All posts by sarahcaddy

VIDEO: How being a B Corp helps with governance

March 28, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

How does being a B Corp help your business excel at governance? In this short video, Gong Director Nikki Francis-Jones outlines three key areas that can help you build #BetterBusiness along with the rest of the B Corp community.

Video text for accessibility:

It’s B Corp month and we’re focused on building better business along with the rest of the B Corp community. Governance is a key measure for certification and for demonstrating your business’ impact on society. So here are three reasons why becoming a B Corp helps your business excel at governance.

Held accountable: Each year, B Corps produce annual reports and these act as a public record of the impact they make on society. This means we are all held accountable not only to set business goals – for example around board diversity – but also for achieving them.
Clear, communicable mission: Being an impact-driven business means that you have to communicate your brand values and goals. So having a clear communications strategy is critical to ensuring that those goals are achievable and focused. It also means that your staff are engaged and that you are able to be firm about the work that you undertake. For example, we can’t in good conscience work for big carbon emitting organisations that are not committed to a Net Zero future. This is important to everyone at Gong.
Whole team engagement: Being a B Corp means that we are transparent about all areas of our business, with all of our employees. Regular finance catch ups ensure that the team sees how their work directly impacts on the business – but also increases general financial literacy and encourages a meritocratic environment.

To find out more, head to our website for more tips and insights on the benefits of becoming a B Corp.

Insight

Why become a B Corp this B Corp Month?

March 28, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

If you’re considering becoming a B Corp this B Corp month, you will already know the importance of putting purpose at the heart of your organisation. Here’s why we became certified as a B Corp back in June 2017 and continue to be proud members of the B Corp community today.

Becoming a B Corp

Our mission is to help purposeful organisations communicate their positive impact. As a sustainability PR agency based in London and Kenya, we know that purpose is what drives business forward and defines it. By becoming a B Corp, we wanted to hold ourselves accountable to the highest standard of overall social and environmental performance and transparency – to our colleagues, to our clients, and to the world.

Gong’s commitment to #BetterBusiness

The process to become a B Corp is rigorous but companies starting the journey may find that they don’t need to change significantly. This blog outlines some of the changes that we made, and how formalising some of our existing practices helped to embed them throughout our company DNA.

These practices hold true today. In our latest company Impact Report, we outline that to play our part in shaping a better future, we look for clients working to solve the ‘wicked’ problems facing society and the planet and use our expertise to help accelerate their impact.

Alongside the big themes such as renewable energy, food security, ethical investing, ESG, carbon markets and climate risk, we are also privileged to work in sectors such as diversity & inclusion at work, global health and economic development. Being a B Corp and being independent means that we can say ‘no’ to certain types of brief. We can’t in good conscience work for big carbon emitting organisations with their heads in the sand that aren’t committed to a Net Zero future. This is important to everyone at Gong.

Good Governance at Gong for #BetterBusiness

As part of our company impact assessment, we track our clients’ focus in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We aim to work with more changemakers and innovators using business as a force for good.

Board diversity is important to us. 80 per cent of our Board are women and 40 per cent are from Ethnic Minority backgrounds. We are committed to bridging the social mobility gap prevalent in our industry.

B Corp benefits

If we haven’t yet convinced you that your business should become a B Corp, here are a few more benefits from joining the community:

Improved impact, through participation in working groups and sharing best practice with other B Corps
Collaboration through partnerships with other B Corps
Networking opportunities at exclusive community events
Support from B Lab on global issues
Recruitment and retention benefits by engaging employees in your company’s mission

So how do you certify as a B Corp?

First businesses must measure, manage and report their societal impact using the B Impact Assessment, which looks at five key areas:

Governance
Environment
Customers
Workers
Community

Businesses need to score 80 points or more to certify, considering the impact of decisions on all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Once certification is complete, you will have joined more than 3,800 B Corps worldwide. We look forward to welcoming you to the B Corp community!

Insight

Positive impact stories: B Corp month

March 21, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

This week, as part of B Corp month, we are charged with telling a positive impact story from among our network.

One of our favourites is from our partner, the African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC). This wonderful collection of business accelerators supports local entrepreneurs to drive job growth across Africa. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Collective has been disbursing business resilience grants from a special relief fund (established with help from the Mastercard Foundation) to support entrepreneurial refugees in a Rwandan camp. This is in addition to the business training and financial support that they provide in the normal course of events.

