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Latest Blogs and Press Releases

‘Dismissed, ignored and belittled.’ Could it be endometriosis?

Endometriosis impacts 1 in 10 women and those assigned female at birth in the UK. That’s over 1.5 million people. To mark Endometriosis Awareness month, we caught up with our Positive Panda, Micky, who was diagnosed with the condition aged 25, over eight years after going...

Panda Previews: My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican

Every day, our Pandas are committed to working together to create real impact. But outside of work, we all have interests that sometimes link with our day jobs – and sometimes not. This is the second post of our content series, Panda Previews, where one...

Judging the edie Awards

By David Bent I know who wins the edie awards as Business Leader of the Year, and SME of the year. Not because of a leak, or because I stole into their offices. Because I’m one of the esteemed judges (yes, they do call us that). Here are...

Key Social Impact Trends for 2024

It’s that time of year again when everyone puts on their thinking caps to predict what the next year will bring. As part of our review for 2024, the Pandas decided to look back at our predictions for 2023. Unlike most crystal ball exercises, we were...

Introducing our New Advisory Board

We’re excited to introduce you to the newest pandas in our embarrassment of pandas as we announce the formation of the new Skating Panda Advisory Board! As the business landscape evolves, the consultancy sector must rise to meet the challenges of our time with a clear...

Gaza and What it Means for EDI in the Workplace

By Hind Dihan There’s a lot I could say about the current situation going on in Gaza. There’s also a lot to be said about what’s going on in the West because of what’s happening in Gaza, specifically what’s going on in different workplaces. People in the...

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What are visible differences and how can workplaces be appearance-inclusive? 

By Hind Dihan  Since working at Skating Panda, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of workplace culture and how employers can improve employee morale and motivation by focusing on their culture. Through our Unlock series, I’ve discovered startling statistics surrounding bereavement and menopause in the...

Panda Previews: Thames Film by William Raban, (1986)

Every day, our Pandas are committed to working together to create real impact. But outside of work, we all have interests that sometimes link with our day jobs – and sometimes not. We decided to start a new content series, Panda Previews, where one of...

We Need to Keep Talking About the Gender Pay Gap.  

Gender pay inequality was big news when companies first had to publish their data a few years ago (2016) – for all the wrong reasons. Very few companies could boast equal pay for men and women, and this gap remains a significant concern, with statistics...

Skating Around the World – Social Impact April News Round-Up

In our series ‘Skating Around the World’, we invite you to enjoy some of our favourite significant news stories throughout April which demonstrate who and what is driving positive social impact towards a thriving planet and healthier and fairer society.  Ghana and Nigeria have become...

Skating Around the World Episode 5

What does a financial corporation, second-hand book retailer, environmental organisation, travel agency, employment company, and Skating Panda have in common? We’re all B Corps – a global movement of businesses that are going beyond to be a force for good.  To celebrate B Corp month, we...

Gender Blindness and How to Avoid it in the Workplace

By Inga Thordar Real impact on gender equality requires a radical rethink in organisations – and courageous leadership. One that is willing to acknowledge past inequalities and injustices and doesn’t try to wipe the slate clean with the current status quo as the baseline.   Successfully implementing gender-neutral...

Skating Around the World – Episode 4

Over the last few weeks ‘climate quitting’ has been a talking point in the news and on social media –where people are choosing to leave their jobs to pursue a career path where they can work for an employer demonstrating strong environmental and sustainability practices...

Key Social Impact Trends for 2023

We are saying farewell to 2022 – a year of big turmoil and contrasts. We are living through economic and geopolitical uncertainty where little to no progress is being made to narrow inequality gaps. But this year also brought some clear greenshoots in areas such...

Skating Around the World – Episode 3

Today is the International Day of Elimination of Violence Against Women. Here are some global figures about women and violence. One in three women experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner across their lifetime Based on 2020 global estimates, on...

What is a Social Impact Consultancy?

By Hind Dihan When graduating from university and looking for job opportunities in the communications industry, I was bombarded by the various types of agencies I could work for. The choices included luxury lifestyle, crisis communications, travel, and hospitality, or FMCG. What drew me to Skating...

PR agencies: measure success beyond the bottom line | PR Week

Andrea, our founder and CEO, recently shared her views with PR Week on why she thinks the industry should incorporate impact as a measurement of company success, not just financial metrics. Read the full article here.   Turnover. Revenue. Bottom line. Headcount. Client retention. New business wins. The...

Putting menopause firmly on the boardroom agenda

Today is World Menopause Day. Thankfully, menopause is much higher on the agenda and less of a taboo than it once was. But, at Skating Panda, we still believe there’s some way to go to normalising menopause, especially in the workplace.  In Parliament, Carolyn Harris, Head...

