg, IL; Allen, TX; Carmel, IN; Atlanta, GA; Van Buren, AK; and Lincoln, NE.

x Close

Managing our community programme

Our community programme is efficiently run at a regional level with small numbers of people directing, administering and overseeing projects. There are three strands to the programme that run though all our major geographies: volunteering, financial donations and partnerships that often involve both volunteers and funding.

Volunteering is at the heart of the programme – it’s a coincidence but no surprise that a heart symbol appears on both Americas’ and Serasa’s volunteering T shirts and hats. Volunteering is popular and is endorsed by our management. Employees are encouraged and supported in their volunteering: we source opportunities, provide time off during working hours for local community involvement and support proposed projects with funds. We also celebrate the volunteers who achieve the most: volunteer awards manifest themselves in various ways in all our operations. For example, in the US we reward people who volunteer 50hrs with $500 for the organisation they work with, in the UK we hold a ‘Community Carnival’ to celebrate our achievements.

We recognise that through our volunteers taking an active role in our communities, we build a variety of dedicated relationships and that volunteering provides our employees with an opportunity to learn new skills and often become stronger team members. We have clear policies and documentation that describes how volunteers can gain match funding for projects.

Donations are made to organisations with a recognised official, charitable status, (in Brazil we have been instrumental in developing a service and a register (Serasa Third Sector Space) that enables NGOs to demonstrate their genuine status and request support for their particular need). We have application processes in place that involve our people in helping make decisions, based on locally developed criteria, and in some countries, core programmes that organisations can apply for.

Partnerships


The best situation we can have is when we combine both volunteering and some company involvement in a partnership project with an NGO or charity. In Brazil we’ve been growing relationships with NGOs through the work of teams of volunteers who are providing their professional expertise. There’s a deliberate strategy of investing in the transfer of intellectual capital and encouraging the sustainability of the NGOs and our partnership with them. There is a strict process for the selection of NGOs we work with, based on disclosure criteria and we now have 90 volunteer teams working in almost all regions of Brazil.

In the UK we’ve done something similar, drawing up a partnership agreement before we sign up to donate funds which spells out what opportunities there are for our people to engage and how there will be benefits for both parties.

Experian Group
Local giving is driven by local community needs and the enthusiasm of our people for specific local projects both assessed openly and fairly according to regional policy.

We also give at an Experian Group level to encourage larger projects with a specific focus. The Board approves a level of funding each year within the central budget. The CR Management team allocates a provisional split of the funds across the regions and the regions submit projects for review that fit with the specific focus.