Local community impact

The ultimate purpose of our business is investment in communities through the grants made to Good Causes by the National Lottery Distribution Bodies.



However, we also want to contribute in our own right through donating money, employee time and skills to our community partnerships.
There are several aspects to this contribution:
  • Employee participation through:
    • Four hours per month volunteering time for all staff
    • Match-funding through the Camelot Foundation
    • Encouragement of individual staff giving through the ' Give As You Earn ' scheme
    • Team challenges through the 'Volunteer to Win' programme set up to support the London Olympics bid, and challenges established through the Business in the Community (BITC) Cares Programme (which links up businesses with local community projects)
  • The Camelot Foundation, which is an independent grant-making body that donates £2 million a year
  • Direct donations, including ad hoc charitable giving, sponsorship and partnership activities
  • Promoting social responsibility in our industry (See Responsible gaming) and also in the corporate sector in general
  • Our commitment to maintain up to 1,000 community retail outlets. See Partnership in retail

Camelot Foundation Logo As a result, Camelot is one of the largest corporate donors in the UK, as measured by the percentage of pre-tax profits going to social and community causes. In 2004/05, we contributed nearly £2.6 million, equivalent to 5.5% of our pre-tax profits. This compares with an average of less than 1.0% pre-tax profit contribution from FTSE100 companies, and is in line with our commitment that in 2004/05 we would maintain our high rate of giving - primarily through the Camelot Foundation - and continue to benchmark our performance .



Percentage of pre-tax profit spent on community investment (%)
Target  Sustain leading position
2004/05  5.5
2003/04 6.0
2002/03  7.4
2001/02  6.6

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PerCent Club Logo

We also benchmark ourselves through membership of the PerCent club. The PerCent standard is a voluntary benchmark, measuring the contributions made by companies through cash donations, staff time, gifts in kind and management time, shown as a percentage of pre-tax profits. Corporate contributions to the community in excess of 1% of pre-tax profits are recognised with the award of a certificate and the use of the PerCent Club logo.  

In 'The Giving List' that was published as a supplement in The Guardian in November 2004 we ranked 18th out of 152 companies that entered the 2003/04 standard. The PerCent logo was awarded to 116 businesses.

The table below shows how we calculate our community contribution, in accordance with the London Benchmarking Group model. See www.lbg-online.net.

London Benchmarking Group Logo The London Benchmarking model provides an agreed approach for valuing different types of company contributions to the community, including cash, time, and gifts in-kind. Our contributions are shown in the table.
London Benchmarking Group model (£)
 
2004/05
2003/04
2002/03
2001/02
Charity 1
2,223,954
2,067,679
2,072,006
2,050,742
Community Investment 2
73,743
139,767
697,127
1,072,798
Commercial Initiative 3
257,880
464,530
279,329
486,572
Management Costs 4
6,002
31,834
94,529
183,686
Total
2,561,579
2,703,810
3,142,987
3,793,798
Business Basics 5
769,940,000
759,500,000
740,300,000
724,819,550
NLDF 6
1,257,700,000
1,216,200,000
1,257,700,000
1,341,563,970

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Consultation


In April 2005, in line with a commitment published the previous year, we consulted community and voluntary groups, employees and corporate leaders to improve our employee volunteering and community investment programme. Nine organisations attended and we met one person individually who could not attend the group session. We discussed:
  • Lessons from other organisations to enhance our employee volunteering programme
  • Opportunities to embed volunteering into employee development
  • Key measures of success and how they should be managed
  • Our community investment programme in comparison with best practice
The key recommendations to emerge were that we need to encourage employee volunteering through:
  • Senior management support and example
  • Strong internal communication, with case studies of successful volunteering
  • Defined measures of success
  • Linking skills and volunteering opportunities with business objectives, and obtaining feedback on those new skills gained

These recommendations formed the basis of our development of our next step commitments. See Next Steps.

Notes for table - LBG model


1 Intermittent support to a wide range of good causes in response to the needs and appeals of charitable and community organisations, increasingly through partnerships between the company, its employees, customers and suppliers.

2 Long-term strategic involvement in community partnerships to address a limited range of social issues chosen by the company in order to protect its long-term corporate interests and to enhance its reputation.

3 Activities in the community, usually by commercial departments, to support directly the success of the company, promoting its corporate brand identifies and other policies, in partnership with charities and community-based organisations.

4 The costs of maintaining full and part-time community affairs staff to manage the community programme.

5 The core business activities in meeting society's needs for cost effective goods and services in a manner which is ethically, socially and environmentally responsible.

6 NLDF - National Lottery Distribution Fund. Money going to Good Causes is core to our business.

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