Social Accounts 2025 - Flipbook - Page 71

Maintain Share Capital and investor/donor
numbers with a strong focus on
engagement, messaging, creating virtual
opportunities for members to contribute,
question and increase their knowledge.
 Launch the new member database,
incorporating donor information to improve
communications and administrative
efficiencies.
 Create a more systematic and structured
method to manage credit risk and debt
recovery with the objective of reducing the
impairment charge.
 Improve the accessibility and scope of the
management information available from our
current operating platforms.
 Continually improve our colleague and
technical resilience to cyber risk threats.
 Shared Interest Foundation will continue to
develop and deliver environmental projects,
engage with new partners and improve our
understanding of environmental challenges
faced by producers.
We ended the year with Share Capital reaching £52.3m, which is a net growth of £1.6m from last year. We have
held a series of well-attended virtual member events and an AGM which has provided an excellent opportunity
for our members to learn about more our activities and ask questions directly to the regional teams and some
customers. In addition to this, we held the largest strategic review consultation yet, with 130 members
participating in discussion workshops. Shared Interest Foundation participated in a series of virtual events
during Fairtrade Fortnight which allowed us to raise the profile of our charity and engage with a wider audience
leading to more people signing up for our e-newsletter.
We have now completed the integration of the donor database with our member databases making internal
efficiencies and external cost savings.
Over the course of the last 12 months we have developed two new internal databases. One manages our portfolio
of collateral, typically land titles that we hold as part of the lending agreement. The second keeps a record of all
of the accounts that have been formally sent for collection with either a debt collector or lawyer. We have valuable
data consolidated into one location and a new ability to monitor the success or failure of our collection efforts more
accurately. Our utilisation of third party services continues. We currently have 40 customers out for collection and
have 20 active relationships with debt collectors and law firms. We believe that this more structured approach will
help us gradually to achieve the goal of reducing the scale of bad debt charges.
The lending system was purposely built in a way that would allow easy access to a wealth of management
information. One page of data can be downloaded from the system by a user, however it would have to be
combined with other data sources manually. Members of the Technology Team are able to access all data and
create bespoke reports according to the needs of colleagues. To assist this, we use an interactive data
visualisation software called Microsoft PowerBi and are in the process of building up a library of automatically
updated reports, accessible to all team members.
Shared Interest has implemented a sophisticated tool to provide training to the entire team on cyber threats
based on simulated testing. This has now been in place for 18 months, and we have seen a significant drop in
'fails' from the simulated phishing tests generated from this scheme. To continue improvement in this area, we
will continue to operate this system and tune it further to enable the team to identify malicious emails. We will do
this by broadening the types of tests they receive, and continuing to increase the difficulty of the tests.
All Foundation projects have included Climate Smart Agricultural training, to build producers’ climate resilience.
Six of the 12 projects the Foundation is currently implementing, have a strong environmental focus. We will
continue to work with partners to develop projects of this nature. This year we worked with local institutions of
higher education including the Crop Science Department of the University of Ghana, the University Nazi Boni of
Bobo and the Matroukou National School of Agriculture in Burkina Faso.

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