As every year, we stand by our commitment to spend 1% of our turnover on the Euromonitor CSR programme. The budget for 2020-21 was £1.5 million. Over £1.2 million has been donated directly to charitable causes, among them 10 Headline charity partners, 2 Environmental partners and 160 Regional charity partners.
Here’s a summary of our 2020-21 CSR impact:
2020 was of course a challenging year for all of us. COVID forced certain changes on us for the year and we have adapted accordingly. We ran our usual themed weeks virtually which was a new experience, but it enabled better communication among our offices and we saw an increase in attendance of these events.
This year there was very low volunteering - although it was not non-existent - in many offices. While the percentage stood at 57% in 2018-2019, it stood at 8% at the end of this year. Anecdotally we are aware that many staff were carrying out individual volunteering and fundraising in their own communities, however, in response to the pandemic.
However, we have also seen an increase in employee giving and in the number of charities nominated for our Regional charity programme. We were able to respond to causes our employees cared about and quadruple a fundraiser for COVID in each of our office locations and a fundraiser for charities fighting racial injustice in Chicago.
A number of our partners had a very tough start to the year, although some of them made up lost ground as the year progressed. Many reorganised their work to focus on hygiene education and medical support for COVID: these included Just a Drop, Humanity and Inclusion, Jaya Mental Health and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). We made the decision to give additional donations to Just a Drop and MSF at the end of the financial year. We also made larger than usual annual donations to our carbon offset partners, World Land Trust and Save the Orangutan to make up for the loss of income from flights not taken and energy offset.
You may explore more about our CSR programme here.