Employee involvement

Through our Can Do Matching scheme, we support employee fundraising activities by matching funds by up to a total of £350 for an individual and £1,500 for a team. Since the launch in 2003, more than 130 applications have been processed and more than £130,000 has been raised to benefit charities.

In the UK we operate Can Do Giving, a Give As You Earn scheme, through our payroll. This is an easy way for employees to support their favourite charities. Contributions are exempt from tax and include a further 20 per cent donation from the O2 Group. In 2004/05 we started individual online accounts, which have boosted participation by more than 100 people, and increased the uptake to 4.3 per cent of our UK workforce. We are now extending the scheme to our other businesses.

In 2004/05 our total cash donations as O2 Group reached £2.2 million, 0.7 per cent of pre-tax profits (£1.7 million in 2003/04). Apart from our in-kind and time donations, in the UK alone we gave in excess of £600,000 to charities and other organisations. Using the London Benchmarking Group (LBG) community investment standard, we have categorised 82 per cent of our contributions as cash, 14 per cent as in-kind service and product donations and four per cent as employee time.

In 2004, O2 won the Charities Aid Foundation Corporates and Communities Award for Online Reporting for an "outstanding contribution" to communications in corporate community investment.