First steps...

On Tuesday, we had a quick pre-Christmas drink.

Oliver, Mike, Ben and I met in a great bar near Marble Arch to discuss our respective Christmas plans, and the goals for the steering group in 2010.

I'm so glad we have such great minds working on this, and it was great to see how thinking from different businesses (retail, online and telecoms) is so well aligned. Our objectives are clearer as well: not only will we be able to identify the fundamental principles of a great third/private sector partnership, we are also going to provide a matching service, where we will be able to introduce businesses to like-minded, third sector leaders whose objectives are aligned.

These practical, genuinely useful outputs will ensure the group is an effective force for change and delivery, rather than the 'talking shops' that are all too common in the area of CSR and business engagement with third sector.

We will meet for the first time on 10th Feb, and I will be announcing the date for the forum meeting in the New Year. There are a few ground rules that we also discussed on what we want from these larger meetings.

1. The forum is to facilitate a meeting of equals. Third or private sector, there will be no favouritism at all.
2. As much as possible, representation should be even - we will make sure there are as many business leaders as third sector.
3. Pre-conceptions must be left at the door. If you are going to come, prepare for the fact that someone might change your mind.
4. Come armed. Everyone attending must have something to offer each other. Whether this is advice, a story of how partnerships have worked or not in the past or personal access/connections to people/organisations other members may be looking for, it will be valued by the individuals and whole group alike.

If we can keep to these rough guidelines, I am confident that this can be successful and generate new thinking on sustainable business.

I'm still trying to come up with a 'strap-line' - harder than it sounds. Not sure how to fit everything we want to accomplish into a pithy, funny, serious, new, ground-breaking and genuinely interesting sentence, but I will most certainly try!

On other areas of work - I am very interested in the debate on whether legislation should be created around sustainability. Some argue that it should be entirely voluntary, and that putting some laws around it may curtail or restrict the activity of the really progressive practitioners. This maybe so. I wonder, though, if something could be said to encourage diversity in terms of the range of charities supported by corporations. A quick survey around an office of 50 people will generate around 60 national, health focused charities that staff have a connection with. Some businesses have some real imagination and look very carefully at who they support, others go with perhaps the 'easy' route? This is a very difficult point to make, as all of them are fundamentally 'good' causes. So what can we do? I think there are a great many things businesses can do when deciding on a potentially large investment (time or money) to the third sector:

ACEVO currently leads the ImpACT coalition, a partnership between around 300 third sector orgs in the UK. The coaltion exists to improve accountability, clarity and transparency of third sector orgs. A very clever title, although one would receive no criticism from me if the words 'trite' or 'a little too on-the-nose' or 'too smart for its own good' were used to describe the name. Very clever marketing people with a considerable amount of time have clearly been at work here.

Anyway, they are doing some excellent work, and should be consulted by businesses who are struggling to ask the right questions during their due-diligence periods. Liam Cranley, ACEVO's Head of ImpACT, is best placed to advise on how to assess the effectiveness of charities. CEO pay, spend on overheads, and a range of subjects that can be rather incendiary are dealt with by Liam from an extremely informed position.

One day left before hols now, although I will return to work very briefly on Monday to be taken for Christmas drinks by one of the many contacts I have made this year. They are a company who specialise in communications, and have been working with a couple of ACEVO members. It's great to see the results of these relationships: tangible evidence of how corporate partnerships can really help the third sector.

New Year's resolution - to update this blog more often. I hope to fill it with all the great insight and fresh thinking generated in our steering group and forum, and track the progress from these initial thoughts to a really positive and significant set of results. We've got one year, and we're going to make the most of it!

Steering Group complete and Christmas drinks

So there we have it. It's done. Names to come, but we have heads of CSR and sustainable business, CEOs and a fantastic chairman in Oliver Rothschild.
This group is bringing together people who have really captured the narrative around sustainable business and can establish not only how this area might develop, but also how third and private sector partnerships might be set up in the future.

The steering group will meet for the first time in January, and we are inviting businesses and third sector organisations to join us for the forum on 23rd February.

We really want this to run as a forum, rather than a set of presentations and questions. Issues will be discussed and new directions highlighted. The other real goal is to change minds. We would like the forum members to leave their pre-conceptions at the door and at here all sides of all discussions. It will be a constantly challenging group, but this way we will see some results!

All this must be organised this year, which is fast disappearing. I have now 11 working days left before my holiday begins. I have a handful of meetings with our partners to go before I leave, and a host of other preparation to do before I can think of holidays. Friday has been written off for our ACEVO Christmas party. Ice skating at Somerset house and lunch. I'm sure the mulled wine on offer will provoke the desire but take away the performance and I will spend much of the morning on my arse, much to the amusement of colleagues and strangers alike. Although, I hear I'm in good company: our chief policy wonk could barely manage the skater shuffle last year, and spent a long time on the arm of a colleague.

