CHARITIES – FROM AMBITIONS TO
ESG ACTIONS PODCAST. 

This episode focuses on how charities can move beyond ambition to embed practical ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) action. It highlights ways to turn regulation, risk and reputation into benefits such as cost savings, stronger stakeholder engagement and new revenue opportunities.

Because ESG isn’t just about compliance – it offers charities a way to reduce costs (for example via energy management), enhance credibility with donors and corporates, and future-proof operations against climate or governance risks.

It’s ideal for charity leaders, CFOs or finance directors, trustees and sustainability professionals who want to embed ESG into their organisation’s strategy and reporting, align with frameworks such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and generate tangible results.

Listeners will discover how to:

• identify and deliver quick wins in ESG (e.g., reducing energy cost)

• develop longer-term strategies for sustainability reporting and securing grants

• link financial performance with sustainability outcomes

• use carbon data and impact measurement to strengthen applications and donor relationships.

Yes—The podcast shares case studies from charities like Human Appeal, StepChange and The Learning Disability Network, including one organisation that secured a £200,000 grant to help deliver its net-zero objective.

The podcast offers a practical approach: start with a gap-analysis of where you currently are (governance, social value, carbon reporting), then build a workshop or action plan to identify short-, mid- and long-term priorities. It also emphasises flexible support models tailored to the charity sector.

Voluntary reporting can help a charity demonstrate impact, build trust with stakeholders, align with partner organisations (for example corporates), and position the organisation competitively for funding and collaboration—even if regulatory thresholds do not yet apply.

Joe Gallagher (00:13.716)
this recording. My name is Joe Gallaher from ESG Pro.

Joe Gallagher (00:26.952)
Okay.

Joe Gallagher (00:36.8)
Good morning or afternoon, dependent on the time of day you’re receiving this webinar, stroke podcast. My name is Joe Gallagher and I am delighted today to share with you some thoughts around turning ambition into action relative to a self-funding potentially ESG program and initiatives and how you can really embrace sustainability ESG for the benefits of the charity beyond maybe a slightly different approach to what you may have seen before.

So looking at today’s objective, so I’ve framed this very much on the left hand side, you can see I’m talking about what I describe as the seven Rs. And it’d be fair to say if you look at the top three, regulation, risk and reputation, that charities are incredibly focused on this particular area. What I’m going to talk about today is how you can get a better return on investment with ESG initiatives. That will be fundamentally driven by a rating, but also how about

reducing not just carbon but but cost and how about using it to generate revenue for the charity through grants through corporate fundraising activities and donors and ultimately what I’d like to try and do is help just lift and raise awareness on both risks and opportunities with this subject there’s a particular focus on the role of the the FD stroke CFO

mainly born because of their regulatory focus and the work they have to do, not just with reporting companies house and fiscal numbers, but the Charities Commission as well. And if we get a bit time, maybe at the back end, a bit of innovation.

So without going into too much depth, this is just a quick who are we, ESG Pro, some of our certifications. You will see that we don’t wear any blinkers with respect to the alignment to reporting standards and frameworks. And really we’re a boutique style consultancy, all things sustainability and really offer fractional resource to help you on your journey.

Joe Gallagher (02:47.008)
So our client base is not just specifically into charities, although we do have some charity clients. The overall benefit of this is it gives us some really strong silver stroke gold nuggets to help us when we’re collaborating with companies and organizations to share best practice. And there’s never been a subject like ESG and sustainability where people are quite happy for that sort of level of cooperation. And some some things are very generic regardless of sector.

and then there are some sort of industry nuances which which we’re very experienced in dealing with. So why is ESG, why is it important for charities? A couple of slides really just focusing on this and I think if you’re looking at the top one, the operational sustainability and risk management, we’re very much seeing examples where

People are trying to sort of connect all of this up. And if it’s integrated fully within the charity, it does actually drive incremental benefits.

I mean, clearly the mission, alignment and credibility, there’s no question that most, if not all charities have an incredibly strong purpose driving public trust. And what we try and do with the impact measurement and ESG is really to try and lift that transparency and potentially align to sort of global leading frameworks and standards with your reporting. For me, sometimes when I’m engaging with charities, I always often pose the question, you know,

Do you take the regulatory route alone or do you adapt a balance of mandatory and voluntary and be one step ahead but also just drive that purpose to a different stage? And that will elevate yourselves in the eyes of various stakeholders and of course we’re keeping a watching brief on what’s happening with the Charities Commission.

