By Mandy Rudd, GiGL CEO
Part of our commitment as a community interest company (CIC) is to submit our annual accounts and a completed CIC34 form, to Companies House. The form includes sections to demonstrate how our activities have benefited the community we were set up to serve, and whether we have consulted our stakeholders and acted on their feedback. We have a series of standard metrics to illustrate these points drawn from our social media accounts, internal monitoring spreadsheets and various other stats-rich resources.
What the mandatory reporting doesn’t do is show GiGL in full colour. As a local environmental records centre we are blessed (overwhelmed) with ways of generating statistics to illustrate specific points within the business, but they don’t capture the stories that make us laugh out loud or proud of what we’ve achieved. As mentioned in a previous article, they’re also difficult to use to demonstrate social value: the context of all of the stakeholders that we help and whose work, research and recording are a little bit easier thanks to what we do.
After a couple of years of ‘create public-facing annual report‘ being on my ‘to do’ list I finally made time to find an expert to work on it with. Rodger our business advisor put us in touch with marketing consultant Howard Gardiner. Howard has led us through the process of identifying stories that may challenge the perception of what we do, and help our stakeholders understand the range of work that we do that benefits them via our services.
It has been really exciting to work with Howard on this project – it’s refreshing to have taken a step back to see GiGL from a marketing expert’s perspective. I hope you like what we have created as a team and very much welcome your feedback to inform the next edition.
The annual report can be downloaded here.