Anyone interested in solving the world’s biggest social and environmental challenges will tell you that it can only be done through collaboration. No single business, NGO or government can do it alone. But that’s easier said than done. 

Charity Business In The Community (BITC) exists to help change that - by bringing organisations together to create a fairer and more sustainable world. 

Today, host Becky Willan sits down with Amanda MacKenzie OBE, BITC’s CEO. Becky discovers how BITC facilitated collaboration between arch rivals Mcdonald's and Burger King and how they mobilised businesses up and down the UK to make a difference for communities in response to COVID-19. This episode shows you how to make the case for deeper, more purposeful collaboration.

Do you want to learn how to build a purpose-driven brand from the company that’s helped some of the world's most influential organisations become more purposeful? Download the first and the second editions of the Insiders' Guide to Purpose here.

*Apologies for the typos, this is an AI transcription*

This week, I'm joined by Amanda McKenzie, OBE marketed by trade. Amanda held senior commercial roles, a British gas, BT, and Aviva before taking on the huge challenge of helping launch the UN global girls to the world. A CEO of the business in the community and a non-exec Lloyd's banking group. She's a leading voice in the movement for purpose-driven business.

Through this conversation, you'll learn to make the case for deeper, more purposeful collaboration, set things up to make a difference and take the first steps and ensure you create real impact. Not simply noise.

Before I speak with Amanda, let's take a quick look back at her career to learn how she became responsible for running the largest and longest established membership organization, dedicated to responsible business in her current job, Amanda is tasked by the prince of Wales to inspire businesses, to play a bigger role in communities across the UK.

But despite the work, she does now, Amanda, wasn't always so certain of her purpose. Um,

What am I like? Uh, I think you have to be quite brutal about getting other people because they probably know you, although because they're getting this objective view of you. They know you, my rather fabulous boss at the time a guy called Mark Wilson said to me, well, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?

And I. God, that's a grown-up question. I went or some sort of public service I said, and I lit, I, it came from nowhere. I dunno, where, so I think it had just been brewing. So I, I guess, arguably that question was the dam scene moment, but it was the question and it wasn't mine

Amanda was given the opportunity to take a secondment with project everyone, and the chance to work with one of Britain's most high-profile philanthropists.

That was an extraordinary time, as you can imagine, an extraordinary thing to do. I was very fortunate to get to do it. And then clearly came the time when I potentially would've thought about going back to a fever and I realized. I couldn't. I had to spend more of my time doing more of the things I've been doing the past few years and business in the community came along, and there we have it.

So it did sort of creep up

We're not saying don't, don't ask it, but just ask it further down the process. Don't judge someone by the worst thing they've ever done. And rather magnificently we've now got a million roles that are permanent for whom that is the case. The prince of Wales helped us start this. And at my first AGM, he was there and we wanted to have someone to say, thank you to.

And just describe what this had meant to him. He was very nervous and frankly, so was I, but I sort of said to him, please, your story is incredible. Just speak from your heart. I watched grown men cry, literally tears running down their cheeks. As this person explained what it had meant to them and that they then had a passport and they traveled and they had home and they were building a life.

From a moment in their life, which was very dark and where they couldn't see anything. It was a great way to drive, and want conviction for what you were doing into the future.

Not to. I always used to love that old flash advert, you know, we've done the hard work. So you don't have to, you think about it. There are lots and lots of companies out there who are learning things that if we could only share them, and learn from each other's mistakes, we can move faster. And on the basis that you have to assume solving the climate challenge is not a competitive sport.

I certainly don't think it should be. Why wouldn't you be willing? To do that there's no

So really thinking about that and being mindful. That probably the default of maybe the culture of where you come from is not necessary to do that. The first thing you've got to do is go, what am I willing to give up? Which is not a natural question. People think collaborating is always sitting together.

It'll all be great, but I won't change a thing. The fundamental is what are you willing to give up? And are you willing to give it up straight away? Because that demonstrates your intent. It demonstrates your wholeheartedness. I think

You're also bringing businesses together with not-for-profits and, and the public sector. So help people in businesses understand a bit about, I guess, the challenges from the other side, what are the challenges that nonprofits and public sector organizations face when they're collaborating with businesses?

It's one of our flagship programs where we take some business leaders into a place or examine an issue. One of the places was the social supermarket. And the lady there said, look, you know, we cook lunch for a hundred, three rings and a baked potato oven. And we cook for a hundred people. And at that moment, every business leader in the room went well, we can just solve that.

That's easy. But the other thing that came out in fact from all of the four sips was how much effort and time is going into writing foundation applications. You've got these people who are already stretched, doing remarkable things with basically no resources, but the minute the business leaders heard that this was happening, we have to immediately go.

