At the beginning of this year we evaluated various different Social Value software calculators. We chose the Thrive Social Value platform and starting working with them in March. Thrive has helped us understand just how much of an impact we have already made in the social value work that we already do. During the Year End March 2021 Kinovo’s value was calculated at £1.15million.
Due to the nature of our business and who we serve, social value has always been at the heart of what we do, however we haven’t been communicating it to staff, stakeholders, clients or even the communities in which we work.
The focus of a lot of our work is in the social and affordable housing sector, and because of this, our work in the community is not limited to the remit of the projects that we carry out.
Being on the ground on behalf of local authorities and housing associations, we understand the importance of being part of the community. We also understand the greater impact we can have by coordinating our efforts with our clients and our own supply chain. In the last year we began to reach out to some of our larger clients to become involved in their own social activities and have also introduced social value information from all new suppliers as part of the bid process.
Covid-19 hampered our progress somewhat, particularly in terms of delivering a more formal social value programme to our communities.
However, a lot was achieved and the pandemic also shone a light on the culture of our organisation and the caring, positive attributes of our people. Through acts of kindness, our staff supported the elderly, infirm and isolated. During the lock-downs our engineers were often the only human contact tenants would have as we carried out emergency repair and maintenance works. Our mantra became to help where we can, such as doing shopping runs for house-bound clients, being available to chat, providing PPE in the community or donating computers to local schools.
From providing support to the elderly or isolated, to doing shopping runs for housebound clients – especially during lockdowns – it became clear that the culture was already one of a caring and positive workforce.
Early next year, we plan to publish our first stand-alone sustainability report which will detail our strategy in more detail and set goals against which we can measure performance for the future. Social Value will form a large part of this report, alongside the Environmental and Governance aspects.
Pippa Pang
Social Value & Marketing Manager
“In the last year we began to reach out to some of our larger clients to become involved in their own social value activities. We have also begun to form partnerships with charitable organisations such as StepChange Debt Charity a free debt advice service, that we could signpost our customers to if a need became apparent.”
Lee Venables
Chief Operating Officer
“We committed to producing a Sustainability report in the last quarter of this financial year and we installed Thrive so that we would have the ability to look back through what we have achieved over the past year. Not only that, but it also provides us with the group’s social value benchmark, which we will improve on.”
Martin Stone
Group Business Development
“Social Value is being given higher weighting in tenders now, in some cases up to 20%. Thrive will give us the ability to provide more tangible information about the social value activities that we carry out, in our bids, which in turn will help us to win more contracts.”
