Buy Social Corporate Challenge – Year 5 Impact Report

The Buy Social Corporate Challenge is one of SEUK’s flagship programmes setup to open up corporate supply chains to social enterprises. A group of high-profile businesses is working with SEUK to collectively spend £1 billion with social enterprises – using their everyday business spend to change lives, support communities and protect the environment.

 

The Year 5 Impact Report looks back at the impact of the Corporate Challenge so far, from how much money has been spent with social enterprises to what this spend has helped achieve. It also looks at how working with social enterprises has affected the corporates involved.

 

Download the report

Headline Statistics

 

Here are the headline statistics from the latest report looking back on 5 years of the Buy Social Corporate Challenge:

• Almost £165 million has been spent with social enterprises by large businesses in the first five years of the Buy Social Corporate Challenge.
• Despite the challenges of the pandemic, 2020 was the best year yet on the Buy Social Corporate Challenge, with almost £73 million spent in a single year with social enterprise suppliers by corporate partners.
• We now have 27 large businesses signed up to the Buy Social Corporate Challenge, representing almost every major sector of the economy.
• We estimate that approximately 550 social enterprises supplied one or more Buy Social Corporate Challenge partners over the last 12 months.
• Buy Social Corporate Challenge partners once again reported a strong performance on cost and quality from their social enterprise suppliers – 95% of partners said that they are cost neutral when compared with other suppliers, and 95% of partners said that they deliver comparable or higher quality compared with other suppliers.
• Corporate contracts in the first five years of the programme have led to the direct or indirect creation of 2,030 jobs at social enterprises. Many of these jobs go to individuals who face barriers to the labour market, showing that social enterprises can make a crucial contribution to tackling the COVID jobs crisis.
• According to Buy Social Corporate Challenge partners, sourcing from social enterprises brings a wide range of benefits to corporate clients: