E014 - Danny Witter from Work for Good

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Hey Danny, thank you so much for coming along to the Green Element podcast. Tell us a bit about your business and who you are, what you do, what your purpose is. Just tell us a bit more, I suppose.

Thanks so much, Will. It's a total pleasure to be on here. Thank you for inviting me to have this conversation. I am Danny Witter. I run a social enterprise called Work for Good. I'm one of the co-founders. We're on a mission to get businesses to give a lot more cash to charity. You may or may not be familiar with the kind of stark statistics, but in the UK about £20 billion goes to charitable causes each year. Of that, a rather miserly 2% comes from businesses.

Oh wow.

Which I find really extraordinary, particularly if you look at it in contrast to what people like you and I do, reaching into our own pockets as individuals. to support charitable causes or people we care about, that constitutes 47% of charitable income, so more than 20 times what businesses give each year in absolute terms. So our mission is to move the needle on that and create a massive additive channel of philanthropic funding for the charity world. The way we're going about doing that is we've built an online platform, it's called Work for Good. And on one side, we invite businesses to sign up, and on the other side, we invite charities to sign up, and the platform makes it easy and compelling for businesses to give to charity. There's a load of complication as to why you need an intermediary, and I can get into that detail later if you think it's of interest to listeners.

Okay.

But essentially, the formula we're trying to create is for businesses, for it to be easy and compelling for them to embed charitable giving pledges into what they do. The compelling bit is, if you're going to give money to charity, do it smart. Do it in ways that actually are good for business at the same time as good for cause. So I guess to give you a micro example, there's a Work for Good member business that's a restaurant, and the way they visibly link their giving to what they do, which is what we encourage, because if you do that you can engage your stakeholders with your giving, impress your customers, motivate your staff, strengthen your brand, all of these things that are business positive, at the same time as your Giving Pledge funding good causes. There's that powerful win-win available, if you like.

Yeah.

So back to our restaurant example, the way they visibly link giving to what they do is they've chosen a single table. It's a 6-person table sitting in the middle of their restaurant. They call it their charity table, and they give away the profits from every meal at that one table Very cool. A bit more fun, they let the diners who sit down and have a meal there choose which of a list of 8 charities will receive the donation. And the diner's getting the same meal for the same price, but because they've chosen to eat at that restaurant, eat at that table, the restaurant is making a charitable donation, but the diner feels incredibly engaged because they get to choose which charity gets it, and charity is incredibly personal. So as an engagement strategy with your customers, that works really, really well. And that kind of philosophy across any different type of industry or business model is the sort of thing we encourage businesses to do.

Can you name that restaurant? I'm dying to know what restaurant it is. I want to eat there.

It's down in Surrey. It's called Applegarth.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, I know. It's a lovely story. And, you know, I think sometimes these B2C examples are more tangible for people. But we have lots of consultancies who just pledge to give 1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, in one case even 10% of all invoices to cause. And they make it part of their brand narrative. They talk about it on their invoices. They use our umbrella branding to tell their giving story, and indeed use our tech for those who want to let their customers choose the charity. They can use the platform tech to delegate that charity choice piece. to their clients invoice by invoice, and that really works. So I guess back to the core principle of it, just to reiterate, we're trying to move businesses away from a kind of current situation where most business owners will say they want to do something or they want to do more. The majority don't get around to it because they're too busy with 15 other priorities. Those that do give cash to charity often will write a cheque come Christmas time But they won't talk about it because we're British and it's very vulgar to show off about your good works. So we're trying to move to a different behaviour, which is make a charitable giving pledge, stick it up in lights. It will mean you get on with doing the thing you said you would do. All your stakeholders internally and externally will see the nice thing you're doing and like you all the more for it. and talk about it with pride and authenticity in a way that benefits your business, but hopefully also inspires lots of other business owners to get involved in this movement. That way we can try and move the needle in terms of how much cash businesses are giving to charity. Does that make some sort of sense? It makes absolute sense.