I'm going to commit now that that will never have to happen again. We will provide the resources to help you do that. We'll also look at how you can streamline it. So I think once you put people together and they learn from each other and they hear those stories, it becomes empirical.

Suddenly everyone wants to shift and move together. You have touched on

And I guess within that context, do you need to convince businesses to embrace a sort of more progressive open approach to collaborating with organizations where compared? In a previous effort, where there were a lot of brand benefits that came from working with a single organization. What are some of the questions or, or conversations that come up, um, when you're talking to businesses around that particular challenge, I think people

So in the past, you might have. Thought well, it's one company and it's quite a sort of binary meets with one charity partner or local government or whatever sort of singly. But the minute you put a group of businesses, but with a shared endeavor together, multi-sector I think it becomes much more interesting.

And I think everyone then suddenly realizes they can genuinely benefit from each other. We had a round table a couple of years ago. The stat that moved us was the 84 million uniforms a year going to landfills. Why because they're probably not of amazing quality they're made of stuff that isn't recyclable.

They do get worn out therefore quicker, et cetera. But you put together people that produce the uniforms, people that need the uniforms from, you know, retailers and the recyclers. So you put a unique group of people together and everyone steps up after that. There was a real commitment to try and say, right?

Well, we're going to try and divert all uniforms from landfill. We're gonna find a way to recycle them, but importantly, we're gonna make them greener in the very first place kind of thing. And the challenge does our industrial shoes need to be made of X. So it's all of those things that, but they do come from when you put people together.

And at first, it perhaps seems like a chore, but I think increasingly people are, are, are having to look at it. And I think that's,

I think from those traditional corporate charity partnerships, which might be more transactional, they might be more sort of surface level. Actually. You know, if you are talking about changing products, processes, supply chains that. Deep meaningful work that needs to happen. We need to see more of it, but, I think the idea that that is more likely to happen through collaboration, through bringing the right people together in a room, I think is a really interesting one.

They've created jobs. They've created effectively new jobs and they're growing. I think 5% of the country's tomatoes. So on every front, it's capturing energy that otherwise would've gone to the atmosphere, it's reusing it's, it's taking carbon out of that whole, the whole supply chain for tomatoes. It's just so clever to have thought about that, but that feels quite a long, long way away from opening your tap and getting clean water out of it.

But it's just thoughtful in the round, proper circular economy, collaborative thinking. Yeah. That absolutely

And this is in the community's business response network, which I think was a fantastic example, of that in action. So it'd be great, to understand a bit more about how that came about what happened, and what you learned from it.

We didn't have a business case. We had a notional idea of what we thought we could achieve, but people understood that and bought into it. I remember having a conversation with the ABI. Who's their API, Amanda? Oh, sorry. The, uh, an association of British. And they went, you are going to leverage the power of business aren't you right now?

And I went, that's exactly what we're hoping to do. And so when people did that, we didn't have to fill in very, very lengthy forms. There had to be a notional, what's the impact we're going after and what do we hope to achieve? Of course, but it wasn't days long cuz no one had the time. So if everybody recalls back, uh, just as the lockdown was starting, lots of businesses were giving.

Be it time or money, very deliberately or product. And then even individuals, individual CEOs were giving up salaries. There were all sorts of magnificent gestures, but there was a risk where we were certainly picking up that cuz we got quite a good community footprint that some of those things weren't getting effectively to the frontline.

So the community need wasn't necessarily being answered. One of my favorite examples suddenly thought I wonder what's gonna happen to all those airline meals. That is frozen. They're going to go to waste. So, uh, ripple dissolves airline meal meets Hertz refrigerated, Laurie fleet meets Iceland, massive freezers of which they gave plenty meets fair share.

So again, we had partnerships effectively either through membership or through our community work with a fair share. So we were able to stitch together several of those. Another lovely one, Amanda,

Oh, well they got,

If you remember at that time, there were a lot of children who couldn't have access to tablets or computers, cuz they simply didn't have them. But what we also knew was there were a lot of companies with old kits, but there was a problem in terms of the security of stripping them down and then getting them out.

Uh, we worked with computers for schools and they helped that. So again, it is because of what we realized. Food security computers, and then actually people security. So in many ways, we were spending quite a bit of time trying to get companies to see ideas around helping domestic violence and abuse or helping companies realize that this was happening.

Potentially some of their people, when they came, you know, they came to work effectively when they could no longer come to work. That was not helpful for them, but the sort of long. You know, big stats on the national business response network are about 5,000 of those different effective supply chains.

Some were more complex than others, and we estimate we helped about 2 million people over that period of about a year and a half. Wow. It's really,

And we could not have done the national business response network. Had we not done everything we'd done for the previous 38 years or, or whatever. So we managed to raise the money. We then got these supply chains done, but it was the most extraordinary amount of conviction and passion from my lovely team at, at B I TC, uh, to make this happen so that unbelievable determine.

