Qantas and the $3.9m Question

Off the back of our run of stories on unprovable claims in ocean plastics and energy supply, culminating with the deeper look at the E in ESG in an interview with Pledge for the Planet founder, Alice Kendall, today we’re taking a turn into the territory of S. 

Yes, Social. The forgotten middle-child of corporate impact’s ESG.

Although, truth be told, that metaphor doesn’t fully hold up because Governance has massive oldest-child energy about it.

Next edition I will share the interview on corporate social impact with Tim Costello AO, former CEO of World Vision Australia and Chair of just about every coordinated effort to do good in some form or another.

But for today, let’s start with a story…

Work, Amirite…

In one of my earliest jobs, on top of timesheets, we were asked to complete an ‘Activity Monitor’ where we mapped out our week’s work in ridiculously small increments.

Head-office, it turned out, wanted to get a better idea of our true ‘cost to business.’

Frustrated by the added administrative burden - in the spirit of radical transparency, and with absolutely no ill-intent I can assure you, I filled out each box of the ‘activity tracker’ for the first day of reporting with the line ‘filling out the activity monitor.’

I don’t remember what happened next except that the Activity Monitor didn’t last much longer. I can only assume I was given an Employee of the Month award and had one of the smaller meeting rooms named in my honour.

The point is, sometimes businesses get so caught up in what they want, they forget the burden it creates on the people they ask to provide it.

I was reminded of that off-resume career highlight this week when I saw a wonderful post on LinkedIn from Margaret O’Brien, Co-Founder and CEO of Young Change Agents highlighting how grant programs that are designed to prioritise a business’ need for scale can inadvertently shift the cost of impact onto the very organisations they seek to support.

Here’s what went down…

Last week, Qantas announced the nearly 50 successful applicants in their $2 million Regional Grants program.

Which in itself is great news, and is part of a long-running commitment of Qantas to supporting regional community organisations that should be commended and increased.

However, it was one sentence in the announcement that caught the eye:

This year we received nearly 3,000 applications, which is a 70 per cent increase on last year and the biggest response since the program launched in 2019.

3000 applicants!

Imagine the ‘Activity Monitor’ of the small Community Impact team tasked with reviewing them.

Margaret O’Brien and her team at Young Change Agents were one of the 2,950 applicants. They were unsuccessful.

The point here is not that corporate grant programs are bad. They are great for community organisations and great for business.

The real issue is that a grants program that requires staff to review 3000 applications and that requires social impact organisations to spend hours upon hours of time creating an application is simply not well designed for either the business nor its potential partners.

Like a plastic straw on a juice box, it creates unnecessary waste.
And we can design better solutions.

Nor is the point that Qantas is wrong for being excited that the program they fought hard to establish, and to carve funding out for year on year, has attracted more interest than ever.

But, announcing that fact publicly, instead of using it only internally to make the case for more resources, risks drawing attention to just how limited the available support is; and raises questions about how strategic the grant program truly is.

So how do we do better at grant programs?

Well, let’s start with how we don’t do it worse.

If you read one thing off the back of this edition, I would love it to be this admittedly long, but brutally honest review of giving by the Trustees of Thankyou’s foundation.

It’s one of the first resources I share when working with corporate clients on their impact model.

Read the letter here.

There is also a video summary at top, but come on, grab a cuppa and read the whole thing. It will at least fill a fair few boxes of your ‘Activity Monitor’.

While it’s the journey that matters in this letter, the destination they get to is critical;

That was written at a time when Thankyou had given a little over $6 million in grant funding. As of the time of publishing this, they have given more than $18.5 million to non-profits around the world. That’s nearly 3x the Qantas Regional Grants program by the way.

So what’s our destination after all of this?

This announcement from Qantas is wonderful news for nearly 50 deserving organisations.

And it is a great program that for so many reasons should remain an important, and ideally increasing part of Qantas’ national strategy. 

At the same time, the waste created through poor program design should be a rallying call for businesses and foundations running grant programs to seriously consider not just what they give, but how they give it.

If that’s you, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear your thoughts or takeaway lessons from the Thankyou letter as well.

Cheers,

Tim

PS: Next edition I will share my interview on corporate social impact with Tim Costello AO, former CEO of World Vision Australia, and certified National Living Treasure.