BBH offices on Kingly Street, London
BBH staff raising money for Barnado's
BBH offices, Kingly Street, central London
Urban Business Awards
The urban business award 2009 has been won by BBH
BBH is a creative advertising agency with six offices around the world, including one on Kingly Street part of The Crown Estate’s Regent Street portfolio.
BBH’s skillset as a creative communications business lies in understanding people and how to make them change behaviours. BBH have applied these skills to themselves and created a unique set of environmental sustainability and community development programmes that motivate every person throughout the organisation to change their personal behaviours for the better.
BBH’s company logo is a black sheep and their belief in the black sheep as a concept has shaped their choices in terms of partnerships for community development both from a corporate and personal level. BBH supports organisations and people who display similar characteristics of being ‘black sheep’ – creative, original, hard-to-fit talent who need support to fulfil their potential in society.
In the summer of 2007, the agency took a day out to raise money for Barnardo’s, the UK children’s charity that is also one of their clients. In one day, they raised £51,000. On the same summer day in 2008, the idea evolved and the entire UK agency took a day out to dedicate time to work on charity projects around London. Charitable projects included working with the elderly, volunteering at community centres, repainting schools, doing building maintenance, gardening in public spaces and providing art therapy. In one day, BBH staff donated 1,638 volunteer hours on fourteen projects.
Every year since their inception in 1982, the company has given 1% of their profits to charity. But today charitable giving is about more than just financial support and BBH staff want to make a personal difference and get actively involved to give something back to their community. To that end, BBH have created the Black Sheep Mile, which is a global charitable programme that offers BBH staff the opportunity to give back to their respective local communities.
In addition to community projects, BBH are very focused on environmental sustainability, with a pledge in 2007 to reduce as much as possible their negative impact on the environment with a series of programmes under an internal brand called ‘Big Green U’. This scheme aims to motivate staff in order to make them more environmentally friendly by encouraging them to change their behaviour around energy use, recycling, carbon emission when travelling to and from work and meetings, and use of plastic bags.
The judges – Paul Clark, The Crown Estate’s Director of Investment and Asset Management and Martin Moore, non-executive Board member of The Crown Estate – commented: “We were impressed by BBH’s strong community focused ethos, their commitment to driving environmental sustainability and encouraging volunteering amongst their employees. These priorities are aligned with The Crown Estate’s values of commercialism, integrity and stewardship.”
Charlie Rudd, BBH London Managing Director, said: “The commitments we've made to environmental change and community development have been championed by the whole agency. Winning The Crown Estate urban business award is a gratifying result and a testament to everyone's hard work.”
