Case Studies

This year our UK and Ireland business has supported The Prince’s Trust with both funds and volunteers. The Prince’s Trust Enterprise programme is one of the few still available to disadvantaged young people in the East Midlands who are looking to become self-employed.

Advice and support from the service comes in a number of forms for the young people who qualify, including: business mentors, funding and more general support and advice on life’s challenges and personal barriers to success. This is a programme we have supported for over two years and in this time we have helped over 50 young people in setting themselves up in business which include everything from a creative agency to a mobile barber! Employees have acted as mentors and volunteering in this way proves very satisfying:

"For me personally, being a mentor is an amazing journey. It is great to see how my experience and advice can change someone’s life, giving them hope and motivation."

Tania Brecht, Graphic Designer, Experian

Our Education Ambassador Programme enables our employees to share financial literacy education presentations about topics such as credit reports and credit scores with consumers in the communities where they work and live. More than 100 employees have now been trained and present to non-profit groups, business clients and schools across the country, reaching more than 1,500 consumers.

The Allen Outreach centre rebuilds lives in Allen, Texas, one family at a time. The centre provides a holistic approach to getting families in desperate situations up on their feet. Our office in Allen, fundraises and supports the work of the Allen Community Outreach centre, providing emergency assistance, such as counselling, food and clothing, for struggling families. We financed a new computer lab at the centre and supported Allen’s programme of money management and interview skills classes.

Tecendo Sonhos has been especially designed to enable our employees working at the Branch Offices Network in many Brazilian states to volunteer alongside their colleagues in Sao Paulo. In the second half of 2012, 40 new volunteers completed their training and are already working in the community surrounding the branch offices where they work. Engagement has been good and the feedback positive; one volunteer reported “it’s good when we have the opportunity to get out of the daily grind and seek new ways to help someone else.

“We delivered our best in the lecture and, in turn, we received respect and acknowledgement.”said Kelli Golin, a Real Dream volunteer. The lecture in question was held at CEASPH – Centro de Atendimento Social e Promoção Humana, an NGO which supports children with low performance in school and who are in a socially vulnerable situation.

During this last year we embarked upon a ground-breaking new partnership with the UK’s leading financial education charity pfeg (Personal Finance Education Group) to transform 20 schools in some of the country’s most financially disadvantaged areas into Centres of Excellence in financial education. The initiative will give up to 18,000 school children access to a life-changing financial literacy programme, helping them to gain the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to be able to make the right financial decisions and manage their money well into adulthood. Our Experian volunteers can support teachers in the classroom. And to target this support, schools are being identified using Experian data, to spot areas of the country with low levels of financial literacy and use of financial services such as bank and savings accounts. Schools will also be offered the use of our Values, Money and Me free online resource. Our picture shows our chairman, Sir John Peace and Martin Lewis, a renowned UK finance expert, at the parliamentary launch event for Values, Money and Me.

Our office in Turkey carried out a project together with the Youth Association for Habitat and the United Nations Development Programme, aiming to reach 100,000 young men and women over a three year period. Experian Turkey is involved with the financial awareness section of the programme, which reached 2,000 young participants this year. Experian experts held training sessions in financial management in a total of 10 provinces across Turkey.

As part of the Smartbucks – Mind Your Moolah programme, students were transported to screenings on Sunday mornings where they received cold drinks, popcorn and VIP-treatment. The film centres on two disadvantaged youths and was specially produced to heighten the awareness and the importance of financial planning for disadvantaged students. At the end of the film all participants received a book explaining financial management in a fun and simplified way. Using cinemas instead of class rooms, and a film instead of a more traditional lecture, was a concerted effort to encourage students to think differently about their financial future.

As a result of office discussions about how teams could do more in their communities, the Australia and New Zealand team arranged a menu of 18 volunteering opportunities for colleagues to choose from called ‘Heart of the Holidays’. 180 people took part, giving over 650 hours to projects as diverse as hosting parties for aged care clients at a retirement village to walking with people at a local manufacturing centre for the disabled. There was a huge amount of goodwill created both within our teams and in our communities.

In India, consumer awareness about credit bureaux and credit information reports is at a very nascent stage. However, credit information reports have become a very significant part of the loan approval process. Our Consumer Education events help empower consumers from various walks of life with facts about credit bureaux, credit reports, importance of using credit judiciously and benefits of maintaining credit discipline. This year we have conducted sessions across a number of locations in India and covered a total of 338 participants. We also partnered with the Money Life Foundation to conduct two separate one day events in which consumers had an opportunity to receive their credit report and faceto- face advice on the same day. Advice videos have been produced that star our employees, acting as very convincing consumers with specific debt and social problems.

On 10 June 2011, more than 270 colleagues from our HR teams across the globe took part in the ‘One HR day’. United by one goal to connect with their local communities and each other, HR teams used their skills to improve their local communities, supporting a wide range of organisations.

To make the most of this opportunity and really connect with each other, teams agreed to all volunteer on the same day and to share their experiences and pictures via a global intranet site.

Partnering with 19 NGOs across the globe, teams spent their days tackling contrasting social issues, from working in food kitchens feeding the homeless in Minneapolis, Paris and Melbourne, to helping care for orphans in China and Bulgaria.

In Latin America, CBN, the main news radio station in Brazil praised the HR team for helping assist 180 unemployed people get back into the workplace. Working with a government institution, the HR team used their skills to run resume writing workshops, individual interview training sessions and one to one career sessions.

