Where charity recruiters fear to tread...

Just when you all thought that the financial services sector was the one area where People Unlimited would never dare to tread, we’ve jumped at the chance of working with Legal and General.

Somewhere in your dusty filing cabinets you too probably have some paperwork with the L&G logo on it, ensuring you’re worth more to your family after you’ve shuffled off your mortal coil than you are with your sharp suit and BlackBerry.

L&G provide insurance, mortgages, pensions and investments. They own large chunks of property across the UK and are one of our leading Footsie 100 companies. No small surprise then that they’re often targeted by charities as a possible partner for fundraising. However, L&G are refreshingly entrepreneurial when it comes to working with the Third Sector, as you can see in this article.

Graham Precey, Head of CSR at L&G, approached People Unlimited to see how we could help engage L&G’s most senior Directors with the Third Sector and as a result, SMaRT was born – Senior Managers Recruited as Trustees. We designed the programme so that we identified L&G’s corporate objectives, aligned them with the personal objectives of the L&G directors, as far as possible, and researched and approached NFPs looking for new Trustees.

One of the issues we had to consider was whether there were charities out there who would benefit from a Trustee from L&Gs management team. L&G put in the offer of some Governance training and we created a survey to see the level of engagement in the sector. Amazingly, some organisations told us it was ‘too much work’ to participate. Sometimes the conservatism of this sector leaves me holding my head in dismay. However, many others were better able to see the benefit of developing a long term relationship with a progressive and prestigious Footsie 100 company and of accessing some of its key staff talent.

The result? Watch this space. It’s too early to say how this initial pilot will work since we’re mid way through the project, but so far we have a group of 10 very skilled and highly engaged managers and about 30 keen participating NFP organisations who can certainly see the benefit of striding out where others might tentatively hold back.

If your organisation would be interested in participating in this project in this or future phases, feel free to drop me, David Lale, a line: dlale@peopleunlimited.co.uk or 0759 006 1741.