Get the boss to help your charity

Neill Ghosh
  Neill Ghosh
Intelligent Giving Lead Researcher

The top ten employers
 1. Aviva (Norwich Union)
2. Northern Rock
3= Barclays
3= British American Tobacco  
5. BSkyB
6. Vodafone
7= 3i Group
7= BHP Billiton
7= Gallaher Group
7= Man Group
  
YOU MAY YET BE ABLE to change the world. With a little help from your boss.

If you work for one of the top-ranking companies in our new Ethical Bonuses Index, then we offer our congratulations. Because if you work for one of these organizations, happen to earn the average wage, give a respectable three per cent of it away, and then have the gift topped up by your employer – in this case RBS or Northern Rock – then you’ll end up giving almost £1800 a year to your chosen cause. For any charity, that’s serious money – but it will only cost you £40 a month.

Our first Ethical Bonuses Index reveals that more and more companies are doubling or even tripling their employees’ donations, with some big players shelling out millions on these increasingly popular schemes. In a competitive job market, this philanthropic largesse is turning out to be a popular way to attract and keep staff.

> Download the Ethical Bonuses Index 2007 (PDF, 44k)

But it’s not just topping up donations. Lots of companies realize that giving paid time off to volunteer can make their employees a happier bunch. The BBC and Aviva (aka Norwich Union) offer an exceptional six days’ volunteering time per year. If the 55,900 staff between them took up this option, then a team of 100 people could work for charity for 13 years (with weekends off – don’t want to overdo it).

Every little helps… unless you work for Tesco


But there is a lot of catching up to do by many employers, especially supermarkets. Sainsbury’s passes muster by offering to match donations from sponsored events. But competitors including Tesco and ASDA come close to the bottom of our table, offering minimal incentives to give to charity or to volunteer.
Mr Scrooge: a fan of Tesco
Bob Cratchit benefits from Scrooge's ever-so-slightly unethical bonus

Tesco does particularly badly. Although it offers its employees the chance to give direct from their wages, staff are left to pay the admin costs the company incurs in running it. So employees end up paying around four per cent on administration that could go to charity instead – and which most companies pay on behalf of employees. Until things change, we’d advise Tesco employees not to use the company’s payroll giving scheme; charities would receive more money if took out a regular direct debit instead (remembering to tick the Gift Aid box).

But at least Tesco responded to our enquiries. Over a third of the employers we contacted, from AstraZeneca to Unilever, couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us their policies. In many cases the impression we received was that they didn’t have any.

It’s getting better


But things are clearly improving. Companies realize that giving ethical bonuses improves morale and doesn’t cost much – and the schemes are becoming increasingly popular. Many companies we spoke to were in the process of formalising their policies, and we predict that most big companies will have ethical bonus schemes in place by this time next year. And that’s something we can all look forward to.

> Download the Ethical Bonuses Index (PDF, 44k)
> More Features

Companies reviewed: Aviva (Norwich Union) Northern Rock Barclays British American Tobacco BskyB Vodafone 3i Group BHP Billiton Gallaher Group Man Group Royal & Sun Alliance United Utilities Legal & General Alliance & Leicester Cadbury Schweppes Capita Group HBOS KPMG Old Mutual Reckitt Benckiser Smith & Nephew Ernst & Young Anglo American Royal Bank of Scotland Scottish and Southern Energy Whitbread Standard Chartered Tate & Lyle Bradford & Bingley BG Group J Sainsbury Kingfisher BBC Orange Centrica Alliance Boots British Land BT Group DSG international HSBC John Lewis Partnership Prudential Resolution Yell Land Securities Group Reuters Marks & Spencer National Grid Shire Virgin Experian PricewaterhouseCoopers British Airways Cable & Wireless Home Retail Group Hanson Kelda Group (Yorkshire Water) Lonmin Rolls-Royce Sage Group ScottishPower ASDA Cairn Energy Tesco ITV Associated British Foods SABMiller Amvescap AstraZeneca BAA BAE Systems Bodyshop BP Carnival Collins Stewart Tullett Compass Group Cooperative Bank, The Corus Group Deloitte Diageo Drax Enterprise Inns Friends Provident GlaxoSmithKline Hammerson ICAP Imperial Chemical Industries Imperial Tobacco Intercontinental Hotels International Power Johnson Matthey Liberty International Lloyds TSB Group Morrisons Supermarkets Next O2 Pearson Persimmon Reed Elsevier Rexam Rio Tinto Royal Dutch Shell Scottish & Newcastle Severn Trent Slough Estates Smiths Group Somerfield Standard Life Unilever WHSmith Wolseley Wpp Group Xstrata


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Reader's comments

Telling the staff in the first place...
Submitted by Editor Dave on Thu, 01/02/2007 - 8:34am.

See our blog for a recent realisation on our part: http://intelligentgiving.blogspot.com/2007/02/we-do-good-on-paper.html


To all the CSR people checking out 'their place' in the ranks...
Submitted by LMC on Wed, 31/01/2007 - 3:10pm.

Don't get me wrong: six days volunteering per year is a generous allowance. If the average contractual working week is 37 hours, that's 111 hours per year. If an employee's salary is over about £17.5K, then the 'value' of that person's volunteering equates to just over a grand donated by your company to charity. Good stuff.

However, please note that from the charity's point of view, little and often might be more valuable than 'chunks' of one or more days at a time. ESPECIALLY if it is a small charity with limited staff and resources, by the time they have arranged for your corporate team to do a day's work, the charity sometimes may as well have done it themselves in terms of time/resources taken. I know - I've arranged such events. How generous of us to offer those people a free team-building day :non-existent rolleyes emoticon:

Allowing your employees to split their time may be of more actual value to their chosen cause - e.g. a couple of hours a week mentoring a teenager (local volunteer bureau or education department will have details of schools with schemes) , helping a smaller child with reading, arts activities with special needs groups, taking an elderly person to the library or shopping, etc etc. Or perhaps if they are already involved with Guiding or Scouting, or other youth groups, be flexible about 'paid days' for additional activities for the group during school holidays. Or a Friday preparing for a camping weekend (and possibly - again the voice of experience - the Monday to recover from lack of sleep!)

The company I work for part-time has just under 50 employees, and offers six days a year volunteering. This can be taken "however" the volunteer likes in chunks of time - all it needs is a little bit of planning to make sure the phones are covered. So if your company doesn't do corporate volunteering this way, no excuses please!

----------------------------------------------- ... nearly Vlad the Impaler


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