I am going to ask you about why we need an intermediary either now or— well, I've just brought it up, why not now? Because I am really— I think that is— I think personally, from the outside, I think that's really important to know, and I found this fascinating when I found out.

Yeah, so there are 4, possibly 5 parts to the value exchange. With different businesses, it can be one of those things or all 5, and every situation is different in terms of what a business owner's motivation is, and therefore the method as to how they want to use the platform. But to rattle through them quickly, one advice, consultancy if you like. Not that many SME owners get out of bed in the morning thinking, how can I give away cash to grow my business? But the reality is, you do this stuff in a smart way, you can drive positive business outcomes and behaviors. And we've got hundreds of businesses doing it, so we see a lot of clever examples around that. So we share that knowledge and wisdom. Um, second piece is PayTech. If you are wiring to lots of different charities, say you use the restaurant example, you've got a list of 8 charities, maybe you change it every 6 months, you're giving to 16 charities a year. So to be able to settle up those giving pledges in your Work for Good account in a few clicks, to wire lots of small amounts of money every quarter to a bunch of different charities and keep all your tax-deductible receipts in one place. super easy from a payment and admin perspective.

Right.

The third bit is boring but important, so bear with me here.

Yeah.

It's illegal. You wouldn't believe this, but charities are approached every day of most weeks, particularly the bigger well-known brands, by businesses who want to give them money, and the charities are turning them away. This is because there's a big section of the Charities Act called commercial participation, that says if a business links donations to sales of goods and services, it has to approach each and every charity it wants to give to and negotiate this document with them. Now, the charities, for a bunch of reasons I won't go into, have very high thresholds below which they won't negotiate these docs. So typically £25,000 to £100,000 minimum annual donation per charity. below which they won't do this. In the case of Appleby Arthrostral, they'd have to go and approach and try and negotiate— even if the charities wouldn't turn them away for being too small, which they would, you'd have to negotiate 16 of these a year. It would just kill them, crush them. There's also a secondary point around VAT being charged on donations, which would hit the charity, not the business, but nevertheless is pretty unwelcome. The good news for any of your listeners who are now falling asleep, understandably—

They're not going to be falling asleep.

All this tax and legal detail, The good news is we've solved it all in a very innovative way, but all you need to know, all they need to know, is it's gone away.

Yeah.

So a business can sign up to the Work for Good platform in 2 minutes online and start wiring amounts as tiny or as large as they like through the platform in a few clicks to as many different charities without ever approaching them, having to negotiate anything, possibly get turned away for being too small, and all entirely compliantly with all the Charities Act legal obligations. So we've made it really, really easy. I mean, just as one example, we have an automotive business changes its charity every month. He says it takes him less than 5 minutes in admin each month to do the legal compliance thing and to settle up the charitable donation pledges to the previous month's charity. So super easy, and I think that's sometimes what puts people off is the thought that this will be a painful thing to execute.

Yeah.

Choi, very briefly back to your question, that was number 3 on the list. Number 4 is the visibility thing. I think we talked a little bit about helping businesses to be proud about their giving and talk about it and not be shy and British. And core to that, there are a bunch of marketing strategies, but core to that is our logo is used as a mark, as an accreditation. It's this paperclip folded into a heart, as you can probably see up on that poster back there.

Yeah.

And everyone seems to love it, and it may not be universally recognised yet, but businesses are using it really creatively, physically and digitally, to say, we're a Work for Good member business, we're one of the good guys, we give back, and putting it in their email footers, business cards, RFPs, vans, windows, wherever you like, and just have some umbrella branding around their giving programme.

Yeah.

And we also promote case studies of our Work for Good member businesses. We turn it out through our social channels and amplify theirs. Really just want Businesses to give visibly and transparently in a way that's convincing and engaging stakeholders, and then for everyone to be talking about it so that becomes the norm as opposed to the exception that is done on the quiet.

Right.

So those 4 things are the main reasons. If none of those apply, if we talk to businesses and they just want to write a cheque and post it to a charity they already know, and none of those things apply in terms of embedding it into their business in these kind of ways, then we advise them to send a cheque direct. That makes sense.