The day has proved a great success with rewarding results echoed across the regions; not only has it built bridges between teams that couldn’t be geographically further apart, it has also given people the opportunity to see firsthand the powerful contribution one team can make in resolving the challenges facing society.

Our support for children at a school in the largest slum in Mumbai, Dharavi, continued this year. The school is dedicated to providing education and an opportunity for the overall development of local underprivileged children. Experian enabled the school to set up a computer lab, refurbish the classrooms, purchase play equipment and provide the basic infrastructure for pure drinking water and clean and hygienic sanitation facilities. Experian’s CEO, Don Robert, visited the school a year on looking at the difference Experian has been able to make to the school environment and the life of its students so far. Having heard about the school’s future plans to increase the student capacity to cater for more than 1,000 children, Don, on behalf of Experian, pledged continuing support including sponsorships for students and teachers. Employees from Experian India created ‘The Experian Marathon team’ and ran the Mumbai Marathon 2011 (42km) to raise funds whilst across the globe the wider Experian community, having read the inspiring story of the school’s progress on their local intranets, also made donations.

The very successful Real Dreams (Sonhos Reais) programme continued and grew this year. The aims of the programme are to help people to enjoy a healthy financial status, avoid indebtedness and stimulate interest in entrepreneurship through adult education sessions on financial literacy. It entails employee volunteers becoming skilled in delivering financial education training in various environments.

A second group of our employees received training this year and delivered modules of training to four new schools and families living in the second largest favela (slum) in São Paulo, the community of Paraisópolis.

Increasing the project’s reach further, the team within Serasa Experian is now working with CARE, a leading humanitarian organisation, which fights global poverty by helping people become more self sufficient. CARE Brazil has developed a school for young adults, set up specifically to develop entrepreneurship skills. Working together they are developing additional modules on entrepreneurship, adding website content to support the unit and working with the students who attend the school.

By developing their materials on a website, linked into the Serasa Experian site, they intend to expand the scope of activities to a wider number of volunteers in offices across Brazil.

A large amount of hard work and fundraising went into providing the charity, Room to Read, with the funds needed to build a school in Laos. This was a great achievement and employees in Australia felt proud to have given children in Laos the opportunity to attend a school that they are proud to attend.

Room to Read is a charity reaching out to communities in remote areas that don’t have the capacity to fund or improve their current schools. They focus on making the community accountable for managing the funds and creating the school themselves, sourcing the materials and building the school from the ground up. They are then responsible for keeping the school at a high standard. This process is seen as valuable experience for remote communities as many of the adults involved would not have had exposure to this sort of building exercise. Three staff members from the Melbourne office were lucky enough to go and see the great impact that Experian had made and were able to report back on the project in person to colleagues.

John Peace, Experian’s chairman, and a champion of community involvement, has been awarded ‘The Prince’s Ambassador Award’ by the UK charity Business in the Community (BITC).

This special award is in recognition of an individual whose leadership and commitment to responsible business has resulted in changes and improvements inside their own company and who has also inspired other organisations to take action.

The Prince of Wales gave a personal tribute to John and Experian in a five-minute long video, celebrating some of the many projects he has championed.

As a founding director, John has lead inspiring community initiatives within Experian for over 30 years. This achievement was also acknowledged when he was made High Sheriff of Nottingham, in March 2011.

John commented “I view Corporate Responsibility as integral to the way Experian does business and I am proud that so many of our people give their time to so many worthy causes. My involvement with Business in the Community together with my role as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, enables me to bring even greater focus to many of these projects.”

Providing a team building focus for the year via a major Christmas volunteering project has become a tradition for Experian’s UK HR team. This year they worked with charity Age UK to host Strictly Amazing, a nostalgic ballroom dancing event for older people building on the high profile of the popular UK television series ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. Volunteers decorated a local venue in 1940s style, greeting guests with an array of vintage cars, hosts in period dress, and appropriate music from the era. Stars from the TV series made a surprise appearance to perform a demonstration dance, meet the guests and pose for photos.

Experian Malaysia supported the charity RACTAR, which provides for orphans and poor girls in the region. The ‘Thought out of Box’ concept enables charities to sell goods via a ‘Box’ system. A local company provides boxed space for the display of goods and sales support in high street locations, enabling isolated charities to reach a market. Our funds supported the box rental and startup costs. Other than ‘Thought Out of the Box’ Experian’s involvement with RACTAR included the provision of IT equipment, a year’s subscription to Broadband and software to enable the charity to communicate and make and accept payments online. Our employees also sent story books and made several visits to the centre.

Experian has a partnership with Nottingham's City Council and its wider local government team, 'One Nottingham' that tackles inequality. As part of a programme of events to support the city and its people through the economic downturn, Experian suggested a series of high profile events to promote debt awareness.

With Experian acting as a main partner this Debt Awareness Campaign was initiated in 2009 and ran for a year, with events, information and practical support to help local people, as well as local businesses, through the recession.

In addition, Experian has been integral to the Council's Economic Resilience (ER) programme. Our Chairman, Sir John Peace is Chairman of the Economic Resilience Forum led by the Council's Chief Executive Jane Todd. The Forum is a unique partnership between the City Council, local businesses and the education sector and has developed a robust approach to focusing on the key issues for the city, leveraging data provided by Experian and other participants. Sir John commented: "We are pleased to be able to use our insight to help the Council prioritise around the key issues that will allow Nottingham to weather the recession successfully. As a major local employer, we are very much committed to doing whatever we can to support the community and help people cope with these challenging times."