How #WeGoBeyond being a business for good

For CreateFuture and many other like-minded businesses around the world, March is B Corp month. Four weeks of the year where we strive to go beyond our usual commitment to the B Corp values and standards and do something extra to make a positive and tangible impact on the world around us.

This year, CreateFuture put our Design Thinking toolkit to the test in search of a simple but effective way for the business to support the communities around us, using the skills and experience we have within the team.

The answer was Block 60 – free online advice sessions for new starts in our industry. A safe space to ask the big (and little) questions, to seek advice on getting started and basically get the low-down on what it’s really like to be a part of Scotland's thriving community of creatives and strategic thinkers. Let me share with you how we got there.

Let’s roll it back. How did we choose our community?

When we broke it down, we realised that CreateFuture is lucky enough to be part of lots of different communities locally, nationally and internationally, each with their own focus and needs. This gave us a new challenge: how do we narrow it down to just one?

We had to ask ourselves; where might we realistically make a sustainable impact using just the skills and time we have at hand?

Supporting new starts

With the help of the wider business, the team decided to focus on supporting new starts in our industry. A community with challenges that everyone on our team could relate to, because we’ve all been there!

We live and work in an industry that is complex to understand for those on the outside, intimidating for graduates and young professionals and often hard to break into for those without connections or real-world professional experience – so it can be tough to get started.

As our industry deals with an ongoing talent shortage, CreateFuture wanted to make things more transparent, less intimidating and just easier to understand for those who are keen to enter agencies, studios and consultancies.

Between all our team members, we’ve got loads of experience and we wanted to share it.

With this in mind, we ran a short, sharp ideation session to develop solutions that could support those looking to enter our industry.

We wanted to:

Simplify the confusing and ambiguous library of roles, titles and terms in our industry in order to help people better understand their options.
Provide tried and tested advice on how to get started with a creative career.
Reduce the strain put on the mental health of new starts (of any age) by building the professional and creative confidence they need to succeed in their role.

This session gave us 5 great potential ideas to explore and through user testing sessions with our key audience, we narrowed it down to ‘the one’.

Our idea: Block 60

Block 60 gives new starts, or those searching for a role, a chance to book a 60 minute open and honest chat with an experienced member of our team and ask the questions that have been keeping them up at night.

We’ve all been there: trying to understand industry jargon that can be vague or intimidating, best practice methodologies or tools that you’re unfamiliar with… Whether new starts are looking for a junior role in creative, strategy, client services, project management or operations, we probably have some insights or experience to help demystify things and answer their questions in a straightforward way.

Making it real

To go beyond the B Corp badge and bring our idea to life, we’ll be working with a partner in the recruitment space in Scotland. They’ll help us identify some new starts who could use a helping hand and give this initiative a test drive before we open it up to the wider community. This is just the beginning, but we’re excited to get it started and make a difference.

If you want to follow our journey or learn more about CreateFuture or B Corp, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn.