Thrive are delighted to share that Kinovo PLC are using the Thrive platform to track and report their social value endeavours across their business and their 4 subsidiaries; DCB, Purdy, R.Dunham and Spokemead. This is especially exciting as Kinovo have recently gone through a rebrand (formerly Bilby PLC) and as part of that process they have been meticulous with their decision making around their supply chain and partnerships.
With a strong sense of community, family and partnership, the company chose their name carefully. With ‘Kin’ meaning family and ‘novo’ meaning new, Kinovo reflects a renewed family of businesses.
Through the rebrand process, Kinovo realized that, due to the nature of their business and who they serve, social value was always at the heart of what they were doing, but it wasn’t well communicated to staff, stakeholders, clients or even the community where they were helping.
The company focus a lot of their work in the social and affordable housing sector and so to them it is important that the whole company “walks the walk”. Because of this, their work in the community is not limited to the remit of the projects that they carry out; being on the ground on behalf of local authorities and housing associations means they have first hand knowledge of the help people need on a daily basis and staff are encouraged to assist where they can. From providing support to the elderly or isolated, to doing shopping runs for housebound clients – especially during lockdowns – it became clear that the culture was already one of a caring and positive workforce. This is social value in action, on the spot, with benefits being realized there and then.
“We committed to producing a Sustainability report in the last quarter of this financial year and we installed Thrive so that we would have the ability to look back through what we have achieved over the past year. Not only that, but it also provides us with the group’s social value benchmark, which we will improve on.” Lee Venables, Chief Operating Officer, Kinovo.
“Social Value is being given higher weighting in tenders now, in some cases up to 20%. Thrive will give us the ability to provide more tangible information about the social value activities that we carry out, in our bids, which in turn will help us to win more contracts.” Martin Stone, Group Bid Manager, Kinovo.
With ESG and sustainability firmly at the core of this new identity, and with a growing contribution to the UN Sustainability Goals, now more than ever Kinovo need to have an accurate and consistent way to report their progress on their social value objectives. So the next step in engaging a tool to both track and report on the social value activities they are doing is a logical one. It enables them to let more people know about the good work which runs throughout the wider company. Knowing what others in the organization are doing provides motivation and comradery as well as demonstrating to shareholders that this is a company with heart.
Not only this, but using Thrive’s social value measurement tool to be able to see both tangible and fiscal benefits from the decisions they have made – such as the social return on investment of using solar panels and ground source heatpumps – means they continue to make fully informed strategic purchasing decisions, and in this case, helping towards their goals of being a net zero company.
We’ve now been working with the Kinovo team since March; helping them understand just how much of an impact they have already had with their social value work. We are impressed to see how quickly they have been able to implement change and are excited to see what they can achieve in the future.