Joe Gallagher (04:47.636)
The other aspect of this is things like future proofing. we’re seeing companies and organizations, one area of this is looking at things like climate risk and the impact of that. So that is effectively a future proofing. We’re seeing companies who are putting money aside year on year, rather than paying insurance premiums because they believe that something might happen in the future. We know there’s no question in your sector around

retention of talent and finding new hires. It’s an incredibly competitive landscape and you’ve got a growing amount of service users dependent on what you can do. So we’re seeing now more appeal from definitely Generation XYZ in looking at organizations and companies that align to their values and some of those are inherently built around ESG. And when we’re looking at donor and funder expectations,

We’re seeing examples now, local authorities, governments, NHS. Now they are putting more pressure on people to report back on things like carbon footprint, mainly borne out of the fact that they’ve set the UK, the NHS, local government, City of London as an example, have all set net zero targets which are legally binding. Now at the moment I don’t believe they’re being too rigorous and heavy on charities with respect to reporting, but I believe that may change in the

future.

So we’re looking, I said we just talk about the CFO, FD, their role. Very much this is harnessing the elements around sort of regulatory reporting. So dependent on your size, if you sort of reach a certain revenue threshold and employee numbers, like 250 employees or more, you’re subject to the sort of ESOS reporting, which is the energy savings scheme. And that’s now a year on year requirement. If you’ve got 250 employees,

Joe Gallagher (06:50.706)
a balance sheet of 18 million and or a turnover of 36 million you’re also expected to submit into Companies House the UK SECR the Streamline Energy Carbon reporting and that’s a requirement and and your accounts basically could be rejected if you haven’t got enough detail into that but we are seeing now ESG effectively being more integrated into financial reporting in fact the levels of

non-financial information going to a company’s report is only going one way and the other element to bring to attention is if you can get your ESG information into a very easy and audit ready format when you’re commissioning your annual audit you might find that there’ll be less cost to do the auditing of the ESG data because you’ve got it in a sort of a very very simple way to use and we’re looking at sort of looking at sort of various shifts towards various

standardized reporting and we’re keeping an eye on the new ISSB which is likely to be announced later this year Q1 2026 from the government. So the checklist with the CFO I think you know there’s an element here which is risk management and then you’ve got financial impact but the financial impact

as opposed to looking at the risk and the negative, there’s an opportunity to look at the risk and an opportunity and a positive. And we’re seeing examples where companies that have implemented this are seeing some real tangible benefits off the bottom line by implementing stronger ESG values and initiatives. And we’re now seeing a growing amount of companies that are very much integrating ESG into their decision-making.

on suppliers and what they’re doing, whether it’s opening new branches, new homes. So it’s very, very much being central to decisions. And I think the bottom one there is really just highlighting the pressure on the strategic funding needed for net zero investments. You can sort of make quick wins, know, switch the lights off, recycling bins, encourage cycling to work.

Joe Gallagher (09:11.196)
bit of work from home which is challenging in the charity sector. However, there’s going to be times where you’re to need to put changes into infrastructure, solar, heat pumps, boilers and that is challenging and it comes at a cost. So we’ve got ways to help mitigate that for you.

I’m just going to now just without going through each and every one of these, this is just a snapshot of some of the work that we’ve done for charities. This, we changed lives. This was around helping them really fundamentally with the regulatory compliance, the SECR and ESOS I mentioned earlier.

We’ve got Human Appeal and this was a very broad range of subjects and although it’s a UK based charity, they operate globally. So we’ve done a lot of work helping them both corporate and charity governance as well as the regulatory compliance. Step change, this was again focusing on their carbon emissions, but we’re also looking at helping them with their first sort of GRI, which is the global

reporting institute a sort of a rating to help them because this particular charity is competing with others in the same space.

World Transport Games, huge organisation and we’re actually really helping them across multiple aspects of ESG but there’s a key bit about charity governance and also with respect to member privacy of data because of the people that are involved in the games globally.

