Giving back - the business benefits of taking on pro bono projects with Gail Hoban, Co-founder, Gas Studio.

Yiuwin Tsang from the Beautiful Business team is joined by Gail Hoban. Gail is the co-founder of B Corp certified design agency, Gas Studio.

Gail talks to Yiuwin about how Gas Studio formally donates 5% of time every year to pro bono projects. This approach has many benefits, including how Gas gets to help organisations who are helping others further down the line. And being able to commit that to two or three organisations, means they can support quite a few initiatives with their small team.

Another unexpected bonus is how Gas has expanded its knowledge base and expertise on these special projects, which in turn means Gail and the team have been able to win business in new and interesting areas and benefit from a wider network of contacts.

Listen in to learn more...

Gail Hoban is the co-founder and creative strategist at Gas Studio, a B Corp certified design studio, who advocate design as a tool to encourage access to positive life chances. Gail and co-founder Steve Goodwin believe that design is a powerful tool to reach diverse groups. 

Gas Studio has learned that understanding your community first, helps to build positive campaigns that are believable. 

They work with organisations and charities helping them move past the usual stereotypes and reading abilities to make communications work.

For more interesting discussion, join us at www.beautifulbusiness.uk 

Transcript

Yiuwin Tsang: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Beautiful Business Podcast. I'm your host, Yiuwin Tsang, part of the Beautiful Business Team, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Gail Hoban. Gail is a co-founder and creative strategist at Gas Studio, a B Corp certified design studio who advocate design as a tool to encourage access to positive life chances. Gail and co-founder Steve Goodwin believe that design is a powerful tool to reach diverse groups. Gas Studio has learned that understanding your community first helps to build positive campaigns that are believable. They work with of organizations and charities, helping them to move past the usual stereotypes and reading abilities to make communications work. I hope you enjoy the interview. So this part of the interview, we wanna talk about giving back. Part of what you do is this 5% of time that you give back, which I think is a really wonderful initiative. Because arguably it's more powerful than cash alone because you're leveraging your expertise, your experience, and the skills that you kind of bring. So, tell me a bit about how did this come about and also what inspired you to donate time?

Gail Hoban: 1:03

We were already doing it even well in advance of committing to B Corp. And actually it was kind of one of the things that made us think about the B Corp journey cuz we were already giving back to students at the college where I was originally lecturing. We mentored, we were doing three projects for different initiatives. So it kind of made sense that we were starting to put it into some sort of external form that could be accredited, so most of our B Corp points are actually based around community because that's us giving back. But it kind of made sense to formalise it. We realised we had been tracking how many hours we'd been spending and we realised that it actually was quite close to the 5%. So we thought actually that seems to be a sensible figure that's quite tangible and it actually does work out to a set amount of hours per full-time employee. Is basically a hundred hours a year. That's kind of what it equates to. And when you think about a pro bono project, it doesn't take long to actually get up to a hundred hours really. If you've got two or three a year, that's kind of where it ends up. So why not formalise it? And yes, it does give an awful lot more back. It means that you are actually helping another organisation who are helping other people further down the line. And if you're committing that to two or three organisations, we're actually supporting quite a few initiatives with a small team. So it kind of all makes sense. It gives us something to talk about with other people, other non-profits. Again, it sort of helps us in the door. We say we've got this 5% commitment. Sometimes if they have got limited budget, it means we can actually subsidise them with a bit of extra time that helps make the project work better. Quite often they'll come to us and they go, Oh, that's not quite enough in there to actually really do it justice that it needs, but actually give it the mileage and the momentum it needs. So sometimes that extra 5% can help them just deliver it to a to a level that's needed.

Yiuwin Tsang: 3:02

That's so lovely. That's really, really inspiring to hear you talk about it and it's clearly really something that you're really passionate about. And again, it's that point, as you say, it's helping people who then go on to help more people. There's like a compound effect isn't there of the time that you donate. So, how does that affect you operationally cause it's yourself and your business partner at Gas along your network and I know you've got a huge network of contributors and people that can kind of call upon. But in a practical sense is it literally 5% of your time? How does it work? How do you manage it between you guys across the business?

