Corporate social investment (CSI)

Our corporate social investment strategy seeks to ensure that our investments provide a meaningful contribution to alleviating poverty, and promoting development, in the poorer communities in which we operate. To support this strategy and streamline the management of CSI, this year we established the Sanlam Foundation as a Trust to enable us to align our CSI activities within the Group. This development followed a repositioning exercise undertaken in 2010, with the aim of ensuring that the Group's CSI programmes – which are based on sustainable partnerships with communities – will result in outcomes aligned with the company's core strategy. The process of developing our new CSI strategy involved extensive engagement with internal and external stakeholders, reaching agreement on the key focus areas of the Sanlam Foundation.

In line with our strategy, the Sanlam Foundation programme focuses strictly on education, covering four core components:

Underpinning the Sanlam Foundation strategy is the involvement of Sanlam staff and Exco members. Through the Exco Back to School Project , Exco members lead their teams in reaching out to the communities they come from. This forms part of Sanlam's engagement with broader society and also acknowledging the contribution of these communities towards the success of the Sanlam. The engagement process and visible leadership participation has generated a high level of buy-in throughout the organisation. In addition to the Back to School Project, our employees are encouraged, to participate in the implementation of the programmes of the Sanlam Foundation. We have to date experienced high levels of commitment from employees who are implementing the HOPE financial literacy programmes at schools. While high levels of employee participation are encouraging, a challenge still remains to align efforts into a coordinated strategy, as business units have been accustomed to managing CSI separately.

Investing in these areas enables Sanlam to nurture customer loyalty and support, while making a meaningful contribution to the society we serve. We seek to build a leadership position by coordinating our community investment programmes around themes that address stakeholder issues/concerns, and resonate with the nature of the business. Our contribution to community investment programmes is coordinated across the Group and measured in terms of impact to the entire community targeted, employee involvement and achievement of programme goals.

All existing CSI projects and activities have been re-assessed to determine their suitability against the Foundation's vision, objectives and strategic requirements and sustainability. In line with these requirements, we have had to exit some of the CSI programmes that no longer fall in the remit and scope of the strategic focus of Sanlam Foundation. Exit strategies have duly been implemented for these. We therefore have entered into various new partnerships. To ensure we achieve our goals, we have undertaken baseline studies for all programmes to enable us to perform impact studies at the end of the period of the partnerships. A current challenge is that it is too early to assess the success of our strategy and provide facts and figures on performance.

Our annual CSI spend in 2011 was R 34 953 450, representing 0.77% of Group net profit after tax; this compares favourably with last year, in which we spent R19.3 million in 2010 (0.52% of Group net profit after tax). Our 2011 expenditure included R1 million that was allocated to the various business clusters (R200,000 each) for staff volunteer projects and contributions to our flagship sponsorship of Takalani Sesame.

In addition, Sanlam also contributes to the Ubuntu-Botho Community Development Trust through dividends.

Sponsorships

Sanlam RSA's sponsorship activities play a central role in enabling the company to engage with potential markets, seeking to create a positive association and attract the lower level market. Our sponsorships thereby add real business value while also supporting socially significant causes. We select only sponsorship opportunities that speak to our target market in a positive way, aiming to have Sanlam RSA perceived as a valued and trusted partner.

There are certain criteria against which potential opportunities are measured in order to stay true to our business and brand strategy. To measure the effectiveness of our initiatives, a brand study is conducted each year, including an assessment of whether partners have delivered on KPIs. Success is measured in terms of 'return on objectives'.

Core sponsorships include Takalani Sesame, the Sanlam Cancer Challenge, Sanlam Kay Motsepe Schools Cup and a suite of cultural sponsorships, which are pivotal in growing Sanlam's brand awareness within our target markets in South Africa.