BT’s total community contribution of £15 million makes it the biggest corporate donor in the UK. As a privatised company, still with dominant overall market share despite tough competition in some sections, it remains very much in the public spotlight and subject to detailed regulation.
The 1992 Community Affairs Briefing profile painted a picture of a highly principled community programme, keen above all to make a contribution to the community but also trying to focus on clear objectives which might be relevant to business. The sheer numbers of employees (then 230,000, not far short of twice today’s number) deterred action on widespread staff involvement. Effective monitoring was in its infancy.
Today, the company has been massively restructured and downsized but the programme has more than survived, not something that could be automatically assumed. Now it is explicitly focused on business objectives, ahead of the game on evaluation, confident enough to be used in corporate TV advertising. Employee involvement is gathering pace but with ground to catch up, while the spread of subjects and projects is still very diverse compared to others – though the two or three year funding commitments which BT tends to give makes change very slow.
The programme
The total spend of £15 million on the BT Community Partnership Programme in 1996, valued under Per Cent Club definitions, splits into a cash contribution of £12 million and in-kind of £3 million. Two guiding themes of access and communication are applied in three subject areas:
skills for competitiveness, helping people with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a changing society and economy, making the link between education and employment (£6.8 million);
enabling and communicating, using communications technology to help people keep in touch, for example by breaking down the barriers of disability (£5.2 million);
sponsorship, increasing access to the arts and wider cultural and social life (?3 million).
BT’s starting point is its commitment to contribute half a per cent of UK generated pre-tax profits. “Making a fitting contribution” is part of the corporate mission statement. Increasingly individual projects are chosen to make a strategic impact on a whole issue, to overcome not just to ameliorate a specific problem. Projects are assessed against pre-set criteria:
– deliver real benefits to society;
– connected to the company’s own role in society;
– able to work in partnership with BT;
– well managed, with communicatable results;
– financially effective, especially providing leverage;
– scope for active BT involvement, especially people skills.
Financial leverage of additional resources is important. BT Top Sport, for example, which introduces sport into primary schools, cost BT ?750,000 but helped generate ?2.3 million form the Sports Council and ?7.7 million from National Lottery.
Flagship projects include:
Childline, counsels children, where BT has donated office space and advertises the Freefone number in all pay-phones;
The Samaritans, now setting up a single national number so callers can be connected directly to the first available branch, where BT is providing £1 million over five years;
BT Environment Week, run by the Civic Trust, which gets people involved in practical local projects; also in the environment, BT Young Naturalist of the Year Awards to encourage primary school children to learn about conservation, attracting more than 20,000 applications;
BT Swimathon, started in 1986 and now involving 500 swimming pools and 50,000 entrants, raised £1.5 million for Childline and four disability charities in 1996;
support for Campus World, an on-line network of services for education, with curriculum materials and teaching aids, and secure access to the Internet;
arts and culture, including BT Celebration Series taking leading orchestras out on tour and commissioning new works and BT Festival of Dance for 11 to 19 year olds.
Applications procedures
BT receives 80,000 unsolicited requests for help each year. Inevitably most are disappointed, and so to bring more structure to the process, BT is moving in direction of being pro-active, setting up clear funding schemes, with tight criteria, application deadlines and procedures. The first is the competitive Communications Initiative, a ?500,000 fund for projects which improve people’s interpersonal skills. This offers up to six partnerships for projects of UK-wide significance, that are innovative and have clear measurable outcomes. The 300 enquiries when launched in 1996 turned into 130 firm applications. Shortlisted down to 10, an assessment by panel with independent members chose the final six in December including NACRO for training of ex-offenders, Age Resource (part of Age Concern) for information points for younger retirees, and Kids Club Network with a package for children’s play, a Web site and internet road-show. This method of working likely to grow
Organisation
The new head of the Community Partnership programme is Stephen Serpell, in post since November 1995. Significantly he came not from a conventional external affairs background but from the business, having run the Data and Messaging services within BT’s Managed Network Services, a business generating as much in profits as the community partnership programme now spends. The programme is delivered by a team of 32 staff, including a field force of 15 engaged in liaison with schools and colleges.
Programme policy is set by a board level sub-committee, chaired by the company secretary, Malcolm Argent, with non-executive board member, Yve Newbold, and three directors, including head of corporate relations, Ian Ash. He has line management responsibility for the programme, through Sandy Walkington, BT’s head of public affairs, to whom Stephen Serpell reports.
Employee involvement
An increasingly strong theme is employee involvement. Mentoring is strongly encouraged, using the Roots & Wings programme. The payroll giving scheme is probably the biggest in the country, with 11,000 staff donating £1 million a year, and another £1 million in matching funding and administrative fees paid by BT. In addition, staff can apply for money for organisations with which they volunteer. Currently costing £260,000 a year, there is a company wide scheme but administration is being devolved to the business units for line management to decide wherever possible. With another 1,000 staff as school governors, well over 10% of the staff are thought to be engaged in community activity with some form of support from the company.