Gail Hoban: 3:33

We do track time, Like we track time when we're actually working with clients, so we use a toggle timer to actually track the time. From the perspective of when we fit it in, we do have to be realistic to the people that we're helping and say our paid clients have to come first. So there has to be that element that they have to be aware of before we start anything. So obviously it has to fit in with the times, our peak time trough, troughs, and peaks of our workflow. So it has to do that anyway because otherwise we'd go mad. We do try and fit it in as part of our business development because it isn't only acting as a support for nonprofits that need help. It is actually helping build our portfolio as well. Cuz quite often it is making a better project or it's a project in an area that we haven't necessarily explored before. So it isn't just supporting organisations, it's actually supporting us as a business as well. So sometimes it's an investment in our business by supporting somebody else. It is quite a good arrangement.

Yiuwin Tsang: 4:33

It really is. A lot of the people that we've been interviewing for the Beautiful Business podcasts have talked about how profit and purpose, this concept of balancing it isn't always the right approach to have. It's almost kinda like, you do one thing at the expense of the other. You know, you do more purpose stuff and it'll affect your profit. If you're profitable, you're not as purposeful in terms of your approach, but it's not actually the case if you start looking at it, as you say, in your context you're doing good in the world by helping organisations and not for profits make an impact in whichever space they're doing, But it's also opening opportunities up for you and for your organisation. It's building connections, expanding your network and all these little things. I'm sure the opportunities that arise just because somebody said, Oh yeah, we work with Gail over at Gas for this particular project. You should give them a call for your project. And it's that kind of conversation and reciprocity that comes about because you're doing it.

Gail Hoban: 5:25

Although we're a small team, it's making it a lot easier for us to actually contact bigger agencies and actually go in with them as partners as well on the back of some of this work that we've done. So it is not only a connections within the nonprofit world, but it is also helping with partner agencies that might be other disciplines that we can work with because it's showing the sort of client base that we've got as broader which is really helpful.

Yiuwin Tsang: 5:49

Yeah, definitely. And I guess expanding your own portfolio, your experience, different perhaps different sectors or areas or partners and charity groups, perhaps you otherwise wouldn't have had that opportunity to work with.

Gail Hoban: 6:01

Yeah, absolutely. They may not have found us . Definitely it gives us a chance to go in and just prove ourselves a little bit sometimes. But then it might not be that we actually end up doing some paid work with them. It might be that we can show that paid work that we've done with them to show we're big an organisation the same kind of model.

Yiuwin Tsang: 6:19

So it sounds like from a delivery perspective and also just from your kind of operational perspective, I think in the question I sent over to you is that, you know, 5% doesn't sound like a huge amount of time, but most business leaders would love to have an extra 5% of time on their day, you know, to do, do stuff with, but it sounds like you don't view it as that's 5% that's done and dusted that we, we don't get. It's part of a bigger picture of work for you and for your business partner across the whole of Gas Studio that touches on things like skills and network development, business development you know, building up your portfolio there's a lot more to it than just writing off 5% of your time.

Gail Hoban: 6:56

Yeah, a huge part. I would express a huge part of our growth at the moment is quality and size of projects. So that's kind of where we're focusing our growth at the moment, and these help to feed into it. So depth and skills within project growth, it helps build it. So it is not detrimental to the rest of the business. It's definitely complimentary. And also the networking side of things that we've just mentioned. It's all part of business development really but in a different way. And it supports our values, which again gets people talking to us because of our values. So from our perspective, it's a win-win thing really.

Yiuwin Tsang: 7:33

It definitely sounds like it. It's almost kinda like, Yeah, regardless, it's something that you would recommend people do.

Gail Hoban: 7:38

It's personal. If you want to commit to it, if it's what you do, if it's what you're doing anyway why not commit to it, which was kind of where we were.

Yiuwin Tsang: 7:47

Quick question, the 5% do you find that that helps you stay focused as well in the sense that you obviously have a budget of time or resource of 5%. Does it keep you focused in terms of how you use that 5%, who you give it to, what projects will kind of dip into that pot? Because the flip side on this is, whether it be for a business development purposes or it's a purely altruistic thing, is that, that can spiral away. You think, Yeah, we'll do a bit of that work for you for free. Or we'll, you know, we'll do a pro bono and then all starts stacking up and as you say, You know, the trough time doesn't become trough time anymore. It's also a peak time. So do you find that that 5% helps you focus or quant, well, obviously it does quantify, but do you find that, it helps you manage it in that sense as well?

