At an awards ceremony held in the City of London, Hymans Robertson has been announced as a top community investor in the 2017 GivX Community Value Awards.

Developed by the pre-eminent social enterprise Benefacto, the GivX framework allows companies and organisations to simply and ­­effectively measure their community investment, and to benchmark their ratings against other companies.  

Speaking on behalf of Hymans Robertson, Clare Gardner, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility said:

“We welcome GivX’s aim to establish a benchmarking tool for corporate community investment.  Developing a standardised measure of corporate giving will be a massive support to the expanding corporate commitment to sustainability and responsibility. A dynamic alternative to impact reporting will hopefully encourage more firms to participate in, record and communicate on community investment.”

GivX has been developed in response to other often complicated, CSR measurement tools and has been designed to simplify the process, measuring value on only six key metrics. Equally, GivX outputs a simple, comparable score: companies report just two numbers, their total contribution, and a per employee score. The aim being to make communicating and comparing the work companies do more accessible to all.  

Speaking on behalf of Benefacto, Ben Darlington explained: 

“The principle behind the GivX framework is one of simplifying CSR measurements to make it easier for businesses and organisations to measure their contribution to the community and then communicate it. Our inaugural awards were to celebrate an innovative group of companies, who by pioneering the framework, are committing to transparently and effectively reporting their change-making community investment programmes.

“At Benefacto, we believe that, to measure CSR effectively, companies need to look beyond the cost to them of giving, and focus on the actual value created for charities.

“Furthermore, in an era where we are consistently seeing calls for increased transparency from organisations in both the private and public sectors, we understand the importance of providing a framework that is easy for companies to use, but equally clear and consistent for the public to understand and interpret. “

The Top 25 winners at the awards include UK giants ITV, HSBC and John Lewis, whom by using the GivX index can compare their efforts with those of smaller companies through scoring per employee.

The free-to-use framework introduces a common language that enables companies to benchmark six different areas of their community investment programme. Donations, fundraising and volunteering work are made comparable in terms of the ‘Community Value’ a company has created.

Measuring ‘Community Value’ places emphasis on the worth of donations or volunteering work for charities. It is defined as the replacement cost the charity would have to pay if it were to purchase similar goods or services on the open market.