A bespoke social impact reporting tool is working with the owner and operator of Britain’s railway infrastructure, to put CSR monitoring firmly on the agenda, by measuring company-wide social value activities.
Impact Reporting has signed-up Network Rail to record and analyse the value of the organisation’s social value efforts.
Impact is a CSR and sustainability reporting tool which streamlines the way businesses can capture and monitor processes or organisational activity that has a social or environmental benefit. Network Rail, who sponsored the development of the sector’s Common Social Impact Framework (CSIF), is now making plans to record and report the social value generated by the organisation.
In the UK 216,000 people are employed by the rail industry and its supply chain *and the UK rail system contributes £36 billion to the UK economy annually**.
Chris Farrell, Managing Director of Impact, said:
“We’re becoming the go-to social impact tool for the rail sector because we collect the data which drives the values set out in the CSIF. Impact can capture and measure all aspects of community, social and employee engagement and demonstrates what good CSR analysis looks like in real time.
“We can help rail clients build a clearer picture of the important social value activities they’re engaged in, such as outreach in schools, rail safety, suicide prevention, apprenticeships and local economic spend. As a tool Impact then allows clients to set targets for further CSR initiatives such as increased volunteering hours, further time spent training and more sustainable development, all of which deliver community benefits.”
Sarah Borien, Sustainability Strategy Manager at Network Rail, said:
“Network Rail owns and manages Great Britain’s railway infrastructure, which includes tracks, bridges and stations. We are publicly funded and impact millions of passengers and their surrounding communities every day, so we have a social responsibility to be community-focused and provide societal benefits for the British taxpayer.
“We want to measure our social value in a meaningful way and take into consideration a broad range of activities that we know are being delivered across the network, but rarely measured. For example, we will be examining employee’s volunteering time, STEM engagement, railway safety, social regeneration and community rail initiatives.”
Impact’s client roster also includes Manchester Airport Group, DWF, the global law firm, Places for People and Regenda Group, national housing organisations and The British Library.
About Impact:
Impact Reporting was established in 2017, in Manchester, by the co-founders of Reason Digital.
Its clients include Manchester Airport Group, DWF, Places for People, One Manchester, Regenda, Breast Cancer Care, NPC, Helpforce and The University of Manchester.
It’s an easy-to-use, cloud-based SaaS which streamlines the way businesses capture, monitor, and produce real time reports on their social and environmental impact.
In 2018 it measured an impact of over £50 million for clients spanning law, construction, transport services and housing providers.
About Network Rail
We own, operate and develop Britain’s railway infrastructure; that’s 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK’s largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country’s train operating companies.
Every day, there are more than 4.7 million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain’s railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion-pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation’s railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced – a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.
We are building a better railway for a better Britain.
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