SHOP DIRECT CHARITY PROGRAMME
Giving something back to the places where we live and work has always been important to Shop Direct. We continue to play a positive role in our local communities through our charity programme.
As part of this commitment, we ask our colleagues to vote to choose one charitable project that we will get behind as a team.
Our colleagues take part in lots of fundraising activities every year, including sporting challenges, fun days and other innovative ways to raise funds. Colleagues can also choose to donate to good causes via Payroll Giving and as a business we boost any funds raised through ‘Helping Hand,’ our matched giving scheme. Our charity partnerships go beyond fundraising; we want to leave a lasting impact in our local communities, and for that reason we’re committed to supporting projects that allow us to extend our digital expertise to the project we’re fundraising for.
Last year we set ourselves an ambitious target of raising £400,000 for Claire House Children’s Hospice, which helps seriously and terminally ill children by providing specialist nursing care and emotional support for children and young people across the North West.
The team at Claire House had plans to convert an old monastery in West Derby, Liverpool into a new facility that enables them to support hundreds more children and families across the North West. Our #400kchallenge was to digitally equip the new site in Liverpool, helping the charity put in place futureproof digital infrastructure like cabling, Wi-Fi and server technology. Our partnership was Claire House’s biggest to date.
In October 2016, we completed our year-long partnership with Claire House. Against an initial target of £400,000 we raised £440,000 enabling them to open their doors within 14 months of acquiring the site, and begin offering services 18 months ahead of schedule.
Over the last two years we’ve raised over £690,000 for charity. We’re aiming to push that even further across 2017-2019 through our new two-year charity partnership.
In October 2017, our colleagues voted to support Booth Centre and Whitechapel Centre, the leading homelessness charities in Liverpool and Greater Manchester. Each helps thousands of families every year, preventing and resolving homelessness and social exclusion.
We’ve committed to raising £600,000 to support the charities to deliver a multi-faceted approach to improve digital inclusion and employment for some of the North West’s most excluded and impoverished people. We’ll also provide industry-leading knowledge to help drive the project.
Since launching our #SD600kchallenge, our colleagues have been taking part in various fundraising challenges which will continue across the next two years of the partnership. We also held a charity ball in December 2018 with proceeds contributing £210,000 to this charity challenge.