Skating Around the World – Episode 2

From cancer fighting fungi to a supermarket sustainability measures In our series ‘Skating Around the World’, we are inviting you to enjoy some of our favourite significant news stories from around the globe, the stories which show who and what is driving positive impact on issues...

International Day of Charity and Why It’s More Important Than Ever Before

In 2015, the United Nations (UN) identified eradicating global poverty as the number one goal in the Sustainable Development Goals. They recognised how, when one is in poverty, it’s difficult to establish a foundation to build for the future. Life becomes about survival, instead of living.  Now,...

Skating Around the World – Episode 1

From forced wildlife relocation to a global first in free period products  The world is complicated and messy. Every day, we doomscroll through news feeds that provide us with myriad heart-breaking, headline-making stories about the issues we face, which can leave us feeling powerless in the...

Earth Overshoot Day: How Do We Use Fewer of Our Earth’s Resources?

Demand for our earth’s resources has skyrocketed in recent years, posing a significant issue considering our resources are finite. 28th July marks Earth Overshoot Day for the year 2022, i.e., the date on which researchers have determined that humanity has used all the planet’s biological...

2021: A Year of Impact

And just like that… 2021 is already coming to an end. It’s been a very eventful year, to say the least, between COP26, the historic malaria vaccine approval, COVID-19 recovery coming more into focus, and the charity sector starting to rebound – to name just...

Bring Your Menopause To Work Day is every day

Women make up 51% of the workforce in the UK and are now working later into their lives than ever before. This means that a greater proportion of women in employment will experience the menopause and its symptoms during their working lives. Around 8 in 10...

2021: Where bold, courageous, and purpose-driven steps are needed

By Dave Hanney 2020 will stick long in the memory, having delivered a series of seismic shocks. The global pandemic shook and disrupted every organisation, government and individual. Black Lives Matter became a mainstream force and accelerated the fight for racial equality. There was a rise...

10 tips and tricks on how to have a sensational and sustainable festive period

As part of our 10th birthday anniversary, we’ve been looking back as well as forward, and this led us to the yearly excesses of the winter holiday season. We all aspire for a healthy, balanced and sustainable planet, and we can play a role this month through the choices and decisions we make...

Have Awareness Days had their day?

Many charities and brands invest a lot of time and resource into named national or international awareness ‘moments’ to help raise their profile, yet every year the same ones dominate mainstream media. So are awareness days, weeks and months still a great way of engaging new and existing audiences, or an ineffective...

Time for change: Accelerating human-led impact

Covid-19 has complicated the way we work and go about our lives, but despite the challenges it has provided the chance to rethink the approach to purposeful business. Skating Panda and Charities Aid Foundation have joined forces to share our thoughts....

Climate change: from caring to action

By Charlotte Highmore We’ve all heard the arguments that individual consumption changes are “futile” since 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to 100 companies. This is true, but only to a certain extent.   It is true that industries must take on their role in fighting the...

Putting purpose to work: Taking external stakeholders on the journey with you

Skating Panda and Charities Aid Foundation have joined forces to share a series of four articles to help businesses understand the why, what, and how of becoming purpose-led  ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination.’ This is, of course, a well-worn saying. But the words are surprisingly...

Dealing with discrimination in the workplace

In the workplace, we want to maintain a professional reputation and create, nourish and build good relationships with colleagues at all levels, but what if one day you’re in a meeting or having an informal conversation and someone says something that is wrong and offensive?  In...

How to build and grow a purpose-led business, from the inside out

Skating Panda and Charities Aid Foundation have joined forces to share a series of four articles to help businesses understand the why, what, and how of becoming purpose-led Photo by Mark Fletcher Brown; Unsplash Around the world, every business’s leadership team is facing the same challenge –...

The role of purpose in building future-fit businesses

By Dave Hanney, Director at Skating Panda and Jana Potgieter, Growth and Investment Manager at Charities Aid Foundation Skating Panda and Charities Aid Foundation have joined forces to share a series of four articles to help businesses understand the why, what, and how of becoming purpose-led There...

Is purpose really doing its job right now?

By Dave Hanney We’re currently experiencing what a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world can be like, in an unprecedented way. It comes at a time when so many businesses have been uncovering, articulating and publishing their purpose. We were chatting with the team at Blueprint for...

In tackling corporate tax, we can’t overlook the human side of decision making

'Business purpose beyond profit’ is a bandwagon in danger of collapsing. It’s no longer voices on the fringe, but the mainstay of capitalism that’s calling for change. Especially after the FT and Economist nailed their colours to their mastheads.   When opinions swing swiftly, reality gets distorted. The voices of the critical experts become even more important...

The Global Goals campaign brief has changed

The Global Goals. The 17 Goals. The Sustainable Development Goals. SDGs. No matter what you refer to them as the facts are:  Sustainable Development Goals logo They were created in 2015 Ratified by 193 countries  There is a 2030 deadline to achieve them    To quote the United Nations, these...

