Suppliers
Following the completion of the first round of Partnership Reviews during the year, much of our focus has been on further developing, refining and trialling our Partnership Review tools and processes.
We have also been developing organisational tools to enable greater understanding of our suppliers situation and how best to allocate resources to support activities.
Read more about our suppliers.
Staff
A range of indicators about Traidcraft staff (diversity, salary levels, training) can be viewed later in this report and in general show that we are making good progress and can fairly claim to be an employer of choice.
Traidcraft currently holds the Investors in People standards for recruitment and for work-life balance, being only the fourth company in the UK to have achieved both these standards as well as the overall IIP standard. Traidcraft was also successfully re-assessed for the Positive about Disabled People symbol during the year.
We have conducted a detailed piece of research of staff views of Traidcraft using external expertise (FMR Research from Glasgow). The process this year achieved an improved response rate from staff. It is difficult to state categorically why this was the case, but it can generally be considered to be a positive step for more staff to engage in the survey.
Ratings of Traidcraft as an employer overall (7.4 out of 10) and on specific aspects tested are still high, but fifteen of the nineteen statements retested (a new one was added this year) received slightly lower mean scores than last year.
This may, however, reflect the larger sample of staff views obtained this year, since more people who gave a view on whether things had improved, stayed the same or deteriorated in the past year felt they had improved rather than got worse on thirteen out of twenty statements, with only three receiving more negative than positive scores.
See more information about our staff.
Pensioners
We continue to be committed to pensioners . The closed final salary scheme funding improved this year following strong growth in the schemes assets. The scheme's assets now represent 89% of the total liabilities.
Fair Traders
Traidcraft plc had 6,037 active Fair Traders at the end of the 2006-2007 year (up from 5,600 at the previous year-end). The retention rate (i.e. Fair Traders who place at least one order in the year) stands at about 85%.
A separate survey of Fair Traders about service levels, over the busy August to November season in 2006, showed that trends in customer satisfaction remained comparable with previous years.
However the impact of non-availability of craft lines in October and November 2006 does come through in the survey data when the data is analysed at a monthly level. The slight decrease in "shopping satisfaction" is most marked in the latter months of the monitoring period.
See more about our Fair Traders.
Public donors
Numbers of public donors has grown well this year. This is due in part to our converting more mail order customers into donors via the top up option on webstore and paper-based order forms. We are continuing to seek more committed givers to underpin our work.
Compared with last year, public donations have fallen as a proportion of our expendable income for the year (58%). This is due to increased levels of funding derived from institutional sources and higher levels of programme activity enabling us to draw down restricted income from these institutional sources.
It costs us about 31p to raise each £1 of public income (32p in 2005-2006) – this cost allows for staff time, cost of fundraising literature and events and a share of the overall overhead of the charity (salaries of support staff, rent, IT, etc).
We carried out a survey of a sample of our public donors in order to build a profile of the donor base and to gain feedback on specific issues, including whether or not donors have clarity on how donations are spent.
The survey responses would suggest that Traidcraft is broadly getting it right with regard to appeals and communications about donations, certainly with its core supporters who responded to the survey. However, there is some concern that donors can feel "bombarded" with requests to donate from many different charities, so care needs to be taken to avoid donor fatigue, particularly with regular donors.
See more information on public donors.
Institutional donors
Income raised from institutional donors amounted to £1.58m which was a healthy increase on last year (£1.22m) but fell slightly short of our target of £1.65m. It should be noted that due to the long-term nature of our projects this money will be spent over a number of years (including the one just finished).
It remains very difficult to obtain much feedback from this group of donors about their experience of working with Traidcraft. What we can do as projects come to a close is point to the evaluations carried out and any assessment of impact which is available.
See more information on institutional donors.
The local community
Traidcraft and its staff have continued and extended involvement in a number of different ways in the local community (covering donations to offset some of the organisation's carbon emissions, work opportunities and non-executive/voluntary positions with organisations).
See more about our work in the local community.
The environment
One of Traidcraft’s foundation principles is to "respect all people and the environment."
During 2006-2007 Traidcraft has sought to understand more fully and reduce our direct carbon footprint. We have:
- switched our electricity supply to renewable sources,
- reduced our use of air freight, and
- changed catalogue production to use more environmentally friendly paper sources.
Our current view is that in 2006-2007 our carbon emissions from direct activities were approximately 1,166 tonnes. Traidcraft has offset 75% of these emissions (those relating to sea and air freight, air travel and gas usage) and we are seeking more reliable data on our parcel carriage impact so that we can seek to offset these in future.
See more about our environmental policy and commitments.