Obviously can't do it without the funding. And then where you started with this conversation is having extremely good partnerships and good collaborations and being willing as well, slightly to let a thousand flowers bloom. Cause I think if you'd process engineered this, there were a million reasons why you might not have done it.

And if there are, you know, can you paint a picture of what that looks like? Well, we, we

She said, you know, the life chances of a working-class boy in Blackpool are terrible. We used to do work in Blackpool. We should go back that kick it off. There has to be a belief from someone, a bit of grit, somewhere of something wrong. That needs sort. But then you have to go, okay? So what do we know?

What's worked in the past and about, oh gosh, probably nine years ago now, maybe 10 businesses and communities launched a program called business connectors clue in the name. There was a person that went into a place and their job was to absolutely link together. The local business, the local government, potentially national government as necessary, and all the not-for-profits or charities in that place.

And their job was to understand what the community needed and how. Could business help tackle it? Some really big system things needed help in Blackpool. And how did we know that? Well, because the local council was going, we've got a real problem with housing. They kind of knew what the problem was.

The local community knew what the problem was. So I think that the second thing is the community in its broadest definition knows, absolutely knows what the thing, what, what needs solving the question is they might not necessarily know either how to solve it or what is the right. So. We were very lucky to have Barness Joe Valentine, who was the chief executive of London.

First, she said to us, I want to do something. I want to do three days a week on the ground. I want to do something incredibly tangible. And it's like, wow, fantastic. But you know, the Barness of Putney turns up in Blackpool. That that could be, that could be kind of, you know, I'm from a head office here to help.

That might not feel great. She's the least pompous person you'll ever meet. And that's, you know, but, but we just didn't know. So we, so we. The local council to interview Joe and say, is there some work to be done together. Do you, are you gonna get on? Because if you're not, we'll find someone else, but you have to be comfy that you, that you can work together.

So that's the third thing. You've got to find a key person that I think can lead the effort. Who everyone buys into, but ripple dissolved. Now the town has got a phenomenal plan. It's got quite a lot of funding about, I think, uh, 700 million and, and possibly sight of another billion. It's not all about money, but you can't do a lot of the changes that they need to change and get after the housing stock, which is a major problem there.

So I use that as a very long example and I hope it wasn't too long, but just to say it, this is multi-year programs, you know, the notion of leveling up as if it could happen in two and a half years is just not going to happen. This is multi-year, you know, relentlessly bringing businesses together and, you know, fighting for a place.

Yeah, no,

You know, marginalized groups of people have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation.

Is their community failing them if you like? So you've always got that your local businesses and they tend to be, the SMEs are absolutely in touch with what needs to happen and unusually, unbelievably dedicated to the place and quite feisty about what needs to happen. And, and often, you know, we've when we've done things, believing people always go.

I hate the phrase. We're hard to reach because we are very easy to reach. Thanks. But you need to listen, you know, so I think there's, there's something there as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's

And I think sometimes the drive for the competition can be more powerful or felt more strongly than the driver of collaboration. And so I wondered if you'd ever managed to get sort of arch-rivals

So he's done some tremendous work there and he's the CEO of Tesco. He was the, yes, he was the CEO of Tesco. But, but the work that he's done, which. Helped in a teeny tiny way actually, but important. I mean, clearly of course, what happens as well, if you think about financial services or anything, everyone's kind of very worried about the, you know, competition of markets authority.

And you know, if we're all coming together, are we about to do some, terrible collusion, but clearly, in this space, that's not the case, but if you think about even the net zero banking Alliance, Targets everyone is collectively creating targets more and more sectors are together doing this. So the prince of Wales, sustainable markets initiative, which is a global initiative, which is pulling together at a sectoral level, how can we decarbonize that particular sector?

I think that's the ultimate example of it. But again, as I sort of touched on with the uniforms example, you can bring competitors together against something that. Absolutely part of the supply chain. It's not a, is a McDonald's burger better than a burger king burger or vice versa? It was about their uniforms.

There is no competition in uniforms, surely. So I think that's the point as well. It's the actual topics that are gonna be so fundamental. If we crack a lot of this to tackle some of the things we need to,

As a result of these really powerful, impactful collaborations, they can change the way that a business operates. And that requires buy-in from the top. You know, you can't change these sorts of systems and processes without the support of, you know, the most senior execs within an organization.

You've talked a little bit about this thing is believing program, but it would be great to understand a bit more about how you involve leadership teams in really meaningful ways so that you get that buy. For what can be probably some quite big commercial questions at some

And passion is so infectious that they, you know, on the back of that, we might go and talk to a, a leadership team, but on the whole, it tends to be the ultimate CEO has to be thoughtful and mindful and committed in one way or other or, or indeed the chairman. Then on the back of that, we'll either talk to the whole executive at once.

