History

Caravan - a history continued

Consideration of the above factors coincided with research released by the Economic & Social Research Council that showed that charities stood to benefit financially by building a strong brand identity and delivering a clear consistent message about both their cause and their values.

The second issue was about how the money raised would be best used. The NGBF’s constituency was the total food and grocery industry, one of the UK’s biggest individual sources of employment. Based on the size of this market we knew that there were many thousands of pensioners out there who might benefit from welfare support from the fund, but who didn’t know about the charity.

To tackle these issues a development process was initiated that began with a human resources forum, in which we consulted with senior HR people in the industry. From there Tony Pearce, former Chairman of Caravan’s trustees, led the Board in examining how they might change things and fully achieve the Fund’s original aims of helping people in the industry who have fallen on hard times, by educating those potentially at risk about how to avoid this in the future.

The development work was carried out by the NGBF as an internal project, with wide consultation at each stage with the NGBF’s stakeholders. As a result, the new Caravan identity was born. It makes a clear statement about the organisation’s commitment to change and doing what it says. It is evolutionary, and contemporises and invests meaning in the NGBF camel, a previously unexplained brand icon and a hidden asset. The new identity is credible and is intended to generate respect within the industry.

Welfare provision remains Caravan’s first concern, and it will continue to provide support for our beneficiaries who are currently suffering hardship. The rebranded charity aims to broaden its role over coming years to enable it to realise its mission of helping to eradicate hardship and becoming the industry’s welfare expert. This will include improved communication of the financial planning issues affecting those in the industry. The objective is to establish Caravan as the industry’s leading independent supplier of general information, aimed at encouraging people at risk to make better financial provision for the future.

As part of this ongoing mission, Caravan secured the pro-bono services of management consultants Accenture in 2003 to look at how the charity could improve the well being of its beneficiaries in the future, and to better understand the position of the grocery industry with regard to the current debate around pensions and savings for retirement. What started as an internal exercise in long term planning led to a very different scenario from the one which had originally been envisioned by the trustees.

The results of the Accenture research show that the resources of the charity both in the short and long term are insufficient to meet the magnitude of the problem faced by our industry. The Policy and Issues Council of the IGD agreed to help Caravan establish an industry work group, the Caravan Welfare Strategy Group, to look in detail at the problem. Part of the remit of this group is to better understand the people in our industry and why they may need our assistance.

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