Keystone Projects

Overview
Targets

Community Investment

Guidelines for Community Investment

Overview

As a large organisation, spread over a wide geographic area, we receive many requests for help from the communities in which we operate.

This project involves developing and embedding community investment guidelines and building a central reporting system for the money, time and in-kind contributions our sites around the world make to local communities. We will then be able to measure our community investments and offer employees a Company-wide process for seeking fundraising support.

Status

A Community Contribution Strategy is in development. This will support our Sustainable Communities Policy and provide us with a framework through which we can achieve the goals and commitments the Policy includes. This Strategy is expected to be finalised in FY2011/12 and takes into consideration:

our overall business strategy;

our existing workplace giving and donations policies;

key findings from external reports on community engagement and investment;

our 'Get close' sustainability agenda;

our Sustainable Communities Policy; and

materials issues identified by internal stakeholders and the communities in which we operate.

During FY2010/11 we implemented a process to capture community contributions into our financial management system, as a central repository of this information. This process is now being embedded across the Company and our community investment numbers detailed in this section of the Report are generated from the information being captured.

Results

We participated in the 2011 London Benchmarking Group's (LBG) Australian and New Zealand annual benchmarking study of community contributions. LBG is the internationally recognised standard for measuring and evaluating a corporation's community investment. This allows companies to account for their total community investment using standard definitions and valuations. Across Australia and New Zealand, 48 large corporates participated in the study. Our per-employee contributions were equal to the average recorded within the study. A critical part of our participation was following standard guidelines of measurement, independent assurance of our data and process review. Our internal measurement and recording processes program will be improved in FY2011/12 following feedback from LBG.