So what would you say, in a nutshell, what would you say your business superpower was?

Business superpower? What a wonderful concept. I guess it just feels like what we're doing is very unique, which some weeks worries me slightly. Um, yeah, I, I just, just feel there's this un— this vast amount of giving intent out there which rarely manifests. Um, and our superpower is just to help people learn that new behavior and then execute it in, in, you know, in the minutes and a few clicks. And that, that, that is the potential. The potential feels huge. There are 5.7 million SMEs in the UK alone and growing fast. They represent by some standards 50 to 60% of UK economic output.

Yeah, I'm doing a presentation on Saturday at a conference and it's 56%, I think, current numbers.

And if we can turn on that tap of giving, and you know, this is not in a you should do more, you should do something, this is a this is a smart thing to do for your business. It could be game-changing. I mean, to put some other numbers on it, if we could get just 5% of UK SMEs to give one day's income a year, that would create new additive charitable funding of a quarter of a billion pounds a year.

Wow.

The pie, the market, whatever else, is huge. Getting to scale is non-trivial. We're trying to teach what is a relatively new behavior to a very hard-to-reach sector. So the challenge is huge, but the prize is worth fighting very hard for.

How did you get into this? Like, when did you decide, right, this is what I want to do, I'm going to set up Work for Good? And like, what's your background? You must have had yeah, experience in something, or maybe not. Maybe you just woke up in the morning and went, you know what, this is what I want to do.

Yeah, so my story is I did 25 years of investment banking. Great career, won't disrespect it. Not very soul-satisfying, if I'm honest. I never really loved it. And I've been falling in love with the third sector for some time, and for a while I was lucky enough I juggled both. So I was at Deutsche Bank for many years, I chaired the charities committee, I got involved in some of the programs we were running. I was mentoring social entrepreneurs, finding myself going into prison and, you know, doing training with, with, you know, rooms full of inmates. Just really inspiring and different stuff. And to be honest, I was getting all of my personal growth at that stage of my career cycle out of all of that stuff and falling in love more and more with the concept of giving back and doing good and all those Lovely things. So I walked out of that world 3 and a half years ago for a bunch of different reasons, but professionally I really wanted to take all of my energies to the kind of giving back and doing good space. At the time I'd— so Work for Good wasn't my idea. It's a guy called Rupert Pick, and I can tell you his backstory and the light bulb moment if that's something of interest.

Yeah.

But before I'd left banking, that he wanted some advice on how to get this set up and going. And, um, then when I found myself richer in time, I said, you know, and it became clear to me he was running his own marketing business, had 3 young kids, uh, including Ottie, whose, whose health issues had inspired the idea in the first place, and he just didn't have the bandwidth.

Mm-hmm.

And I said, why don't I just get this going for you? Uh, and I was thinking I'd give it 6 months of my life pro bono. to set it up. And on the 25th of this month, I will have been working on this for free for 3 years. So it's become a real sort of a passion thing, but it's worth it.

We get that from you, absolutely get that from you. So how do you engage your staff, suppliers, and companies with your mission and purpose? Like, one of the things that maybe listeners want to know is Just how is that communications? It's talking to— how do you engage with people? How do you get that story out?