Let’s talk about commitment

There’s a bit of chat and it’s getting louder about what it really means to be British isn’t there? Maybe it’s because we’ve committed to and actually now started to leave the EU, just maybe… Listening to the radio on January 31st 2020, the day of...

If you want to know about risks, ask a risk taker

Last year Skating Panda was invited to speak at the opening plenary of the Charity Finance Group’s Risk Conference. The focus of the conference was risk and our session was called ‘Risk Horizon Scanning’. There was a wonderful irony in being given such a brief as we had just...

Purpose, more than just a fad. Is it going mainstream?

Everyone’s talking about purpose. And it’s not always good news: “the new greenwashy buzzword” or “the preachy new CEO buzzword” or again “the empty buzzword”. And so on and so forth. An early adopter, Skating Panda has spent the last 10 years focusing on increasing social impact, solving global...

LFW 2019: what does sustainable fashion really mean?

Today marks the start of Fashion Week here in London. This is always an exciting and busy time of the year for any fashion brand. This year, however, I have noticed that there is something peculiar going on – in parallel and often hand in hand with the...

Whose job is purpose? Or how Keith Weed’s advice shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Keith Weed pictured. Keith Weed, Unilever’s CMO for nearly ten years, has been instrumental in transforming a packaged good manufacturer into everyone’s favourite purposeful corporate pin-up. Keith, and countless other people at Unilever, made a big dent by being brave enough to challenge conventional business wisdom. Keith is an...

Multiple offices, one voice: tips on how to align global and local CSR strategy

When you’re a global company it’s not always easy to have all your regional counterparts singing from the same hymn sheet. There are even more complexities when you’re picking a charitable cause to support, and are making plans on how to implement corporate responsibility strategies across each and every...

The rise of “philanthrokids”

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Gen Z – loosely, people born from 1995 to 2010 - are true digital natives, hypercognitive and globally connected. They value individual expression and believe in the power of dialogue, they avoid labels and mobilise themselves for a variety of causes. By 2020, they will...

Purpose is your business

At three very different events over the past month speakers touched on purpose and social responsibility in business, including the role that government, corporates, charity and entrepreneurs can play in driving positive change. But the volume of words being spoken about the topic far outweighs the actions being taken...

How can startups stay true to their purpose as they scale?

There's no doubt the startup economy is thriving with 660,000 new companies registered in the UK in 2018 – a 5.7 per cent increase on the previous year and a record high. Many startup businesses are built on a founders' passion, and increasingly we're seeing entrepreneurial businesses that...

Red Nose Day reflections 2019

Happy Red Nose Day 2019! Comic Relief is a British Institution, and as Red Nose Day rolls around again today, the charity continues its incredible work to raise many millions for good causes globally. Skating Panda has its roots in Comic Relief too, with our Founder...

Why we need more men in the room this International’s Women’s Day…

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the word feminism (inappropriately) became synonymous with man-hating, hairy arm-pitted women professing that they are the superior sex. It’s 2019 and as we approach International Women’s Day feminism looks much different. The internet has opened the...

Interested in purpose for your business but not sure of the process?

You've watched Simon Sineck's video, heard about Unilever's success and seen the stats about millennials. Purpose sounds like a good thing. Something your business should have. But how do you go about finding yours?   That might be you, or you’ve got the sense it’s something your CEO is interested in, or...

Skipping into 2019 like…

To some extent, we already know what 2019 has in store for us: Brexit and its aftermath; no doubt more Trump; renewed debates around returning Museum artefacts; Glastonbury is set to return; and the Rugby World Cup will take place in Japan. What don’t we know? A hell of...

The new rules of competitive advantage?

Last Monday, while Theresa May was telling the House of Commons that her deal was the right deal for Britain, a different debate was taking place down the corridor in Committee Room 10. Hosted by the CIPR, those attending heard well-reasoned arguments both for and against...

Why Skating Panda?

Everyone always asks, what’s behind the name Skating Panda? First, we want to make a distinct difference – and there’s not much that’s more distinct than a black and white panda. Our aim is always to create real, memorable change where it’s needed most. I’ve loved pandas...

Strength in numbers – NHS Charities Big7Tea

A year ago, just like every year, summer was wistfully coming to an end and days were getting shorter and shorter. More importantly for this story, a year ago, a new project had started playing on the pandas’ minds. The National Health Service (NHS) was going...

It’s time to talk about Ethics(!)

At Skating Panda we believe in the power of purpose and as we acclimatise to the second machine age, it’s time to include the impact technology has on our lives in these bigger conversations. It’s the reason we’ve launched The Technology Ethics Lab (TechE Lab)....

Can brands heal the divide?

At a time when political culture has become so polarised, brands are reaching out to unchartered territories and taking a position on social issues. We are witnessing the beginning of a new era in how brands interact with their consumers. Shifting from a passive observer,...