G-Research launch new Corporate Social Responsibility strategy, raising £207,658 in one month

Charity and community have always been key pillars of G-Research. We’re proud to provide opportunities for our team to volunteer at a wide range of organisations, from STEMettes to Action Tutoring, and we have long supported our staff’s fundraising endeavours by doubling any donations they receive.

We are an organisation, however, that never rests on its laurels. As we have grown to a size where ad hoc initiatives might start to lose some of their impact, we felt we could support our various charitable partners even more effectively – raising more money and volunteering more of our team’s world-class skills.

We have consequently launched G-Research’s new Corporate Social Responsibility strategy. This will bring together the range of existing activities that G-Research undertakes and help to support new, targeted work that will maximise the use of our donations and skillsets. This will have a particular focus on four key areas that our employees are passionate about: education, the environment, our local community, and using technology to drive positive change.

On the fundraising side, in November 2019 we launched our new Charity of the Year scheme. The goal of our Charity of the Year is to provide focused, ongoing fundraising and support, engaging as many members of the G-Research team as possible in the process. To start things off, we asked all of our employees to vote on who would be G-Research’s first Charity of the Year. From a shortlist of five brilliant organisations put forward by employees (STEMettes, Greater Change, Fitzrovia Youth in Action, the London Sustainability Exchange and Apps for Good), there was one clear winner: the startup homelessness charity Greater Change, who received almost half of the votes (with 87% of the company voting).

Greater Change made a compelling case to partner with G-Research with their focus on personalised funding and use of data. This ensures donations are used as effectively as possible to help people overcome long-term structural homelessness. Their evidence-based approach chimed with an organisation such as ours that uses petabytes of data to make informed decisions and predict the future every day.

We were excited to kick off our partnership with Greater Change with our first Make a Difference Month. This was a series of company-wide events over the course of six weeks aimed at maximising fundraising efforts, which G-Research then triple-matched. The events included our CTO (and others) taking on the Hot Wings Challenge (spoiler: two million on the Scoville Scale is HOT); one of our quant heads spending the month in a sleeping bag (also hot); and 90 employees taking part in our Miles for Money event, covering a total distance of 17,000 miles on their bikes.

We were blown away with the generosity and engagement from our employees, who raised an amazing £63,624, which, combined with the company triple-matching, is a staggering £207,658 for Greater Change. 100% of the funds raised will go directly to helping hundreds of homeless people rebuild their lives. Keep an eye on our blogs for updates on how the money is being used.

We are proud that we now have a first-class CSR programme to match our world-class work. We’re looking forward to continuing this strong start into 2020, with many more fundraising activities, new volunteering opportunities, and special events lined up.