Bringing digital innovation and collaboration to help Scottish Water raise funds for WaterAid

Back in Feb 2019, 48 individuals from Capgemini gathered together to begin the Future Leaders programme, a facilitated learning experience for selected individuals across the Capgemini Group.

Our aim was to develop our leadership skills by solving real business challenges. This year the theme centred around the three pillars of our Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Programme: Active Inclusion, Digital Inclusion and Sustainability.  Raina recalls, “For me digital inclusion seemed like an obvious choice – or to use my skills to help people in local communities benefit from digital transformation.

Our remit: ‘to determine how we can best embed the Capgemini digital inclusion mission into our ways of working.’

The Idea: Scottish Water, a strategic partner of Capgemini, holds an annual WaterAid Ball to raise funds for a charity partner, WaterAid. This annual ball includes an auction, where attendees can bid for a number of items raising funds to deliver clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene for everyone, everywhere.

As part of our commitment to supporting the Digital Inclusion challenge we held discussions on how to introduce more meaningful ways to use our everyday skills and expertise beyond client delivery to give back to the community.

Graeme said “We had a eureka moment where we realised we could enable our colleagues to use their project management, technical and development skills in support of Scottish Water’s fundraising ambition  by developing a fit for purpose digital auction app to support them in their aims to raise £80,000 at the WaterAid Ball”.

The story doesn’t end there…

In addition to enabling our people to use their skills to support Scottish Water’s fundraising ambition, and develop a stronger partnership approach, we also wanted to support our own partner Code Your Future, a non-profit organisation supporting disadvantaged individuals with the dream of becoming developers. We reached out to their team in Glasgow, to offer students some real project experience, working collaboratively with us to develop the app, gaining tangible new experience and building their project portfolio, much needed for employment.

This helped in enhancing the relationship not only with our clients, but also our charity partners to deliver something collaboratively that has social value to raise money for WaterAid.   The WaterAid ball took place on Friday 6^th March. It was a spectacular 70s theme event, and through our contributions, we helped raise over £80,000 for WaterAid, to help support key water projects across Malawi and Rwanda.

And here’s what’s next…

As well as building the app and dashboard in just 10 weeks, we are proud that we have also been able to create a strategic framework for working with clients on charitable initiatives.

This framework provides simple guidance and support to collaborate with clients on any charitable initiative, providing steps to ensure the initiative is delivered successfully.

It’s flexible to support a wide variety of different initiative types, enabling those who may not previously have considered volunteering their digital skills to get involved.

The framework enables Capgemini to showcase our digital skills and strengthen our relationships with long-term partners.

We are also delighted that we have created a blueprint for involving our wider partners, and we are in talks with Code Your Future to continue our partnership with similar initiatives going forward.

We will be working with other team members to see how we can further utilise our framework to help increase the uptake of digital inclusion volunteering.

We hope this is just the beginning of the story… how a group of future leaders truly became architectures of positive futures.

Author

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Raina Purba

Graeme Walker