On the subject of mulling, I mulled some cider last weekend. Much better than the wine equivalent in my view. Threw some dark rum in as well for good measure. I also indulged in a 1978 Rioja that my colleagues bought me for my birthday - the oldest wine I have had and I now have ambitions for more. Great stuff. A drop of vintage port was a splendid end to an evening with friends.

So, a full panel on our steering group and the McKelvey house well and truly in the Christmas mood, at least in the booze department.

CSRn't - fixing a broken agenda

9 months ago, I began working for ACEVO, the association of chief executives of voluntary organisations. I head up the commercial partnerships department. This means I manage our relationships with around 100 businesses.

ACEVO exists to support, develop, connect and represent our 2000 members, and we're very good at it. Over the last 10 years, we have made some very significant changes to how third sector organisations can work with government. See here for our Strategy Director's blog - http://sebelsworth.blogspot.com/ for an insight on how we operate with our friends in Whitehall.

So these two things tie together - take public service delivery - third sector orgs competing for contracts, or often sub-contracting to a larger, private sector company such as SERCO, one of our commercial partners. It makes sense that we can draw the three sectors together, not just two.

The conversation went thus: "we've done a great deal to fundamentally change the architecture of the third sector's relationship with government. we've become good at it. So good, in fact, that we are often looked to as the voice of the sector."
"Interesting. So how can we do this with the private sector?"

In fact, the question is 'why shouldn't we do this with the private sector?'
ACEVO has a unique position in this debate. We are a leading voice of the third sector, and we have strong contacts with business. Many organisations, clubs and initiatives looking at developing CSR strategies and agendas for business to interact with third sector organisations are on the periphery, looking into one of the two sectors. We are in the middle, interacting with all three. We have the influence and the access to some of the greatest thinkers in each area, and we are now going to make the most of this.

I titled this post "CSRn't", and I think it covers how we feel about the initiative-itis that people can feel about CSR. All too often, businesses are encouraged to either pay a lot of money, or simply go through a box ticking exercise to prove how good they are at CSR. Two anecdotes show the flimsy nature of this type of engagement:

1) Law firm. 50 partners, 250 staff. Based in London. Each staff member gets one day of volunteering per year. Very commendable. Think of the impact a lawyer can make in one day - they might sit on the board of a charity, putting their legal acumen to good use; similarly, they could spend a day with a social enterprise, guiding them through the minefield of legal issues they face.
Of course they do none of these things. Instead, their HR director organises a day when they all go to a local primary school, and they paint the climbing frame, they paint murals of fields and sea-sides on the walls, have someone write it up for their newsletter, take a couple of photographs and go home.


2) Investment bank, Canary Wharf, London: picture the 25th floor cafeteria around lunch time. 2 visiting CSR directors are discussing with their opposite number how the host company 'does CSR'. With a sense of ceremony that leads us to believe he has done this before , the host stands, looks north, and points. "Between Aldgate and Mile End", he says. Is this ideal? Is this what we want to hear?

Again, we can see the rather Victorian attitudes that prevail among many CSR professionals. But not everyone will do this. Many have excellent policies and agendas. In fact, ACEVO have been asked a couple of times to talk to partners of professional services firms on how to become a trustee.

The other thing we need to remember at this point, is that it isn't always about MONEY! Cash is often not the best thing business can give charity. Expertise is just as valuable on many occasions. Also, we have seen this year just how corporate philanthropy can suffer in bad economic conditions.

So, our aim with this area of work is to address the issues of sustainability. Not in a green sense, but in it's broadest sense. We want to build relationships between private and third sectors that are sustainable. To do this, we need to create business relationships, Just like ACEVO member Joyce Moseley of Catch-22 has just signed with SERCO.

In February, we will be launching our Sustainable Business Forum. The steering committee is chaired by Oliver Rothschild, who has sat on the board of UNICEF as well as many other charities, and has business interests that will all benefit from partnering with the third sector. As well as Oliver, we have support from Mike Barry, head of sustainable business at M&S, Ben Brabyn, CEO of Bmycharity, the online fundraising website that now charges 0% commission on donations, and other businesses such as Jupiter Asset Management. On the third sector side, CEO of Social Enterprise London and vice-chair of ACEVO, Allison Ogden-Newton, and other great minds will be leading the debate.

This blog will report all the news from this forum, from topics on the agenda to the lively discussions and more heated arguments. It will follow the discussion, how the debate evolves, make a note of the good stories and bad, and also look at the implementation of all of our ideas.
This is the most important thing, and what will separate us from the initiative-itis riddled corpses that have come before. This Forum will be more than about thinking, it will be about doing, and telling that story.