Our communities

We aim to have a positive impact on communities.

We're focusing on building digital skills

We care about the communities where we operate and support them through our people and our business. We encourage our employees to use their enthusiasm and skills to support the causes they care about through volunteering and fundraising. 

Building digital skills

Our people get involved in activities that share connectivity and build the digital skills of people across the UK.

Find out more

What we do

Volunteering

All our employees can spend two days a year volunteering during paid working hours. We showcase volunteering opportunities across the UK on our intranet, enabling staff to sign up easily. All the opportunities we promote to our employees focus on building digital skills.

In 2015 a total of 11,338 volunteering hours were clocked up by more than 1,900 EE employees looking to give something back to their community. 

Some of our volunteering examples include:

  • Our Techy Tea Party programme, which launched in 2012 with the ambition of helping 1 million people improve their digital skills by the end of 2015. In 2015, over 10,000 guests and volunteers got involved, with 90% of guests saying they’d learnt something new and that we’d increased their confidence and motivation.
     
  • Working with Apps for Good, an open-source technology education movement that partners with educators in schools and learning centres to deliver a course to young people 10-18 years of age. Volunteers helped judge submissions from students on potential new apps, then provided mentoring support for shortlisted schools to help them hone their ideas and presentations.

Fundraising

We raised £192,473 through employee fundraising and company donations in 2015.

We support our employees with their fundraising efforts in a number of ways:

  1. To kick-start their fundraising activity, we cover registration fees and set-up costs, up to a maximum of £50
  2. If employees are planning to organise a raffle or a competition they can apply for gifts such as iPhones and high street shopping vouchers to use as part of their fundraising efforts 
  3. We have EE branded clothes available for employees to wear while they fundraise
  4. We add an extra 25% to the amount raised, up to £250

At EE we’ve continued Orange’s longstanding relationship with Unicef. In the past 12 years this relationship has raised a staggering £5.6 million for children through emergency appeals. This money has supported the vital work they do with disaster and emergency relief. The Text to Donate campaigns help the charity to collect donations and release aid as quickly as possible. The success of these campaigns is in no small part down to our team here at EE, who come together at short notice to make them happen.

We also demonstrate our support for the armed forces community and have therefore signed the Armed Forces Corporate Covenant. See details of pledge here.