Resources

Highly Commended in 2006

Download as a PDF

International, Highly Commended

BT in Partnership with Disasters Emergency Committee - The Tsunami Appeal and Beyond

Citigroup International Award 2006 in association with the International Business Leaders Forum and Business Action for Africa

BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions operating in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. BT with the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) supports appeals providing the network management and telephony, recruitment of call centres and volunteers, fundraising, and PR. BT is DEC’s only corporate sponsor and has supported all DEC appeals.

Processes

DEC is a consortium of 13 UK humanitarian aid agencies. DEC disburses funds to member agencies best placed to deliver effective and timely relief to people most in need in response to a global crisis. BT has built and refined systems that can respond immediately in times of disaster by:

Telephony: The BT call centre that takes DEC pledges is set up within 72 hours.
Online: Following the Tsunami the existing service provider did not have the capacity to handle the unprecedented response. BT within 4.5 hours had the site working on a platform that vastly increased capacity and security.
On the ground: BT sent engineers to disaster areas to install satellite earth stations to provide vital communications for aid agencies, media and families, without which the relief effort would have been chaos. The value of this work was £1.5 million.
Leveraging pledges: BT Chairman rang leaders at the top 20 FTSE companies to seek support and encourage them to pledge, leveraging a £500,000 donation from BT.

Impact

Business benefits included allowing BT to showcase its ICT capabilities to a larger market. BT's response secured an unprecedented publicity to the value of £7.2 million, and reached 43 million people.

It also accounted for a rise in customer satisfaction and enhanced reputation. Over 90% of employees as a result feel more positive about working for BT.

A call centre was set up within 24 hours and over a holiday period. Over 1.7 million pledges were taken over the BT network.

A new Guinness World Record was created for the most money donated online in 24 hours - £10,676,836.

As BT does not profit from Appeals the company gave back all money made from the telephony and network management of the tsunami.

In total over £43 million was raised through the BT internet facility.

Monies raised saved the lived of thousands and improved the lives of 3.6 million.

More than £112m of DEC funding went towards providing clean drinking water, sanitation, shelter, food and medicine.

The rebuilding and rehabilitation that DEC agencies are undertaking is more than £190 million and includes building 20,000 new homes to house over 100,000 people.