Quick summary
To play an active part in social and economic regeneration in our communities, at a local, national and global level.
This year’s message has to be more, not less.
Playing an active part in our communities is in our cultural DNA and so even in a year when trading conditions in some of our geographies have been difficult, we have given more.
We have asked a lot of our employees this year but many of our key achievements in the community are down to them and their continued dedication. Overall our people have raised more funds than ever before and have maintained similar levels of volunteering. And if you add the amazing volunteering achievements of our colleagues in Brazil, who mobilised 2,551 people on a specific ‘Serasa Volunteer Day’ we can certainly say we’re doing more!
We’ve reduced our management costs very slightly but we’ve given more funding direct to community projects, increasing our overall cash giving by over $300,000 from the UK and US businesses, plus more than $700.00 from Experian Group plc.
More has also meant more of our people being engaged: we’ve reached out to new parts of our business, involving new offices in our US Community Involvement Council, expanding our relationship with The University of California, Irvine, and bringing recently acquired companies on board in the UK. For the first time we have also gathered anecdotal data on community involvement in Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
Awards have come our way as a result of more involvement: recognition for encouraging our people to give through payroll giving; ‘Big Tick’ awards from Business in the Community; and awards for individuals who have excelled as volunteers.
And next year we want to achieve more still; we have defined a new global focus for major community projects and have started to look at how we can learn better from each other, for example, duplicating excellence in policies and process in the US and tracking impact and results using methodology from Brazil and the UK.