And, you know, then you've got this extraordinary array of people on, you know, are massively different levels of, um, their either acceptance or knowledge or willingness. Um, I suspect most people are willing, but often they don't know how. so it's very hard, you know, that some of the tradeoffs that people have to make, or what going to have to make to achieve net zero are quite tricky.

And that this is UN uncharted territory. The CEO creates an environment where that's okay. This means that you can then start to have those conversations. Yeah, absolutely.

It takes a long time. And so businesses are serious about collaborating in a way. Contributes to solving those sorts of systemic challenges. What do they need to know about what's involved in getting it right? Can you paint a picture of what you might want senior people in businesses to think about before they enter into conversations about playing a more kind of active role in places that they're part of?

It's not fair on the organization or the place or on the charity partner, whoever I would therefore make sure that the board, depending on the nature of it and the scale of it, uh, have brought into the long term principle of it and you, and then you somehow get notional. We're going to do this for seven years, 10 years, whatever it is.

So really think long. And then beyond that as best you can be willing to personally commit to it because I think that will also create a really good role modeling for the rest of the organization. It shows that one, you mean it, um, it matters. Um, and I think that will sustain that beyond your tenure, cuz the reality is, you know, what's the average tenure of a CEO.

Four or five years. Uh, uh, if that, sometimes I think there are certain things you just have to go most my colleagues or my success is gonna inherit this. So I have to leave. I have to make sure it's fit for that. And we're not just going to abandon it

Stories for businesses. And, and for brands, as I said, wanted to ask you, as a marketer by background, what advice you have for companies that want to shout about their role and the work that they're doing, especially when the effort could be multiple different organizations.

So if it's a house of cards, please, please don't um, don't, don't do it. If it's just like, someone's given you the script and you read it, like, you don't believe it because guess what? Everyone will hear it. Like you don't believe it. So I think if your starting point is you, what? You're doing this to get publicity then think again, or don't do it, frankly.

We're just, we are just super proud of everybody. So as best you can, you try and always bring all those partners into the conversation and say, we are unbelievably grateful, for what you've helped happen. I think that's the other thing just always thank everyone else because frankly, they'll probably do it again as well.

Yes. Just be wholehearted about it. I, it is just. Oh, gosh, it sounds so sort of, you know, Mary Poppins really, but it, it just is great ideas and things people just want to contribute to.

Well, we've also talked about the fact that this is a multi-year sort of effort. It takes time, but how ultimately. Should we be measuring the success and impact of effective, purposeful collaboration, and is anybody? Doing it

Cause off the top of my head, I can't think of like the perfect person. However, of course, it all depends on what you want to achieve in the first place. So by definition, there's not going to be, you know, the collaboration in Blackpool is very different. We are currently working as well in Bradford, Coventry, Norwich, um, Rochdale, you know, the, what, what Rochdale needs to do is quite different.

Each place will have its own. Metrics that are probably the clues of it. And what you're going to look for is some that you can see green shoots off some that you go, wouldn't it be incredible in 10 years? Um, and, and some that you're going to get along the way, be it, the quality of the schools, the outcomes of the kids coming outta technical college or the young people coming or whatever it is.

So I think it's being thoughtful about the shorter-term ones and the longer term, but it has to be born out of what is the issue too.

And then, and I guess when you do look over the shorter term, what are the signs that you look for in terms of the kind of healthiness of the collaboration that's happening? What are the signs that say to you? Do you think this has the potential to deliver those longer-term impacts in 5, 10, and 15?

If we haven't got that, does the council want some help? And clearly, as it is deemed to be an area that. You know, social or, you know, is it, is it struggling, uh, from a, an economic impact point of view? So there, the starts in terms of the collaboration are genuine, have you got a healthy group of people that are willing to come together and begin to tackle that problem?

I mean, it kind of starts with, if you think back to the Blackpool story with someone willing to convene them. And then that group of people being willing to share what they know and then hope, you know, selfishly and Barcom tackling.

Thank

What are you prepared to give up? And what must you stay true to, for the collaboration to work for your business? The best collaborations often start by being actively involved in the right conversations, which increases the likelihood of serendipitous encounters with potential partners. It's about being open-minded and genuinely listening for potential.

You can't be in every conversation about every C. So get clear about the issues and places that are most important. Leadership engagement is essential to unlocking the full potential of purposeful collaboration. And the best way to create real engagement is to make it personal and create powerful, immersive experiences connected to the challenge you're trying to solve.

They help leaders build conviction and belief. If you'd like more practical advice on building a purpose-driven. With brilliant insights from people like Amanda. Download the insider guide to purpose@givenagency.com slash insider guide.

Purposing is produced by Fascinate Productions