Stakeholder engagement

We define our stakeholders as people and groups who are impacted by our actions and whose actions impact on our business. Listening to their views helps us define and further embed responsible behaviour in the company. It also helps us to further understand and address our social, environmental and economic impacts.

We have a number of formal bodies in place to ensure we fully consider stakeholder views in our decisions. The stakeholder engagement table provides more information about specific groups, issues raised and our responses during 2009/10.

Our ten-year licence means we can take a long-term view of stakeholder engagement and plan our approach more strategically. We made a number of commitments to stakeholder engagement in our last stakeholder report, and have made significant progress on all of these. We have established a new Stakeholder Engagement Panel, which met for the first time in December 2009.

To coincide with the Panel's launch, we began to review the way we categorise our stakeholders. Representatives of each main stakeholder group sit on the Panel and, as we move forward, will review and formalise our approach to stakeholder engagement, as well as seeking wider opportunities to engage with stakeholders.

In 2009, we accepted an invitation from the organisation AccountAbility to sponsor the revision of its AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard. The aim is to make the standard more relevant and widely used within organisations of all kinds. Our involvement includes attending consultation meetings and sitting on a dedicated technical panel.

During the year, we worked with YouGovStone (YGS) to convene a Social Innovation Forum of influential stakeholders. We ran two events, a workshop with around 50 representatives mainly from the third sector, and a lunchtime discussion with 16 corporate decision makers, to generate ideas for developing our stakeholder consultation programme.

We are also in the process of developing our response to the points raised during these workshop discussion groups, and the numerous suggestions made, for example:

• We will consider how we can best consult employees' families about their experience of Camelot as an employer.
• We have developed a pilot engagement programme targeted at 19-25 year olds, in association with the University of Westminster. This involves a survey and 'Question Time' style panel debate, and will take place in 2010
• Much was made of the need to communicate the benefits of lottery funding at a local level, so we are:
  • Working with the National Lottery Promotions Unit (NLPU) to make Good Cause awareness-raising campaigns more visible in-store
  • Working with the BBC and the NLPU to grow the annual National Lottery Awards and help promote the impact of Lottery funding across the UK
  • Using existing communications for employees, retailers and players to more effectively coordinate Good Causes messaging
  • Researching the relative appeal of Good Cause messaging with players.

See the stakeholder engagement table.