Ulterior Events aspires to ‘do more’ with new CSR initiative

Incentive travel specialist Ulterior Events is launching a new CSR concept for corporate groups that aims to make a lasting difference to communities around the world and change lives for the better.

We caught up with Managing Director Graham Alderman to get the lowdown…

Tell us more about PROJECTS by Ulterior Events and why you decided to launch it?

We have spent many years travelling around the world delivering incentives, which enables us to meet lots of wonderful people and communities. Increasingly, we are being asked to include a CSR element as part of those trips, which might involve something being painted, built or donated to help our host community. This is all so very valuable and important, but I have often thought we could do more. Over the past two to three years, I felt that the CSR part could be bigger.

Incentive travel is about taking a group of people somewhere fantastic and treating them to the time of their life as a reward. That will always have its place and be an important part of employee reward and recognition. But alongside that, I believe there is a great opportunity to galvanise groups to change lives for the better and to leave a lasting and physical legacy, which is the main motive behind PROJECTS by Ulterior Events.

The idea itself came about after a conversation with Nigel Bale, who has been in the industry for a long time and whom I have known for 25+ years. He is director of a company called Team Being, which delivers UK team building projects that have a purpose and a positive legacy. They have worked on projects like rebuilding urban zoos, for example, and it has proven to be very popular with corporate clients.

Being was asked to deliver a team building experience at a conference in Italy for a client that wanted to do something meaningful, so they approached an orphanage and met with the catholic sisters that look after the children. The children who can be there until they are eighteen, spend a lot of time in their room so it was agreed that personalising the children’s rooms would mean so much to them. It wasn’t about just decorating their rooms, it was about doing something just for them - as individuals.

They were taken out for a day whilst the team from Being, the project managers, the local tradesmen and the corporate workforce got to work. When the children returned to find each of their rooms had been decorated around their favourite thing, be it Ronaldo, Star Wars or Disney princesses, the emotion was raw and real from all concerned. I’ve related this story so many times, I wasn’t even there and it brings a tear to my every time I think about it. 

It got me thinking. How can we take this extraordinary idea further afield. We work with so many wonderful communities across Africa, India and Asia that we must be able to combine Being’s project management skills, our 30 years of global event management expertise and a wanton desire from corporates to make a change. Quite simply, that’s how PROJECTS was born. 

How will projects work, and how can clients get involved?

The next step, which has been delayed over the past year because of COVID, is for me and the project managers at Being to spend a couple of weeks in Africa and India, where we will put together around five projects designed to meet the needs of the local communities we meet. 

The projects will be an opportunity to make a lasting difference to the people living in those communities. We will be building playgrounds for village schools in Africa, installing working toilets for shelters in India and creating lasting legacies. All we need is the money and the workforce to deliver those projects, which is where the corporate partners come in. 

It will all be pre-packaged, so for example, we’ll say ‘we need 30 people for three days in India to build something. The trip will include a day at leisure to visit the Taj Mahal and a gala dinner involving people from the projects, and it will cost £100k.’ 

We believe and hope that this can become part of an annual CSR programme within an organisation. We want them to get to the point of saying..”what are we doing next time and how many people do you need?” because every project that is completed means someone’s world has just got a whole lot better. 

We are looking for clients to become a partner and take ownership of the project. The Ulterior team will take care of everything else from booking flights and hotels to the ground programme and logistics. The team from Being will oversee the project and utilise local tradesmen, supplies and support. We will all work together with the host community to make a lasting legacy. 

Do you see this as fitting more under a corporate CSR programme than incentive travel?

Most definitely. This is about helping corporates meet their CSR targets through rewarding experiences that change lives for the better.

We’re not talking about charity. We want to take our clients to some of the most vibrant and exciting parts of the world, but we want to do it differently.

This isn’t ‘roughing it’ and it certainly isn’t your typical team building exercise. It’s about delivering meaningful change where meaningful change is so desperately needed. The crux of it is galvanising a corporate workforce to change people’s lives, and not just the lives of the host communities, but also the lives of those delivering the project.

It’s about flying home, emotionally charged, and saying “we did that”. We want groups to leave with pride and with the knowledge that they have made things better. 

What was the thinking behind commissioning the poem‘But We Can Do More” by Culain Wood? 

The Culain video is very powerful. We commissioned it because we wanted something a bit different to the standard copy and pictures. I wanted something that acted as a rallying call for people that want to help around the world, and I think we’ll get some real traction because it’s such a brilliant poem. 

I have to say, that Culain is quite extraordinary. We spoke initially for 30 minutes, and he went away do a “first draft” and this is what you see now. Not a word was changed as he just got the sentiment from the word “go” 

When do you expect the first live projects to take place?

I would like to get out to Africa and India by the end of this year to start getting the first projects in place, so we can officially announce them in early 2022. Realistically, I think we will be able to deliver them in mid-2023 and after that, the aim will be to have around 10 live projects a year that clients can get involved with.