Yeah, well, we're trying a bunch of different marketing channels. The reality is we want to take this to scale, and that's a big numbers game. Our 5-year UK plan alone is to have 25,000 businesses giving through the platform, and for that we're gonna have to talk to a lot. So in the early stages And, you know, continually we'll talk to businesses direct. A lot of it though, we feel we have to do one-to-many marketing. So we're talking to trade associations. There's a piece coming out on us in the Federation of Small Businesses magazine in January. That's a 200,000 business network. We have some big corporates that I probably won't name here that are really keen to promote us to their huge SME footprints. Their kind of CSR thing is they want to maximize their total social impact. by encouraging all of their SME clients to follow their philanthropic lead, and we've built a bespoke business giving approach and resource, and so they want to promote it. But some of those big corporate conversations are painfully slow. So yes, trade associations, business clubs, any kind of— any sort of aggregating organisation that can take our story out to lots of other people. Which is why I love being invited to do podcasts, because then you can hopefully tell the story and hopefully a few people go, I've never thought of that, that's really smart, I want to get involved. And I suppose, you know, that is our marketing challenge. We aren't yet a household brand. The behavior we're teaching is to a degree a new one, which is always quite hard work. And just generally, you know, people putting out content on us gets interest and increases awareness of brand, doesn't necessarily get a lot of businesses charging through the door to sign up. But we find if we get in the room or get one-to-one or get on a call with a business owner and have this sort of conversation, the conversion rate is very high about people just going, you know, that's smart. Because I think the sweet spot, what's lovely about this, is you've got this kind of perfect storm of a change, certainly a generational change, in attitude, but also simultaneously a commercial imperative for businesses to do this stuff well. We get approached by a lot of startups that haven't even started trading yet, very keen to embed a Giving Pledge into their brand narrative from day one. And these people feel it from the heart, you know, they want to be doing good, they want business to be about more than profit. They also see clear as day the commercial advantage of having a visible social piece to their brand.

Yeah.

So it makes me very optimistic for the future of business giving, and it means that's a very powerful recipe for us to be talking into. So when we talk to business owners, actually of all generations, the reception is very good. It's just trying to get the message out there, to talk to enough people to take this to scale as fast as we'd like to, to do as much good as we think we can.

I think there's a real sea of change that's happening in business, isn't there, at the moment? And you can see it in all manners of the fact— I mean, the fact that you've set up, and with Work for Good, with the B Corp movement that's going on, but not even labelling businesses either. There's an awful lot of businesses that are as you just said, they're coming to you from day one before they even start trading. And there is this sea of change that's going on of actually, you know what? And I think that's what— I mean, the tax stuff that went on, and I may be speaking out of turn, but I don't think that people were annoyed that it was legal. I think they were just annoyed that Actually, there are companies that aren't doing the right thing now, and there's more of that kind of out there that people are going, actually, who cares if it's legislation, they're following the letters of the law, why can't they just do the right thing?

And very soon they're gonna have to do the right thing for survival. It's interesting because, you know, the stats and the research around customer and consumer behavior on one side but also about your people, about staff, about how to attract, retain, and motivate is incredibly compelling as to how much difference it makes if a company has soul, has purpose, is authentic. You know, it's becoming business critical. And then I'm sure you're aware of this, but adding on top of that, on top of the external stuff with customers, the internal stuff with staff, there's also now finance. This has started obviously as a big company problem. But back in, I think it was what, January, February, Larry Fink, who's CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager— they control $6 or $7 trillion of the world's investable wealth— put out in his annual letter to all stakeholders a very strongly worded statement saying that businesses that don't operate with deep and authentic social purpose as one of their key Pillars will ultimately lose their license to operate with all stakeholders.

It's interesting if you look back at the letters that he wrote over the last 3 or 4 years, how he's been building up to that, because you can read one from 3 years ago and he starts talking about it, right, doesn't actually mention it. The previous year he talks about it but doesn't put it in stone. And then this year he actually goes, right. So it wasn't even— it shouldn't have even come as a surprise to a lot of the companies that they invest in either, because if they had been reading what he's been talking about, they would have understood the direction that he's going. And if he's— and he won't be the only person that's going down that route either.

That's really interesting. I hadn't been aware of that. I look forward to next year's letter.

I know, what's he going to do, save the world?

That's a really interesting perspective, I hadn't been aware of that.

Yeah, I can't remember who spoke about it, but someone pointed that out to us.

There's undoubtedly a meta-trend of purpose in business out there, and charitable giving is only one part of that story, and giving in cash is only one part of that story, but hopefully what we provide to smaller businesses that don't have departments in dedicated resources on sort of corporate responsibility, we make a very easy sort of plug-and-play CSR approach to embed some sort of charitable values into a business and execute on them, you know, in a few clicks without it being a painful thing to do. So hopefully, you know, hopefully that's going to create value both for businesses and of course for charities.