Communication
As a company BT spends heavily on marketing, its current “Always on my mind” campaign uses themes directly relevant to the community programme, including the social cost of communication breakdown. Another point of contact with the community programme is the BT Forum, funded from marketing, which is leading a nationwide investigation through conferences and research papers into the changing role of communication in our lives at home, at work and at play. Led by Joanna Foster with a strong campaigning and awareness raising mission, links with the community programme will grow as the BT Forum identifies key issues which then require project funding.
Most companies cite corporate reputation as a big motivating factor behind their community programme. For BT, given the nature of the product, its history in public sector and the dominant market position, it is vitally important for company itself to have high reputation; corporate social responsibility is an integral and key part.
The current TV advertising campaign includes in the London, south east and north west regions four adverts featuring the community programme directly. This is believed to be the first time a company has explicitly used its CCI activities in TV advertising and careful monitoring is being undertaken to check for any cynical reaction. Others have tried press advertising, with mixed results.
Regulation
BT is heavily regulated, more so than other privatized utilities, and this constrains action: for example, it has to turn down the most frequently requested contribution – free or discounted equipment and service – otherwise the regulator could insist the same offer is made to everyone else to prevent anti-competitive behaviour. BT does not include in its Per Cent Club definition of total community contribution spending on services of real value to society which were originally promised in its regulatory submission or might be thought to be part of everyday business. Examples include:
Typetalk, telephone relay service for hearing and speech-impaired people run by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, annual cost to BT £7 million;
directory services for the blind – £1.5 million (and other services for disabled people ?7 million);
malicious calls bureau – ?4 million;
payphones in remote rural areas (30,000 of the 132,000 network) £1.1 million above the minimum required by the regulator.
If other companies were to start increasing their declared totals, for example by using the London Benchmark Group framework, BT might wish to reconsider its policy on some of these.
Evaluation
These ‘extra’ community services demonstrate the limitations of traditional methods of evaluating the community contribution. BT’s recent commitment to undertake some form of social audit will help present a broader picture. Seen by some as incredibly daring, in fact it builds on current practice internally of setting objectives and monitoring performance through regular surveying.
BT’s decision to enter for the European Quality Award, the largest UK company to do so, reinforces this. It has also had a big impact on the status of the community programme. Suddenly attention focuses on the extra points that a well-managed and evaluated programme can yield in the ‘impact on society’ element. In the 1996 submission, the community programme scored in the 61-70% category, compared to a median score among other entrants of 41% and only 4% of companies have ever scored higher. Now BT will be publishing its EQA submission.
As another sign of a more open and accountable future, in November BT published four booklets detailing how it goes about addressing critical issues affecting consumers, the environment, disability and corporate ethics, the latter a somewhat curious phrase to describe stakeholder relations.
Challenges
For the future, the first and foremost task is to continue the process of integrating the programme into the mainstream. That means going beyond planned efforts to get the staff involved to find ways of really involving line management and so getting the business benefit. It should also mean undertaking cause-related marketing.
The next challenge is to extend evaluation beyond costing the inputs, first to record outputs like projects helped, jobs created, school children assisted, and second to assess impact. Since privatisation BT has contributed over ?100 million to the community. What has this really achieved, apart from helping a lot of individual projects? Has it made a difference? The answer is almost certainly yes but demonstrating how would help others to do better.
Finally, there’s that question of greatness. Born big, Britain’s biggest corporate community involvement programme inevitably has a leadership role thrust upon it. In other companies, community affairs managers and senior management alike struggle with questions: How much should we spend? More on education and less on enterprise? How much information should we, must we, release to the public? BT has a great opportunity to set an example, not just to companies but to the other sectors as well on the role of business in society. So the pressure on BT to get it right is intense. “Be not afraid of greatness” Shakespeare also said. If BT leads, others can safely follow.
FactFile
British Telecommunications plc
Year ended March 31, 1996
Chairman: Sir Iain Vallance
Chief executive: Sir Peter Bonfield
Main business: provider of telecommunications services – local, long distance and international calls; telephone lines, equipment and private circuits for homes and businesses; providing and managing private networks; and supply mobile communications services.
Turnover: £14.5 billion
Pre-tax profit: £3.0 billion
Employees: 130,000
FT UK Top 500 ranking: 3
Community contribution: ?15 million
Percentage of pre-tax profit: 0.5%
Memberships: BITC, ABSA, Per Cent Club
Contact: Stephen Serpell, Head of Community Partnership Programme
Address: BT Centre, 81 Newgate Street, London EC1A 7AJ
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