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ITV encourages its employees to contribute to charitable and community causes by volunteering and donating money.

Employee volunteering

ITV recognises the considerable value that employee volunteering can bring – for communities and for the employees themselves. We offer our staff the opportunity to take one day off work per year to devote to a cause they care about and also encourage them to volunteer in their own time.

Volunteering helps us to engage with our employees and make ITV a better place to work. This has been especially important during the period of uncertainty and pressure caused by the global financial crisis and the fact that employees may have had redundancies in their team.

We relaunched our employee volunteering programme in July 2009. The new scheme gives employees greater freedom to tailor their community support according to their skills, interests and local area. We used feedback from an employee survey about volunteering to design the programme and compile a bank of volunteering opportunities that staff can choose from.

Our primary aim is to enable ITV staff to use their unique creative and media skills to support organisations that wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford similar services. For example, employees might:

• Lend their film-making talents to help make awareness-raising documentaries or campaign films.
• Advise young people completing a media diploma about advertising, design, film and television.
• Write press releases or design marketing strategies for charitable organisations.

We also offer employees the chance to get directly involved with Change4Life, as well as other charitable initiatives relating to health, education and the environment. In 2009 we launched a pro bono legal service involving ITV in-house lawyers (see italics below).

Survey results revealed that many ITV employees are not aware of the volunteering options available to them, so we raised awareness about the revised programme with a week-long campaign on our intranet site, The Watercooler. We used the campaign to explain how the Volunteering Bank works, showcase previous examples of employee volunteer work, and recruit ‘volunteering champions’ tasked with encouraging their colleagues to get involved.

Employees have responded well to the new volunteering programme and nearly 200 have already signed up, over half of whom volunteer for their charity once a month.

The right side of the law

In 2009, we launched the ITV Legal Pro Bono Bank in partnership with law firm Lovells, to provide support free of charge to UK charities and disadvantaged people. The innovative scheme overcomes insurance issues that often prevent in-house corporate lawyers from providing pro bono services.

ITV in-house lawyers now provide support for Lovells’ current pro bono clients, including Save the Children, Action for the Blind and social entrepreneurship charity UnLtd. The Bank has also created new initiatives, including a legal clinic for Body and Soul, a UK charity supporting children, teenagers and families affected by HIV. ITV and Lovells lawyers work side-by-side to offer legal advice to the charity and its members in individual and group sessions.

Give As You Earn

ITV employees can give money to charity through our Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme, run independently by the Charities Aid Foundation.

ITV pays the necessary administration fees and, up to April 2009, matched employee contributions. In 2009, employees donated £48,000 during 2009. Matching funds in the first quarter of the year resulted in an additional £14,800 being donated to charity.