So as an organisation, do you— I mean, what is it that I guess, what is it that you guys are doing? You know, how do you approach your sustainability and ethics, etc.?

Yeah, so, so far, you know, we're a young company. We did our beta almost 2 years ago, which is hard to believe, but we've only been scaling for 6 months now. So we focus on giving because we think It's pretty consistent with what we're telling lots of other small businesses to do. And again, we are trying to follow what we preach, which is if we're going to give to charity, we should give to charity in ways that drive business outcomes. And we honestly don't think there's any conflict between giving cash in kind of tactical ways that drive positive business outcomes. Quite the opposite, actually. We strongly believe if you're going to ask businesses to consistently give away cash to cause, It's only going to be really sustainable, and frankly, we're going to take this thing to scale much faster if there's a demonstrable return on investment to the business of having made those charitable giving pledges. It's fine to give from the heart and just send money to charity, that's fine. We think there's some smarter win-wins to do it in ways that kind of align with business outcomes. So in our case, you know, we're a young startup, we are not rich in funding. We probably won't break even until the end of year 4, and we're having to sink a lot of money into it to get us to that point. So we don't have profits to give away, but nevertheless, in our own small way, we are practicing what we preach. So we did an event at the back end of June, and for a bit of fun, and because I hate no-shows to free events, we sent out to everybody who had RSVP'd yes We sent out little things saying, by the way, thanks for coming, and if you don't no-show, we'll give £5 to a charity of your choice. And just as a way of putting a device around getting people to think twice before they go, I'm a bit busy and won't turn up to this thing. And that was quite fun because hopefully it reduced no-shows, though it's very hard to evidence that without doing some sort of A/B testing.

How many no-shows? What percentage?

I don't know. I mean, it was, it was still high. These things are always high, free events, particularly World Cup, June, hot evening, kind of. It's always a slight frustration. But the other fun thing of doing that pledge was purely self-interested. We wanted to demo the tech.

Yeah.

So everybody who turned up then got an email from Work for Good, which thanks them for being involved, and they get to click on a link and choose a charity they like, and then we wire that check.

That's brilliant.

It's only a fiver, who cares? But, you know, so we do that. We're about to relaunch our referral tech next week, which will encourage all Work for Good member businesses and charities to be referring other businesses and charities to the platform.

We're signing up for that, aren't you? I mean, that's such a good idea. £50 for every referral you get goes to charity. I love it. It just made so much sense when we spoke to each other on the phone about that.

Yeah, and it's— there's a warm fuzziness about making a pledge. If you say to somebody, refer a business to us and we'll give you £50, I'm not saying it's grubby, but I just don't think it's as motivating or as brand-friendly as saying, you know, this is the way we'll thank you, we'll give money to charity, but you can choose a charity you care about.

Yeah.

To keep it kind of personal. So we've done a few things like that. So mostly focused on the giving. Until quite recently, we were entirely remote, so there wasn't a lot of environmental and waste and those kind of things to consider. But we very much want to follow your example and become a B Corp. Brilliant. It's a timing and resource issue.

Yeah, well, especially if year 4 you're expecting to break even, I can understand that because it's not an easy process to go through. And I think you do have to be clever with your time, don't you? Particularly at the beginning, you can't just run off and do as many things as you possibly can because actually, ultimately, you will end up— you potentially may end up falling falling over and failing by trying to do too much. It makes absolute sense to focus, particularly as you've got such a good social purpose as an organisation as well.

Yeah, no, that's fair.

So what kind of influence would you like— what would you like people to take away from this podcast? Funny thing, I know exactly what you're just about to say.

I'm trying to think of something not obvious to say. I want them to take away—

It's not signing up for Work for Good.

