Belness Nyamuyota Msumbe - a local woman taking part in building a health clinic i Malawi in the Bilka / DanChurchAid-project.

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1 Belness Nyamuyota Msumbe - a local woman taking part in building a health clinic i Malawi in the Bilka / DanChurchAid-project. by Folkekirkens Nødhjælp/ Carl Gustav Klemmed Lorentzen

2 BEST BUSINESS OF TWO WORLDS The Bilka stores needed an image change. The humanitarian CSO DanChurchAid needed funding for their projects. An unusual partnership between a chain store and a civil society organisation has demonstrated the power of value creation through an innovative business model with many different revenue streams. We wanted to change our image in the public eye, says Bilka store manager Morten Wagner. Bilka was being perceived as a big, square, aggressive and masculine chain store. We needed to change that it was simply something that was expected by everyone around us. Bilka decided to partner up with a suitable CSO and start a humanitarian project in order to showcase their social engagement and awareness of the World. Finding the right partner We needed to choose an CSO that would make sense to us and who would be perceived favourably by our customers as well, says Morten Wagner. After networking and negotiating they decided to team up with DanChurchAid; a major Danish CSO that suited the chain store in both size and by being non-religious and politically neutral. We could see that we would have an overlapping purpose with Bilka, says DanChurchAid engagement director Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. Our mission is to help the poor, and Bilka wanted to strengthen their CSR profile and give something back to society. After agreeing on a partnership, Bilka and DanChurchAid started going through the different projects that the CSO was working with and ended up choosing to support health care centres in Malawi. It was very important to Bilka at first that they were supporting something concrete - something that was solid that you could actually go and see, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. Creating value The partners sat down and started thinking about how they could generate the funding necessary to donate a health care centre. Basically, they chose a range of different products that they found suitable and asked Bilka s suppliers if they would like to participate by donating something to the Malawi-project every time one of the products were sold at a Bilka store. At the same time the warehouses sold donation vouchers, staged various events, sold ad space in the store paper and applied for support from various foundations. The Bilka employees were very active in setting up events like gospel concerts that included the local communities around the warehouses. One employee even went to the local optometrist, collected boxes of old glasses and sent them off to Malawi. Others visited the store s suppliers to give talks about the project in order to motivate them to participate and to help them develop products that would fit into the campaign. Our strategy was to start off by creating a product line to go with the campaign. One example was the plush toy wolf Billy the wolf. Today, we sell more Billy 9

3 Morten Wagner, store manager at Bilka. by Jakob Brodersen / access2innovation wolves than the number of children that are born in Denmark each year, says Morten Wagner. Gaining momentum The campaign started off and was immediately a massive success. In little over three months, the partners had reached its benchmark of three million DKR much faster than any of them had expected. Then we started getting creative and develop new variations in the product line. Should our bakery start selling bread with a donation for every sale? And how about donation add-ons on milk and coffee? It really was a question of adding up many little things into a big stream, says Morten Wagner. One of the items on sale was a donation voucher where customers bought a goat for a poor family in Malawi. That was an example of our world coming together with the NGO world. They would like to raise money to distribute goats for poor people in Malawi. Our challenge was to figure out a way to sell those goats to our customers. Selling items to customers is what Bilka does best. To this day, they have gathered more than 21 million DKR that have been donated to DanChurchAid - enough to pay for five health care centres and a series of health care projects in Malawi. What s in it for us? It is worth stressing that every penny that has been

4 I am extremely skilled in selling a carton of milk. The CSOs are extremely skilled at what they do. We have been nudging them towards being more focused on how to generate value the same way that we do in relation to the market. They have helped us become more soft and rounded and create a new world for our customers. I would say that this overlap between us has created something new. None of us could have done this on our own. - Morten Wagner, Bilka store manager raised through the donations has been donated to health care in Africa. None of it ended up in Bilka s own cash register. To us, the real strength of our partnership lies in what you could call the trinity of customers, suppliers and co-workers, that have all contributed donations to the Malawi project, says Morten Wagner. Having engaged employees means that customers become engaged. Engaged customers means that the employees become even more engaged. That rubs off on the suppliers. And when you add all of that up, it becomes really powerful. Credibility value Creating value for donations to Malawi is one thing, but we quickly discovered the promotional value of what we were doing. The credibility that DanChurchAid gives to the project is extremely important, says Morten Wagner. Basically, we are supporting the development towards all of us contributing to making the global village a nice place to be. If we can do that by using our brand to influence others and influence the way they think, then that is very valuable, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. However, the CSO is very aware of how important it is to keep the brand associated with doing good and is careful not to taint its brand through partnerships with companies that doesn t share their values. It is something that we are very aware of, he says. Both who we want to work with and who we don t see ourselves sharing values with. We are quite thorough in our screening process when we choose our partners. Improving the NGO s own brand To DanChurchAid, the partnership with Bilka meant that they gained access to Bilka s vast network of customers and suppliers. Bilka has the warehouses that attract thousands of customers every day that might never visit our stores, read our magazines or visit our website. We tried to merge our universe with Bilka s universe and make it obvious to everyone why we are working together, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. If anyone had any doubts at first, there are now many obvious proofs of the partnership s succes: First of all, we ve now got five functioning health care centres in Malawi that wouldn t otherwise have been built. Secondly, the partnership has led to a series of other areas where we are collaborating with Dansk Supermarket. Thirdly, it means that we have proved that we are able to collaborate in a broad term with everyone from churches to CSOs and commercial companies. That is also valuable to us. You could say that is has also improved our brand in relation to future partners, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. It s part of being a modern CSO that you can collab- 11

5 Kenneth Kamp Butzbach, Engagement Director at DanChurchAid. by Jakob Brodersen / access2innovation orate with private companies, university researchers, other NGOs and government institutions. Sustainability We knew that DanChurchAid were a strong partner who would be able to ensure that the project was sustainable and wouldn t suddenly collapse. They have some very good partners locally that are trustworthy and ensure that things run smoothly. We re not just laying down a foundation here we are building actual health care centres. We are making a difference down there. That is what we set out to do and that is exactly what we are doing. That is very important to us, and that is one of the reasons we chose to work with DanChurchAid, says Morten Wagner. To DanChurchAid, sustainability is part of the foundation of setting up a partnership: We don t believe that companies should just donate money to us, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. It s nice when they do, but in the long run, it doesn t make the partnership grow and develop. We need to find the matching values. That makes the partnership sustainable. When it comes to the health care centres specifically, they will be taken over by the Malawian government in order to make sure that they will keep on running. More to come Fuelled by the success of the Malawi project and the large number of side projects that it has spawned, both partners are eager to expand their joint ventures. Actually, at the moment we are trying to develop the partnership with DanChurchAid even further, says Morten Wagner. The Health care clinics in Malawi are an ongoing thing that will keep on running, but we are looking for add-on projects. We are off course looking at the size of the donations needed, but equally important 12

6 at the extra value they create on the side. I think it must be interesting for an CSO to see what products they have themselves and what they can create in the same way as we do in the warehouses, he says. DanChurchAid is also speaking in very positive terms when it comes to continuing the partnership. When you set out, there is an overlapping purpose in what you do. You work in that field where your circles overlap, so to speak. But as the partnership progresses, that field often increases, opening up new ideas and initiatives that arise within the partnership, says Kenneth Kamp Butzbach. Baby being weighed while the mother receives information about health issues at one of the Bilka / DanChurchAid health care centers in Mzuzu, Malawi. by Folkekirkens Nødhjælp/ Francis Botha