Top financial provider with ethical roots bags Gold Award
When Friends Provident scooped the Gold Award in the
Government’s Payroll Giving Quality Mark initiative, the company
saw it as an endorsement of their strong corporate culture of
committed giving.
Friends Provident is one of the UK’s leading providers of
financial products and services. It also has an unusual history,
being founded by Quakers in the 19th century. These origins have
placed ethics at the heart of the company’s business for over 175
years, and provide the basis for its longstanding commitment to
corporate philanthropy.
With 3,600 staff on its payroll, Friends Provident was keen to
get its employees involved in its corporate community programme. It
started offering Give As You Earn, CAF’s payroll giving scheme, to
its employees back in 2000.
“We are very proud of our ethical heritage and this is a very
practical demonstration of how our charitable values still apply
today,” said Mary Evans, from Friends Provident’s Corporate
Responsibility team. She continued: “It is very important for us to
recognise the generosity and high number of employees who
participate every month.”
During 2008, Friends Provident had over 390 employees
participating Give As You Earn every month. Mary said, “Our
contributions vary from month to month but on average we
contributed over £17,000 every month, inclusive of matching. That’s
over £204,000 to charitable organisations during 2008.”
In order to keep the scheme fresh in the minds of employees,
Friends Provident employ the services of Sharing the Caring, a
professional fundraising organisation, to come into its offices and
promote the scheme to its staff. The company now matches donations
up to £20 a month per employee and uses a diverse mix of
communications to promote the scheme, ranging from the corporate
annual report to the staff newsletter and intranet.
Mary Evans, from Friends Provident’s Corporate Responsibility
team, says: “The Payroll Giving Quality Mark Gold Award is a great
way of recognising a culture of responsibility and committed giving
among employees.”