We were lucky enough to be able to support the AEC in communicating some of the refugees’ stories – including that of Karasira Mboniga, who runs a food and money transfer business – as part of our corporate CSR work. Most notably, they were covered in The Economist in a feature entitled, “The world’s toughest business school – the challenges of being an entrepreneur in a refugee camp”, which you can read here. The grants provided by the AEC proved a lifeline for the entrepreneurs who needed to support their families during this pandemic, whilst also avoiding debt and maintaining stock for customers when supply chains suffered.

The fund has already helped almost 4,000 entrepreneurs; 91 per cent of the businesses that were closed have since reopened. On average, the ventures have managed to increase their staff by a third within a month of receiving a grant. Now there’s a positive impact story.

As a proud member of the #BCorp movement, we support #BetterBusiness, believing that it is vital to use business as a force for good. With other B Corps like us, we aim to create an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet.  What’s your positive impact story?

Case Study

Resource Futures

March 16, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

WEBSITE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Website creation is a core part of our design business. We work with clients around the world to build a website from scratch or to refresh an existing design.

We always begin with the fundamentals – a discussion to fully understand your brand, your audiences and your website goals. In some cases, our client teams support with web text, in other cases we will deliver a designed and coded website for you to edit in-house. We will work with you to develop a timescale for delivery and completion.

We created a website for our client Resource Futures, an environmental consultancy with a complex set of stakeholders. Their website needed to be easy to navigate but speak clearly to organisations ranging from public bodies, to policy makers, to not-for-profits. We worked with the in-house team to create a brand ‘look’ for the website as well as a site map for easy navigation for all users. The resulting design is bold and fresh, yet clear.

“We’re delighted with the new website Gong has created for us. Our new website really reflects who we are and what we do; we’ve had great feedback and we’ve already seen potential new business coming in as a result. The team at Gong have been great to work with – from the initial workshop through the design process and ongoing support.”

– Nicola Round, Communications and Marketing Manager, Resource Futures

Case Study

GLIDE Annual Report

March 16, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

DESIGNING CORPORATE MATERIALS

At Gong Creative, we are frequently commissioned to elevate the status of regularly produced corporate materials – such as annual reports, deal tombstones, marketing brochures or leaflets.

In the example pictured below – of the Global Institute of Disease Elimination (GLIDE)’s Annual Report – our talented designers used the client’s brand guidelines to produce original, high spec digital designs. We worked to a tight deadline after gaining initial approval on the proposed ‘look’. Meanwhile, our client team supported with media relations, promoting the issues raised in the report in global health and business press.

If you are looking for support in creating your brand guidelines, writing your marketing text for annual reports or leaflets, or producing physical copies of marketing materials, we can help with that too.

Insight, Small Grid

Female Leadership – insights on International Women’s Day

March 8, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

One of the good things about celebration days in the international calendar is that they give us the excuse to pause and think about important issues amidst the rush and clamour of busy schedules. Female leadership is still a big issue, particularly for those who subscribe to the belief that diversity in leadership enables better decision making – at a time when our business leaders are taking on so much responsibility for the wellbeing of society and the environment, alongside their usual stakeholders.

In the FTSE, where many international companies choose to list, The Hampton Alexander Review’s final report into female leadership was published on 24 February. Amidst the positive increase in the number of women overall in the last decade, it was noted that we need more women in executive positions to see sustained growth at the Board level. As we work towards gender parity and a more prosperous and sustainable world (SDG 5), International Women’s Day – this year themed #ChooseToChallenge – offers an opportunity to showcase our top picks of outstanding examples of female leadership, and how they stand out for challenging the status quo.

Here are ours – who would you add to the list?

Mayyada Abu Jaber, renowned female activist

Attendees at DiveIn’s festival in Amman in 2018 were treated to a speech by Mayyada Abu Jaber, the renowned female activist and inspirational leader who discussed her lifetime dedication to female empowerment.  As a Brookings Institution Global Scholar for Leaders in Girls Education, Ms Abu Jaber conducted research to evaluate gender bias in the national Jordanian curriculum. Armed with evidence of inequality, she founded JoWomenomics as an independent non-profit organization to foster mindset change towards greater women’s economic participation. This in turn influences labour law policies and provides job opportunities to more than 600 marginalized female communities in Jordan. In recognition of her #ChoicetoChallenge, she has been recognized by the World Bank as an inspirational leader in the Middle East and North Africa, among many more accolades.