I want them to take away that giving within a business context is a thing, that it's easy to do, and that it's good for business. Specifically, I suppose, within that, if you know, to go beyond the obvious, that it's never too early or too small. I have a lot of conversations where people just go, well, you know, I need to wait until this point. The reality is— and I've had 2 of these conversations this morning alone— The reality is I talked about startups getting involved. You get involved as a sole trader, our annual membership subscription, which is, we think, very humble, starts off as little as £25 a year for a sole trader. Somebody can come on board starting up a business with no revenue, sign up as a Work for Good member business, become part of this community, part of this movement, make a pledge to give away, say, 5% of sales and revenues, And wear the badge, tell their giving story, make it part of who they are from day one in a way that you get kind of all at a commercial level, all the marketing benefits. You're not giving, you're not having to donate very much at all until such time as your revenues take off, and then you're only ever giving an amount that's commensurate with your income growth. So you can get the marketing benefit up front. Your only downside is paying our humble membership fee, and then the giving comes with your success. So there's often the mentality that this will be hard to do and is only something you can do when you've totally made it. And I see, if I look at the generational aspects of— I guess my generation was go out and have a successful career, make enough money, and then think about giving back. And I see the generations behind mine a much more give-along-the-way kind of attitude. And that's what we're selling, like giving into your business along the way because it's good for business. I suppose the business analogy is you've seen these kind of Founders Pledge organizations, which are fabulous, which get business owners to say, when I sell the company— I'm going to grow this company, when I sell it, I'll give a few percent or whatever to charity, but I'll pledge upfront that's what I'm going to do. Those kind of models are wonderful. I think from a self-interested perspective, that giving along the way is good for business and good for business growth, and giving at the end of the business journey is one approach. It's not the only approach, and I quite like ours.

Yeah, absolutely. You also don't know whether you are going to be able to sell either, if that is what your aspiration is. You may be, you know, so at least do something good along the way. at the same time, which is guaranteed, rather than, oh God, I'm now gonna have to sell my business, oh, no one wants to buy it, oh well. That pledge was pretty much on deaf ears.

I don't think many customers are gonna like your brand more if they spot that you're gonna give 3% away once you get—

Absolutely agree, absolutely agree, but why would you? So can you let us know how our listeners can understand how to get started, understand more, We'll obviously be putting all of these web links on the website, on the podcast notes.

So yeah. Well, that's about it. You just go to our homepage, click the Get Started button. You called it correct. Registration takes 2 minutes, subscription not much longer than that. Once a business has subscribed, they're very welcome just to hop on a video call, Zoom call like this, with me and anybody else in the team and just have a kind of free consultancy brainstorm, if they need it, about how they should be thinking about giving within their context, subject to what their motivations are, what are their business issues. We've got to brainstorm, come up with a few ideas, perhaps start simple and then get more complicated. We did a blog ages ago called How to Do Good in 12 Minutes and 38 Seconds, which is how long it took us to go through the entire process. from registration through to having made a donation to a charity, and that included 5 and a half minutes of setting up a beautiful profile for the business on our website, which of course we encourage businesses to do. It's good for SEO, etc. But without that, it's 7 minutes to go from one end of the process to having made a donation legally and compliantly to the charity of your choice. So it's not hard to do. We hope the site's intuitive, but we have video tutorials if they're needed and all that kind of good stuff. But click Get Started, get in touch, and then, you know—

Can you choose your charities?

Yes, absolutely. So businesses making a pledge to give away.

So if you've got a bespoke charity that is close to your heart, can you bring that charity with you?

Yes, completely. So we have 320-odd charities on there so far, and they're signing up every day. Charities sign up for free. We want to be universal choice. So we've got probably 2/3 of the top 20 brands on there already. We're very sort of established and credible, but we've also got the tiniest little local charities. And you have to be a registered charity to be on the platform currently. We may widen that to other nonprofit and do-gooding organizations in time, but we're keeping it relatively simple in leg 1 of our growth story. But we will sign up any charity that any business wants to give to. If they aren't on there already, so absolutely, it's any charity is the short answer to your question.

Brilliant, brilliant. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you as usual, and yeah, thank you so much.

Well, thank you as well. It's been really interesting.

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