Gail Hoban: 8:28

Yeah, it definitely does from both ways, because we're a little bit low earlier in the year, we, we do track it each quarter. So we have a quarterly review because of the governance that goes with B Corp you kind of need to do a quarterly impact review, or we do anyway, so as alongside all the sustainability things that we need to talk about, we also talk about and look at the time that we've actually volunteered on a quarterly basis so we can, and we do select projects that will give real meaning when we, when we do select them. But also if they're a bit beyond it, we might go, Actually that is going to eat us up. That is going to be too much. But the 5% gives us a good accountability level at which we can go. Actually, that probably is a little bit too much and that is gonna fight against the paid work and our paid clients that we need to support properly. And if we've got this other distraction, it might just be a little bit too much. So we do think along those lines as well. But we also think along the lines of, are we gonna hit the 5% at the end of the year? Okay. Mid-year we reviewed it and we could see it was a little bit low. We've taken on a little bit more, which will work and again, and will support our portfolio . So it was worth taking on so it was worth tracking it. We know by the end of the year that we are gonna be hitting that 5% and probably a little bit more , but that's how it goes. You kind of 5% is a, a mark in the. That helps us work too. And not very too far beyond, but it's not the end of the world to do a bit more.

Yiuwin Tsang: 10:01

I'm so inspired by this Gail I'm really thinking I want to implement this in my organiaation and , I'm not just saying that for fluff either, cuz it just seems like such a sensible approach. Rather than the whole, you know, 1% of profit, 10% of profit, which has its space definitely because, sometimes organisations need the cash. But it is around that impact bit. And I know, we talked about this just before the call, and challenges that you're facing at the moment is around measuring the impact of, cause I guess time's relatively straightforward as you say, you've got your toggle app, you can account for the time, but what, where's your thinking going in terms of assessing that impact? Cause I guess it's always a learning process. It's always. gonna change and evolve, you know, the way that you approach it and the way that you perhaps assess projects that you're gonna go into, but where's your thinking at the moment in terms of how you assess that? The impact of the 5% of the time that you've donated?

Gail Hoban: 10:49

Yeah, and it's very different every project that we approach because of it being brand and not a website which is very trackable, the visitors, the amount of products, all that kind of stuff, there's lots of numbers against all this stuff. Brand is so much harder which is one of our issues. So you can measure the changing confidence before and after what you've done. You can change how many volunteers have signed up to a program maybe on the back of it. But still there's a huge part with brand that is client related. Have they benchmarked before we started? Have they signed up to the benchmarking that we suggested? All those sorts of things that cause us issues. Being able to measure the change in journey is part of our problem because we're not directly supporting homeless people directly. We're supporting initiatives from a secondary basis. So we are giving them the tools for them to carry out the work. So we are a little bit reliant on them using the tools and putting the energy in to support something as well as it could be so that we are kind of a step away to a degree, which sometimes gives us issues with what the outcome is and how we can measure the outcome. There have been some things that are tangible. We did some work for a college for recruitment for the college and a new brand to enable them to talk about their new courses. And we were able to measure that there were diverse students that were recruited as a result of our inclusive campaign. So there's some things that you can measure. Some things are harder to measure. So, it's our goal over the next couple of years before we get recertified to try better ways of measuring and measuring emotional confidence and feelings towards a brand before and after is definitely one of the things that we need to look into and invest in a little bit more.

Yiuwin Tsang: 12:49

Okay. I guess there'll be lots of organisations out there who want to go on this journey and similar sort of journey to you. I'm very selfishly thinking about my company and the way that we do things, but it sounds like the advice would be think about what measurements could be put in place now that you can then benchmark against later after your donated time. So that you can start, even if they are just indicators, but just so that you can show the difference that you're making. And I guess kind of the sooner that you start thinking about these things the better. And would you say, Gail, that it's now formed part of your selection process when you start looking at, you know, what projects or initiatives to donate your time towards that you do think about, you know, how are we measuring the impact, You know, what needs to be in place? What have they got in place that we can use now? And, you know, what can we do further down the line.

Gail Hoban: 13:37

Yeah, definitely. It's always an opening piece, whether, whether we can ever totally extract all the information we need at the beginning. Because there's always an urgency to start a project , so enabling them to think about benchmarking points is always a bit of a tricky one. But yes, it's definitely so crucial. if you are giving back time to be able to understand that it is making a genuine, positive impact. Yeah., I'll leave it at that. It's definitely, it's definitely something that's needed. We have tried different ways of doing it. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes it's not. But it all depends on how something is measured as to whether you are actually able to measure it. And can you go in again when the project's finished? And actually take that next measurement. Are you actually able to access all that information is the other side of things as well?

Yiuwin Tsang: 14:27

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Beautiful Business Podcast. And thank you to Gail for being a wonderful guest and sharing your experiences and creating positive change in the world with Gas Studio.