Marianne Tikannen and Elba Horta, co-founders of Puro.earth

With backgrounds in engineering and geosciences, these two outstanding female founders of the world’s first marketplace for selling ‘carbon removal’, are united in their ambitions for protecting the planet. Unafraid to challenge traditional methods, the two entrepreneurs forged new career paths in their pursuit of sustainability, as outlined in this Forbes article. As Ms Tikannen reportedly says, “It’s really important to move from words to action… we only have one climate.”

Rashmy Chatterjee, CEO of ISTARI

Rashmy Chatterjee has made a habit of #ChoosingtoChallenge. As the first female engineer to join the Indian Navy, she was commended by the President of India for her work. After two decades at IBM, she is now the CEO of Istari – the global cybersecurity platform established by Temasek to help clients increase their cyber resilience, earn digital trust and secure their business growth in this time of rapid digital transformation. As an advocate for women in technology, Mrs Chatterjee is a prime candidate for mention on this International Women’s Day.

Elizabeth Wangeci Chege, CEO and co-founder, WEB Limited Group

Frequent viewers of our blog and video content will know about Elizabeth Chege – a true pioneer in the sustainable construction sector in Kenya and green building throughout Africa. In our #AfricaNetZero interview series, Ms Chege speaks openly about her initial decisions to focus not on box-ticking and meeting building standards, but in putting sustainability first in the construction sector. Coining herself as a ‘sustainable engineer’, she was told by her professors that “we’re not sure anything like that exists” – a true example of a #ChoosetoChallenge female leader.

Charlotte Boaitey-Kwarteng, Barrister

In 2018, Charlotte Boaitey-Kwarteng was recognised by the prestigious GUBA awards for work in criminal and human rights law. Speaking of her Professional of the Year award win, Mrs Boaitey-Kwarteng told of her bold decision (having come to the UK from Ghana) to “run her own Chambers in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn surrounded by a sea of all-white Chambers.” She is an exemplar of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand

Ms Ardern responded to the Covid-19 crisis with the strictest regulations in the world, closing New Zealand’s borders with the response that she would “make no apologies” for doing so, while other countries remained open. Her choice to challenge the practice of other nations was made from listening to scientific expertise, and her accomplishment was in uniting her country through communication and strong leadership. She had the self-confidence to stand by her conviction to act quickly and maintain her stance. Her success? A record-breaking victory resulting in re-election.

Insight

Shining a light on our Top 5 B Corps

March 5, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

As a long-established B Corp (Gong was among the first UK communications agencies to achieve certification in 2017), we have built a healthy network of B Corp ‘friends’. We’re even lucky enough to work with some of them. Here are our top five (though to be honest, we could have made this a much longer list!) in honour of B Corp month:

Volans

Volans is a think tank and advisory firm operating at the cutting edge of regenerative innovation to help catalyse systemic change. It was the first B Corp in the UK and incubated the movement here, so well-deserving of the #1 recommendation slot. It is a great pleasure to be able to work with them to amplify their client initiatives and partnerships in the media. A recent example is Bankers for Net Zero, an initiative that brings together banking leaders and other key stakeholders to accelerate the flow of finance towards net zero-aligned activities. Widespread media pickup, including Yahoo, Reuters and the New York Times, generated new enquiries from further potential collaborators – their network continues to grow.

Unreasonable Group

Unreasonable Group was created out of the desire to have the greatest impact possible on the world’s toughest challenges. They believe that entrepreneurs building scalable businesses are the best bet for solving such challenges, and support them in doing so. You can read for yourself the incredible effect Unreasonable Companies have had here – but the number of lives positively impacted by them – 549,000,000+ – gives you some idea. We’re talking drones positioned to plant billions of trees, converting elements in the air into meat protein, the future of fusion energy, hydroponic farms under the streets of London and so much more.

Danone

Danone needs no introduction, though not everyone may know the extent to which the company is involved in the B Corp movement. Its B Corp profile highlights their One Planet One Health commitment to inspire healthier eating and drinking habits, for example, but we know them best for their collaboration with B Lab.

In December 2015 Danone and B Lab announced a partnership which most recently has resulted in an e-learning and engagement tool to help Danone’s 100,000 employees feel motivated by the company’s commitment to certify its 130 subsidiaries around the world as B Corps. Gong was commissioned to create this tool.

