Member Article

Yorkshire businesses hailed as one of Britain’s most caring organisations with globally recognised award

Creative Leeds based PR agency, Chocolate PR has seen its client, Skipton Building Society through to winning an internationally recognised corporate social responsibility award in a campaign to find Britain’s most caring organisations.

Last year, Skipton Building Society launched its Grassroots Giving programme, ‘Skipton Big 160’ to celebrate its 160th anniversary as a mutual organisation. 160 donations of £500 were given away to small community and voluntary groups across the UK. An intensive media relations and social media campaign was launched by Chocolate PR coinciding with Grassroots Giving to showcase the programme and encourage community groups across the UK to get involved. As a result, the scheme generated overwhelming interest, with over 1,000 applications received to win the 160 pots of funding, and more than 20,000 votes at the shortlist stages.

Now Grassroots Giving and Skipton Building Society has been recognised internationally, being heralded a winner over 200 other nominations for it’s corporate social responsibility commitment, in the International CSR Excellence Awards.

Skipton has been invited to have its winning paper published in The Global Guide to CSR Excellence (the leading international work of reference on corporate social responsibility best practice) so that others around the world can follow its example and learn from the Grassroots Giving programme.

Jo Swann, Managing Director at Chocolate PR said: “The reason we are so happy to win this award is because it recognises what GrG is about at the core - It’s about helping community groups grow and supporting them in developing for strong futures. When we launched GrG we all agreed it was key to make it have further impact that just handing out funding, and it was key that the impact went further than just the winners. The free advice and support via downloadable guides, showcasing of the groups via social and PR, and involvement with community events has proven to be a great success.”

Chocolate PR encouraged groups to learn from the free resources- that included information on how to manage volunteers, attract business sponsorship and manage governance essentials - guides also explained the benefits of being active on social media.

As a result, 73% of the groups involved said the campaign had helped them reach more people, 90% said the campaign will help them in the future, 75% gained more press coverage and 105 of the winning groups now have Twitter and Facebook pages.

A further award winning element was the addition of a new social networking site designed specifically for the Grassroots Giving community groups to help them all stay in touch and learn from each other, after this was highlighted as a desire from 2013’s applicants. The Grassroots Giving cluster on Project Dirt is an online hub, connecting all Grassroots Giving applicants enabling them to promote events, share knowledge and interact with each other.

Following the success of the 2013 programme, Grassroots Giving has been launched again this year via www.skiptongrg.co.uk . Currently in the application process, Skipton Building Society and Chocolate PR are hoping even more community groups will apply this year.

Roy Prenton, coordinator of Skipton’s Grassroots Giving said:“This award recognises the fact that Skipton is playing its part in helping all those unsung heroes in communities across the country who are doing their bit to help others. To be recognised as a caring organisation is a real honour for the Society as this trait is something which we were founded around over 160 years ago - to help communities help themselves.”

“We really enjoyed working with Chocolate PR who are bursting with energy and always full of new creative ideas of how to extend our reach. We’re now really looking forward to reading all the 2014 applications”.

Applications are now open until 31 July 2014.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gabriella Smith .