Five Years of Impact: How Giki Has Helped Organisations Drive Real Climate Action

Trusted by Global Enterprises 

Giki has provided multi-year programmes and campaigns with some of the world’s largest and most respected companies, including Adobe, Accenture, BBC, BNY, Cap Gemini, Deloitte, NatWest and many more. 

These companies chose Giki to help them with the all-important job of helping their own employees and workforces take positive climate action, both in the workplace, through their own roles, and also in their personal lives. 

We ran hundreds of campaigns, challenges, and education and awareness raising events across a broad range of sustainability topics, in every continent over the last 5 years. These included everything from food systems, nature preservation, waste reduction, sustainable travel, energy efficiency, digital carbon footprints, through to sustainable fashion or the COP climate events. Giki specialises in making complex sustainability issues accessible, relevant and compelling for people across the globe. 

We also ran multiple ‘Sustainability Games’ and short term campaigns for companies including Arup, KPMG, HSBC, RELX and Springer Nature. This provided short bursts of activity across multiple geographies, which increased knowledge, awareness, and drove positive climate actions. These Sustainability Games also brought teams together, and helped embed sustainability into company goals and priorities.  

Many companies used Giki to help embed sustainability goals across the workforce. For example, major food company Compass, used Giki Zero to help educate employees on some of the key areas in their net zero strategy, such as food waste reduction, and sustainability impacts associated with what we eat. Others focused on engaging employees on business travel goals, sustainable procurement priorities or responsible consumption. 

Global tech company, Adobe used Giki’s ‘Sustainability Games’ to run inter company competitions. This innovative approach provided a month of sustainability competition between multiple Adobe Ecosystem partners including AWS, IBM and Microsoft. Adobe extended this winning approach to their customers, and ran a competition across multiple customer sectors, including Costain, Lloyds and Unilever.  

SMEs: Small Teams, Big Impact 

We have also worked extensively with smaller businesses (SMEs), who have seen excellent successes in engaging their employees with Giki Zero. 

With different needs and challenges, it’s always important to factor in common barriers faced by SMEs, including limited resources, smaller teams, less access to sustainability expertise and budget constraints. With these considerations put front and centre, we saw strong impact across a broad range of SME companies and sectors. 

Cawston Press, the innovative drinks brand, saw high levels of engagement, supported by the founding leadership team, and implemented by a small group of younger employees. 

Ecology Building Society achieved a 100% engagement rate among employees, and also invited Board members to take part too, including their Giki successes as part of their AGM. 

Specialist bodies such as the National Physical Laboratory used Giki Zero extensively, across their workforce, as did scientific publishers IOP Publishing. 

At its heart, irrespective of size or sector, Giki helped empower people to drive positive change, and make sustainability relevant and compelling for employees, whatever their level of knowledge and expertise. 

The Employee Race to Zero

Our collaboration with the UN Race to Zero has been particularly meaningful. Together, we created the Employee Race to Zero competition which brought multiple organisations together across sectors, from around the world. Teams competed to take positive action together, learn and celebrate their successes. The Employee Race to Zero has helped transform sustainability within some of the organisations involved. 

In its second year, we focused specifically on SMEs, and the results were remarkable. The winners were, Stage Fifty, a film and TV studio, and their experience showed how competition could boost engagement, drive amazing results, and transform the way employees understand and engage with sustainability. 

The Power of Sport 

In 2022, Giki Zero became an integral part of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games sustainability activities. As well as running campaigns for employees, we worked with the pioneering body Athletes of the World, to help elite athletes use their voice and influence as a force for good on climate. 

We also ran sports themed climate campaigns for some of the large enterprises we worked with to help bring sustainability to a whole new audience, through the love of sport. 

Community Champions

Giki Zero also supported many local community champions and even GP surgeries, to help their communities benefit from positive climate action. From Dumfries and Galloway, to the English South Coast, Cornwall and East Anglia, local people used Giki Zero to accelerate local sustainability action and behaviour change. It has also been used extensively by Carbon Literacy trainers to support their training programmes. 

Recognition and Awards 

Our work hasn't gone unnoticed. We've won BusinessGreen Leaders Awards with NatWest Group, for employee engagement, and have been recognised and shortlisted for multiple awards, including: 

• BusinessGreen Leaders Awards with NatWest Group
• Innovation in ESG with Watson Farley & Williams
• Engagement and Behaviour Change Initiative of the Year with NatWest
• Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year with Adobe
• Corporate Engagement Awards with KPMG UK and Hubbub

Looking Forward 

As we move into a new chapter with Giki Actions, we're building on everything we've learnt to enable smaller businesses to take action. Our goal is to provide a world leading programme to help SMEs build, implement and report a climate action plan.  

Giki Actions, is built on our library of 750+ tried and tested actions for SMEs, and many companies access it through our workshops, which enables them to build their plan in just 60 minutes.  

“The value of this 1-hour session is phenomenal, and only possible because of the extensive research and simple but sufficient user interface. Awesome.” Sam Baker, Director, Business Declares