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At an awards ceremony held on 12^th October, 2017, in the City of London, Atrium has been announced as a top community investor in the 2017 GivX Community Value Awards.

Leading a cohort of companies who are pioneering best practise in CSR, Atrium was commended for their particularly strong performance in skilled volunteering value per employee, where they ranked in the top five.

Developed by the pre-eminent social enterprise Benefacto, the GivX framework allows companies and organisations to simply and ­­effectively measure their community investment, and to benchmark their ratings against other companies.

Speaking on behalf of Atrium’s CSR Committee, Liz O’Rourke said: “Impact analysis is fundamental to the development of a sustainable CSR strategy. GivX is a useful, easy to use, tool which allows us as an organisation to measure community and charitable contributions against our peers in the London market. As a company featuring on the GivX Top 20 businesses helps us to attract individuals who share our values.”

GivX has been developed in response to other, often complicated, CSR measurement tools and has been designed to simplify the process, measuring value on only six key metrics. Equally, GivX outputs a simple, comparable score: companies report just two numbers, their total contribution, and a per employee score. The aim being to make communicating and comparing the work companies do more accessible to all.

Speaking on behalf of Benefacto, Ben Darlington explained:

“The principle behind the GivX framework is one of simplifying CSR measurements to make it easier for businesses and organisations to measure their contribution to the community and then communicate it. Our inaugural awards were to celebrate an innovative group of companies, who by pioneering the framework, are committing to transparently and effectively reporting their change-making community investment programmes.

“At Benefacto, we believe that, to measure CSR effectively, companies need to look beyond the cost to them of giving, and focus on the actual value created for charities.

“Furthermore, in an era where we are consistently seeing calls for increased transparency from organisations in both the private and public sectors, we understand the importance of providing a framework that is easy for companies to use, but equally clear and consistent for the public to understand and interpret. “

The Top 25 winners at the awards further include UK giants ITV, HSBC and John Lewis, all of whom by using the GivX index can compare their efforts with those of smaller companies through scoring per employee.

The free-to-use framework introduces a common language that enables companies to benchmark six different areas of their community investment programme. Donations, fundraising and volunteering work are made comparable in terms of the ‘Community Value’ a company has created.

Measuring ‘Community Value’ places emphasis on the worth of donations or volunteering work for charities. It is defined as the replacement cost the charity would have to pay if it were to purchase similar goods or services on the open market.

About Benefacto

Benefacto is a social enterprise on a mission to engage more professional people in meaningful volunteering. Done right, employee volunteering strengthens the over-stretched charity sector and enhances the service received by those in need. It develops the skills of all involved, creates a cross pollination of ideas between different groups in our society and builds a greater understanding of how to support others in overcoming the challenges they face.

Benefacto gives employee volunteers instant access to dozens of charities in London and Manchester. We achieve our social mission through providing a valuable service to our charity partners. These activities are funded by a host of consulting, communications and brokerage services we provide to businesses to engage their workforces in volunteering. Our workforce combines the best of the private and third sectors. We are principled, creative, technologically innovative and efficient.

For more information visit www.benefacto.org