Joe Gallagher (10:51.856)
The Learning Disability Network, this was our most recent, just in the summer of this year. I met these guys at a conference and we started really just talking about this and then what happened is they were looking to get a grant and the requirement for a grant was to help them with solar heat pumps and windows.

and they needed to help them get the grant, actually do more around their sort carbon reporting and specifically around a carbon reduction plan. So we stepped in to help them. We helped them with the grant application. The return on investment for them was amazing. In fact, just two weeks ago, they got the announcement of the grant, which was £200,000 to help them. Now, the significance of this is that without that grant,

They would not have been able to afford to do the work on a very very old building. Without doing the work, because they’re in Camden and London, it would mean that they would not achieve their net zero agenda. So was very much tuning into those aspirations, but we put a lot of focus here on the benefits, not just from a carbon footprint reduction, but also air quality, which is a very very hot topic in major cities.

So often I get asked when I’m engaging with all companies, organisations, SMEs, you know.

How do we start? do we actually get started? Sometimes there’s a risk and people stay not embarking on the journey just with this fear about how complex, how challenging, the amount of work and every company, organisation, charity has got other priorities as well. So we very much take a sort of a balanced approach but initially without going through the plan step by step we very much just look at the initial stage which is we’re just trying to understand

Joe Gallagher (12:50.882)
where you are at the moment, where the gaps are, you know, around ESG, know, social governance, have you done any carbon reporting? And then what we try and do is lead that gap analysis into a strategic workshop to really just give you the guidance and advice as to what to do next. And we’re very conscious around things like supply chain audits and building social value to help you with your impact reporting. And essentially then that would lead to you potentially getting a

a GRI recognized ESG report plus rating and then really help you with that two-year action plan because ESG is all about continual improvement. Whereas we’ve all been used to sort of things like ISOs, which is like, you know, pass or fail once a year. This is about continual improvement and really it being, you know, part of just everyday work activities. And you can see on the right hand side, the sort of outcomes that we’re

looking for and very much with ESG in particular is that we need to try and strengthen and build sort of stakeholder engagement and that sort of is you know governors, it’s trustees, could be donors, could be corporates you’re working with, your teams, so it’s very much building that sort of stakeholder engagement to get those sort of benefits.

So the prelims, this is very just a quick snapshot and essentially what the outcome is on the right hand side. You can see the materiality assessment, which very much looks to present topics that are strategically of high importance and something that really you should be working to. So our focus then is driven to the things at the top right hand side of the square. Those are the priorities that we work with you on to try and drive. So really,

they may not all be quick wins but they’re very strategic wins and then we try and break those down into sort of short, mid and long term timeframes.

Joe Gallagher (14:57.844)
The carbon reporting is definitely, if we’re looking at ESG as a subject, this is probably the easiest place to start and a most sensible approach going back to what I said earlier about making it easier to get things like grants. So even if you are not regulated to do this, my suggestion is that you take a voluntary step to look at your carbon emissions reporting. And if you do that just in the spirit of, are there any opportunities to save money by doing this?

then hopefully it will drive additional benefits but there is fundamentally opportunities here to save money and I do think that most charities could do a lot more in this area rather than waiting for that regulatory threshold is actually get cracking now and I always suggest putting your work, make it live, put it on the website and you can use that as a key marketing story in particular if you’re connecting with corporates

trying to drive funding, they very much will want to be working with companies and charities that align to their values. So I think you can help them and just sort of tuning into a different way with them.

The strategic workshop, can either be half day on site or two one hour sessions. We’re very, very flexible. really, number three, it’s really helping you place ESG at the heart of the charity. And I share the mantra, the heart of the business systems, which is the triple bottom line, which brings together the three P’s where you focus on protecting the planet, looking after your people and communities, and make the charity more

profitable. Bring those three things together and you get a much much better outcome.