The resulting six bite-size lessons (incorporating engaging video content and more) were rolled out globally in October 2020 and translated into five languages. B Lab is now launching a version of the e-learning tool to make it accessible for the wider B Corp community. Spreading the #BetterBusiness love!

EQ Investors

EQ Investors – another of the founding B Corps in the UK – creates change through the power of investments. In 2017 and 2018 they won a ‘Best for the World’ award for their work on impact investing and their EQ Positive Impact Portfolios allow individuals to invest in companies that are creating solutions to social and environmental problems. This is a pensions and investment firm that is really helping companies and individuals to ‘make (their) money matter’ – another campaign we’re wholly on board with.

ClimateCare

As you know, climate change is a topic very close to our hearts here at Gong. We admire ClimateCare – based (like us) in the UK and Kenya – for its work towards a sustainable future with climate neutral and net zero programmes, using both private and public finance. They even have a handy carbon calculator to help us work out how much carbon we need to offset, as well as 50 ideas for shrinking our carbon footprint.

Who would you add to this list?

Case Study

Crisis support during short seller attack

March 4, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

CRISIS SUPPORT

Our client, a listed global agri-business, was accused of dubious accounting practices by an infamous US short seller.

His previous high-profile targets included a company called Sinai Forest, (with high-profile investors including the legendary hedge fund manager John Paulson) whose shares lost so much value during the reputation crisis that the company ceased trading, leaving only the short seller with a valuable upside.

The Gong team were first ‘to the scene’ when the story was about to break in London. The Financial Times called us with their story and we sprang into action. Our recommended strategy was to retaliate forcefully to refute the false claims, rather than hunker down and try to ‘ride out’ the storm.

After an intensive period of media coverage and speculation and consistent presentation of the facts by the client, it emerged stronger from the crisis with its reputation as a business force for good not only intact, but strengthened by its high profile sustainability ‘next’ practices.

Insight

Solving societal bias with innovative engineering

March 2, 2021 sarahcaddy Leave a comment

Engineering makes a difference in places you wouldn’t always expect. One of the biggest problems in facial recognition systems is bias in the artificial intelligences (AIs) behind them. Incredibly powerful AIs tend to be designed to do a single task, such as predict which of your friends’ posts you will want to see or to identify you in a photo, but an AI can only be as good as the data it is trained on.

Give a new AI a million photos of kittens and it might be able to learn what a kitten looks like from every conceivable angle and identify one in a photo. But AIs designed to recognise and identify human faces have generally been trained using databases containing predominantly white people and far fewer people of other ethnicities. This has led to an inherent bias in the programmes, and a great variety in reliability in identifying people from different backgrounds. This can cause a multitude of problems.

Fortunately, there are people and organisations working to address this imbalance. Take Charlette N’Guessan, for example. This 26-year-old from Cote D’Ivoire and her team have come up with software that uses a phone or computer’s built-in camera and, and in contrast to global AI systems, has been developed specifically to identify Africans. Her initial aim was to solve cybercrime and identify fraud for Ghanaian banks, but like any good feat of engineering, there’s potential for its applications in addressing societal bias globally.

Back in September, it won her the prestigious 2020 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation from the Royal Academy of Engineering, making her the first ever woman to win the Africa Prize.

Given that Gong’s mission statement is “to help purposeful organisations communicate their positive impact”, we are proud to be able to showcase the Africa Grants work of our client, The Royal Academy of Engineering.

And it seems apt to highlight it as World Engineering Day on 4th March celebrates the role of engineers and engineering in delivering the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and encouraging more young people to become engineers – especially women – in a bid for greater sector diversity and inclusion.

The Academy nurtures talented engineers by training, supporting, mentoring and funding innovators, researchers and leaders, helping over 7,500 professionals enhance their leadership skills. In Africa, its Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation supports 16 African entrepreneurs by accelerating their businesses, with a final prize of £25,000. Its Higher Education Partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa (HEP SSA) programme aims to address the engineering skills shortage and showcase engineering’s role in driving economic development in the region. Similarly, its GCRF Africa Catalyst programme aims to support professional engineering bodies in sub-Saharan Africa so that they can share best practice and strengthen local engineering capacity.

By 2025, the Royal Academy of Engineering will have helped a million young people – from every background – to explore a career in engineering. They’re investing £180m in engineering talent, innovation and policy advice over the next five years.

We look forward to showcasing the stories of the impact made by Africa’s engineers, as they innovate towards a more sustainable, brighter future.