New partnership helps Kier track contribution to communities

Kier is putting in place a new social value calculator.

The business has partnered with Thrive to put in place a system which will track more than 100 different activities across its group.

The Thrive platform is aligned to Kier’s Building for a Sustainable World framework, supporting each of its ten sustainability pillars and its links to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

This is not the group’s first social value tool. Since 2017, Kier has used its own “Shaping our Communities Calculator”. This was created in-house and provided Kier with helpful data that it could provide to its clients and supply chain.

However, as demand for sustainability and social value metrics has increased, the Group has partnered with Thrive. This partnership offers a more mature software platform and the Impact Evaluation Standard (IES), a framework of metrics that cover over 109 different activities. This will enable Kier to continue to innovate and differentiate itself as a leader in the delivery of Social Value  

The new system will enable Kier to track the social value targets of each project, as well as providing environmental metrics and corporate-wide reporting. This bespoke data capture will allow Kier to provide clients and other stakeholders with data on a project’s social value impact and success.

Thrive’s platform will also allow Kier to track its supply chain’s social value to capture the work its subcontractors do to support its projects. As well as this, Kier is working with Thrive to further enhance its measurement methodology to include additional cost-benefit analysis metrics and its work with social mobility organisations such as LM3 to monitor regional spend.

Sheryl Moore, group social sustainability manager at Kier, said: “The delivery of social value across Kier is important to us as a Group and due to this we have been recording our social value impact for many years. Through our sustainability framework Building for a Sustainable World we have recognised the need for an enhanced social value platform that allows us to report on the requirements for all of our clients and stakeholders. Building on the legacy of our existing calculator, we completed an in-depth appraisal of suppliers and concluded that Thrive was the best fit to capture our social value impact.

“Thrive is the perfect partner to help us demonstrate our social legacy and drive the social value agenda. It has a unique combination of being user-friendly, having the ability to effortlessly capture data across both our business and throughout our supply chain, as well as providing robust and credible metrics and having the flexibility to support our various customer requirements”.

“We are excited to be working with Thrive and using both its platform and the IES framework to measure and demonstrate Kier’s social value, along with the value our partners are delivering in the supply chain.”

Neil Macdonald, chief executive at Thrive, said: “Thrive is delighted that, after a 12 month selection process, Kier has chosen our social value platform to measure its innovative and extensive social value activities. The unique flexibility of our software compliments Kier’s broad requirements; easy data capture from site, configurable client reports, and a robust way of showcasing their corporate values and purpose. We are very excited to see the positive influence this partnership will have on the sector.”

Image credit: Kier

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