Joe Gallagher (16:49.556)
So the supply chain audit and social value, why this could be quite strong for charities is that you’re building a potential connection and collaboration with your suppliers that may lead to some potential incremental revenue streams from them as a contribution towards a social value contribution back in to yourselves. And who knows with some of those suppliers, you know,

you’re driving a broader awareness with them about what you do as a charity and it might open up within those suppliers opportunities for volunteers to run the London Marathon or climb Snowdon just by raising awareness and doing something a bit different about what you’re doing as a charity and fundamentally with the SMEs it really does help you connect and collaborate with those who are on your doorstep in the

communities. So the GLRite framework there are.

different places that charities can go from a reporting standard point of view. GRI, Global Reporting Institute is recognized globally and this in theory would give you a mark against the E, the S and the G with an overall score and certainly would help with other organizations. Large companies often are using the GRI reporting so therefore you’re making a connection with them in a way that you

working which is, I call it mirroring, so you’re on the same page as them.

Joe Gallagher (18:31.52)
So we talked very briefly about the two year action plan. Everything would basically be talking about where you are, where you need to get to. We’ll make some recommendations on improvement areas. And really the key with this is it’s not a race with a finish line, June of next year. This is basically looking at where you are, a continued improvement week on week, month on month, year on year.

You know that that’s where you get that balance between doing the things that you’ve got to do as a charity plus working with this alongside and of course where we come in is where we could potentially be your extra pair of hands from a fractional resource point of view so rather you going out and finding people we can come in and help you on your journey.

And at the end of it, one of the potential outputs is not mandatory, but one of the things that we can do for you is prepare a sort of 20 to 30 page sort of annual sustainability ESG report building in things like social value and impact. If you are doing your own large sort of corporate, sorry, organization reporting and you’ve got this already, then what we generally do is help you with the element, the 10, 15 pages that are relative to ESG.

and then we can just give you that for you then to embrace into your into your master document because we know that charities are all different sizes so we’re very very flexible in the way that we work with you but this is all about helping you celebrate what you’re doing sing from the rooftops and very much just raise awareness of what you’re doing to strengthen the brand and reputation

So here is, I mentioned earlier about the potential for how you can sort of not only leverage carbon emissions to drive procurement, but actually how can we make this journey self-funding? And we very much work with you looking at your, potentially looking at your spend areas. This is not mandatory, it’s just an option that we have. We’ve got a specialist alliance partnership where effectively they’ve got

Joe Gallagher (20:48.576)
category spend experts that can come in and what I always try and do is identify categories of spend where we can make benefits on carbon emissions reduction and also on costs. things like waste, managed print, facilities management, areas can all drive buildings, they can all drive down benefits in both carbon emissions and cost.

Joe Gallagher (21:20.714)
So I’ve talked through the sort of the steps and as I say, you don’t have to go through the seven step. We’ve got some that come in and just do number two, some want number three, but I just thought I would just position today what those options are.

So lastly, before I wrap up, this is just a couple of innovations. We have Alliance partners that sometimes talk to us about what they’ve got, where it can help companies in particular sort of reducing their scope one and scope two. So this is actually an example of it’s a magnetic tape. Effectively, you wrap this around your pipes. It controls the temperature in the pipes for hot and cold.

can therefore drive a saving which they normally guarantee about a 15 % saving. So if your energy and your energy spend is around 50k or more this is definitely something that we could help you with.

And then the other one is this is around sort of smart sort of monitoring very much around sort of HVAC, heating, ventilation and air conditioning. And what we do here is basically the team put in some sensors and monitors normally for a month or two, and then you get an output report to see what’s happening. And what they can do is actually then you can retain those sensors and you can make decisions centrally on

on how you adjust and it also does predictive stuff so that can help you. Now the benefit of this of course is there might be opportunities not just to create a much better ambience in the offices, it could be the care homes, is that you can also help with things like reduction of mold, improvement of air quality and of course one of the major outcomes is a 10 to 20 % saving in costs.

Joe Gallagher (23:23.074)
Thanks.

So I talked about the seven Rs earlier and there’s another R which is the reflection. So next steps and I’d be very happy to offer up to one hour initial conversation without charge. Normally after that first meeting I can normally come back to you with what I think you could or do need and what you could need in the future. I’m very much happy to sort of put some commercial numbers assigned to that. Our commercial model is built for SME

and charities so we don’t get many objections around around cost and we also work very well on things like phasing so we don’t put too much onus on a commercial point of view and the the work demands recognizing we know that you’re spinning loads and loads of plates at the moment. So thank you very much for your time today. Hope you found that interesting and love to continue the conversation. Thanks very much.