What is a CPO? With David Jessop, Charities Aid Foundation

Yeah, I mean, in CAF in particular, from my perspective, the most important bit when I stepped in was to actually have internal comms brought into the people space.

Okay.

So actually, from my perspective, I was very fortunate that in Kermagin, I was able to influence internal comms moving from what was then essentially external affairs within marketing into the world, the people space.

And what that meant was the right of the heart, of the people agenda was the storytelling, the narrative.

the beating heart, the rhythm of comms, the tone and feel.

And so what that enabled my role to lead was actually the, if you like, the actual colour of the comms.

And what I said, and others in the exec team, of course, but what I said was authentically reflected in our comms.

And so we created a campaign really from 2021 onwards that really, if you're working in the organization, it was hard to avoid.

Regularly being brought into conversations across a whole host of channels, whether that was online or in person, through our hybrid working or whatever, but it was really hard and difficult to actually not be engaged in the questions and conversations about why we exist.

the part we all play in every individual place in supporting the purpose behind why we exist and actually staying up to date with you know where we were succeeding and where we're not doing brilliantly and it was amazing how over the course of sort of 24 to 36 months we really got traction with affecting from my perspective super high levels of employee engagement participation People sharing their voices in ways that, you know, they didn't do most likely before the COVID, for example, as a case.

And what that resulted in really was that individuals bought into, okay, I understand where we're going.

I understand the part I play in it.

And I'm engaged and motivated to do my best in my everyday to do that.

And, you know, the results speak for themselves, I think, here.

How are you measuring it though, David? What is the kind of success criteria for you? Because there's one thing around, what does your engagement survey say? But are there other ways that you might measure? Or is the engagement survey a critical factor for you?

Well, the engagement in surveys is important because that clinic gives you an indication of the interest and motivation and engagement levels of the organisation.

So, you know, our surveys typically always have at least 80% plus engagement.

We've got a workforce in the UK of about 650, 135, 140 in the US and Canada.

And so we measure employee net promoter scores, for example, and we've shifted quite significantly upwards up the scale into sort of mid-ranging positives.

What I would say is perhaps the biggest indicator of success is the amount of money we've been able to get in and then distribute out to charities around the world.

And so if you take as a really clear indicator, if you go back to 2020, the organisation distributed about £650 million to charities around the world.

As this last financial year, it distributes about £1.6 billion.

So you see that shift in many ways, not only threefold, but the context is that we've worked hard with our people out there finding organizations and high net worth individuals who want to donate money to good causes.

And then we've got a brilliant team who are really motivated to go out there and find charities and distribute that money to them on behalf of the people who give it to us.

And, you know, quite simply, you know, we've distributed that 1.6 billion to about 140,000 charities in 120 countries, something like that.