What does good look like?
This is the number one question we get asked at Thrive – what does good look like when it comes to social value implementation and delivery?
Here we show you how T&B Contractors implemented Thrive to boost social value in bids, demonstrate it more effectively and how they got their supply chain on board.
“Thrive not only provided us with a way of valuing our social value, they also helped us to understand the social, economic and environmental impacts of our supply chain and our staff ”
– Mark Hickson, Managing Director, T&B (Contractors) Ltd.
T&B Contractors Ltd (T&B) are a £50million turnover construction company with around 100 staff, operating mainly with clients in the public sector.
The challenge they faced was that they always added extra value within the works they undertook, but this wasn’t recorded and the social value delivered was never quantified. They set out to find a partner who could further develop the social value output of the business.
T&B realised that there was a need to record not only the large scale project activies, but the little things too – whether it be donating surplus materials from sites or liaising with local food banks which they had been doing for years – they just hadn’t had anywhere to record it, and thus, it had never really been celebrated.
Implementing Thrive’s social value module and the IES measurement framework enabled T&B to quantify the social value work that they were doing and set them against recognised metrics. Furthermore, T&B chose to enter data from work they had done in the past to see how much social value they had delivered historically. They are now able to share that work with their clients and staff.
Thrive worked with T&B right from the beginning, using workshops, questionnaires and other methods to make sure that the strategy was right. It was also important that staff were brought on the journey and that the supply chain was thoroughly on board. Thrive worked with the team to make sure they understood how to best use the platform, which metrics track, what to record and how to communicate that with staff.
The benefits for T&B have become clear:
- One central place to record all activities – Recording and quantifying all activities in one place and then being able to communicate that outwards for example in bids, newsletters, social media or stake holder communications. This had not been possible before.
- Achieving buy in from staff – It makes them think about the extra things they can do and how they can create more benefits for their clients. It has helped them be more ambitious about the social value they create overall.
- Giving an edge in bids – T&B can log into the platform to look at a specific project, a specific area, or a specific metric and extract that data – be it values, photos or evidence – and put those within their bids. This means they can very easily answer those social value questions in a bid and demonstrate to clients their full commitment to social value across all of their projects and at head office level. This has, as Victoria says, given them a real commercial advantage.
T&B implemented Thrive not only to comply with social value legislation, but to be more ambitious with the social value work they were doing and to widen the impact they were having on the local communities.
This has certainly come about. Mark comments that Thrive have been able to add value to the T&B business, in the same way that T&B try to add value to their clients.
“For us , Thrive has been a great partner because they have helped us implement our strategy from the very beginning. They worked with us to understand the kind of metrics we should use and how best to communicate that with staff.”
– Victoria Rutherford, Bid Co-Ordinator, T&B (Contractors) Ltd.
