Corporate Social Responsibility

Since we set up Digital in 2000, 5-10% of Digital's activity has been given to charitable causes and not-for-profits every year. We believe CSR should be part of every firm's agenda, and whether it's cash donations or management time, every firm has something to offer. On these pages you can find out about a couple of the areas we’ve worked in. If you'd like to contribute to our Corporate Social Responsibility work then get in touch; digital media and management skills are key for charities, and if you're in the industry then you're already well placed to help. Previous beneficiaries of Digital's CSR activities have included: The University Teaching Hospital (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), The English Place (Africa), World Wildlife Fund (Geneva, Switzerland) and political policy think-tanks in the UK. If you’d like to donate some time to helping a great cause, then email our team today.

Everyone likes Christmas cards, Easter Eggs and Thanksgiving feasts, but at Digital we think our friends would rather we did something more valuable with the money and time we’d be spending on seasonal goodies.

Our skills are in strategy and management coaching, so we set up this award to let charities, social organisations or not-for-profits, who use the internet in education get a big leap forwards. We’ve given over £350,000 since the awards began and submissions for the 2010 CSR award are now open. For application details, write to us with details of your organisation, the role of the internet in education, and the ways we might be able to help you achieve more. The award team will then be in touch and talk you through the process. This year we’re looking for examples of how small internet budgets can have a massive impact on communications, especially within global charities or government policy groups where strategic input from us on their content or communication plans can be amplified to improve the lives of millions.

If you’d like to find ways of joining in on one of our projects then post your comments here. Long gone are the days of shaking tins on street corners. In the digital sector we figure that most people have heaps of skills that can be deployed by the less digitally wired organisations. That might mean helping build their sites, customer contact strategies or their relationship marketing programmes. It’s deeply rewarding and you can make a real difference real fast. That’s why we’ve been doing loads of this stuff over the years.

http://www.rnli.org.uk

The RNLI is the charity behind the brave men and women who go out into the worst weather around the British Isles to rescue people in difficulty. They won the Christmas award from Digital Strategy because this year’s big freeze was sure to make their tasks even harder. Our goal is to help raise the profile and awareness of their work, building stronger cut-through through digital media.

This is a £10,000 consultancy award.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/

Creating the right regulatory framework for online marketing and data protection is key to a healthy society as well as a healthy economy. Personal data will be the battleground for crime, justice and social cohesion, and for people and companies not up to speed with the issues, it could be uncomfortable and costly. That’s why we donated some of our time to helping the ICO’s team work on drafting a new code for the use of personal data and why we spent time and energy campaigning to raise the importance of these issues in government’s messaging. Our work included acting as readers for proposed documentation, giving guidance the way we have to ministers and departments as policy advisors in the past, and building up the right set of tools and messages for explaining these issues to industry. Now every company is processing personal data it’s never been more important.

This was a £7,500 consultancy award.

Digital marketing is in the mainstream of marcoms and direct marketing is increasingly at the heart of digital. That’s why, when the DMC approached us, our CEo was delighted to accept the role of being one of the inaugural commissioners for the regulation of this sector. Supported by the Direct Marketing Association, the DMC’s work is to champion industry codes and ensure best practice is followed.

Personal data is at the heart of direct marketing and the web has unlocked new types of personal data, gathered in new ways and used for new purposes. The projects we have run for the DMC include coaching workshops, research, marketing strategy advice and marketing tracking tools.
This was a £15,000 consultancy and services award.

Connecting consumers to the right medical services is an area the internet can play a fundamental role in. That’s why Digital’s team were delighted when the UK government’s ‘Cabinet Office’ approached us about helping citizens get more value from their public healthcare provider in the UK, and increase the take-up for volunteering in medical related support charities. We wanted to help the National Health Service get more value from their massive network of websites. By forming new connections we could see ways they could connect people more effectively to both medical services and supporting charities. A summary of our strategy was included in the final policy recommendations presented by the Minister.

International healthcare charity Marie Stopes approached Digital this Autumn to apply for our 2007 CSR Digital Partnership Award, a donation of £10,000 of digital strategy to help accelerate online communications and internet strategies. From our work in the Horn of Africa in 2000/1 we’d understood the link between population control and effective economic and agricultural development. MSI has been at the heart of this area for over 30 years and with the deep damage HIV/AIDS is inflicting on entire nations, issues of sexual and reproductive health have never been more important. We’re working with the MSI leadership and marketing teams to help build a strong digital communications programme that moves their websites to the heart of their communications mix. As part of our work we’re exploring audience segmentation strategies, the power of blogging, the development of news and content strategies, and relating all of these back through corporate goals. Sign up for the news services and watch our work unfold over the next year.

Latest news from MSI

• Making a difference in Afghanistan...more
• MSI spearheads dramatic increases in permanent contraception in Bangladesh...more
• Marie Stopes Tanzania sets the blueprint for more partnerships with Local Government Authorities...more

Marie Stopes International is a not-for-profit sexual and reproductive health (SRH) organisation that delivers state-of-the-art programmes in: family planning; safe abortion and care; maternal & child health; and HIV/AIDS reduction and the prevention of STIs. There are 5000 people in their teams and this year they worked in 38 countries, with programmes being developed in five further countries between now and 2010.

Their websites, email, search engine strategies and databases are critical in ensuring the right content and materials discovered by the right people at the right time. The quality of medical advice on the web is mixed and MSI’s healthcare content needs to be quickly accessible, while it’s information for governments and legislators needs to translate social and medical challenges into clear policy roadmaps.

These maps show the locations of some of their programmes in Ethiopia.

We have helped MSF since we came across them while supporting healthcare and educational projects in Ethiopia five years ago. We helped on the first healthcare intranet in Addis (for the country's only teaching hospital) before our team began building digitally networked teaching resources to help improve university teacher training (key in overcoming development and healthcare challenges).

The courage of the MSF doctors and fieldworkers was as inspiring, as the needs they work to fill, are daunting. MSF are our Christmas charity and if you'd like to help them then you can donate here (secure link).

In Ethiopia health care remains almost non-existent, and across the country MSF helps treat people with malaria, kala azar, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Their new projects in the north are bringing TB treatment to nomads, and in the south their mobile clinics bring medical care and food to 60,000. Read more in the annual review.

The aftermath of the Asian quake continues to affect millions. MSF teams have been on the ground since the start and you can learn more about their work in this video (Windows Media Player)

We don't just make cash donations to our Christmas charity (MSF), we also give management time and effort to a range of organisations to help them work more effectively. Here are a few things we've worked on:

Giving our time to NGOs

• The Teaching Hospital (Addis Ababa) - content development and knowledge management for the first medical intranet in Ethiopia
• The English Place (Africa) - content development and management support for this Education charity
• World Wildlife Fund (Geneva) - website and digital media development strategy

Giving time to educate the leaders of the digital networked society

• Universities (London) - lecturing and supporting in development of courses to equip leaders of the digital networked society

Giving our time to governments to help get the framework right for the digital networked society

• The Department of Trade and Industry (London) - supporting policy think tanks in generating ideas for more effective trading
• The Home Office (London) - policy idea generation for how to balance the needs of public security and personal privacy in the digital networked society
• The Ministry of Telecommunications (Addis Ababa) - policy ideas for dial-up roll out