Community

A major part of our Skill for Tomorrow strategy aims to empower businesses and their employees with the best digital skills to help grow their business. Our ambition is to boost the digital skills of 1 million small business owners and their employees by 2025. We are proud to work with partners like Google, LinkedIn, Small Business Britain, Fresh Business Thinking, to connect and inspire small businesses.

In 2019/20 we have helped thousands of business across the UK, by running events designed to help SME businesses on a wide range of topics such as digital marketing, using collaboration tools and getting your business online. Events have been delivered in Newcastle, Bristol, London, Manchester and Birmingham.

In response to the COVID crisis we’ve supported thousands of businesses from all parts of the UK via our website and our series of webinars. Most popular courses include Developing a Social Media Strategy, Digital Marketing, Moving Your Business Online which were key topics businesses told us they needed to adapt and keep their SME business running during Covid-19, with over 87% of people joining our webinars and events reporting that they would be implementing some changes on the way they run their business. A full list of webinars are available to view. 

Supporting charities

We are working with charity partners to use the power of technology to improve lives in the UK and beyond - supported by volunteers from across the business. We’ve used our technology and expertise to help generate over £700m for good causes since 2012/13, and £55m in 2019/20. BT employees are leading the charge, donating over £13.5m through payroll giving in the last 5 years, topped up by BT to over £17.5m. In 2019/20 over 1,400 individual charities were supported and BT was recognised with a National Payroll Giving Excellence Award for Most Sustained Scheme in 2019.

The Supporters Club has funded 61 projects across the UK, to the value of £7,476,791. The estimated number of beneficiaries in the UK is 130,162, with a further 93,131 additional direct beneficiaries including front line workers. Active projects in year six of the programme, include violence prevention, education, mental health/homelessness, disability inclusion, gender justice and LGBTQ+. Projects supported last year totalled £1,960,390.

Additionally, some 10,000 websites have been set up for English charities and community groups using our free community web kit, at a value in kind of over £500,000.

Volunteering

Everyone at BT can take up to three days a year for volunteering. Last year 15% of all employees volunteered their time and expertise – an enriching experience both for the beneficiaries and for the volunteers. Volunteers supported a wide range of charity and community projects such as fundraising for good causes, regular food bank collections at BT buildings for The Trussell Trust, running workshops to introduce teachers to our Barefoot resources and supporting other digital skills initiatives such as TeenTech. Employees also contributed additional volunteering in their own time. In the year ending 31 March 2020, across England some 11,000 volunteers, gave over 16,000 days volunteering, at a value in kind of over £3.6million.  

BT is taking a sector leading approach to climate change with a target to make our business become net zero for carbon emissions by 2045.

As part of that pledge we are working to:

• Purchase 100% renewable electricity worldwide by 2020, where markets allow. In the UK 100% of our directly purchased electricity is now from renewable resources.
• Convert our fleet to ultra- low emission vehicles
• Decarbonise our buildings

We are also helping our customers reduce their carbon too, using the potential of our products and services to help save energy, fuel, material and emissions. We’ve now helped our customers save three times as much carbon as our own end-to-end carbon emissions and have achieved our 3:1 carbon abasement target one year early. This year our carbon-saving products and services helped customers save c13M tonnes of CO2. That means for every tonne of CO2 emitted in our operations, supply chain and from product use we’ve helped customers save over three tonnes of greenhouse gases.

BT has installed electric charging points across the UK, including Ashfield, Birmingham, Brentwood, Bristol, Cleckheaton, Copt Oak, Doncaster, Hatfield, Ipswich, Isles of Scilly, Leeds, Lincoln, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Paddington, Peterborough, Smethwick, Watford, Weston-Super- Mare and Wimbledon.

Find out more details on any of our Digital Impact and Sustainability activities.