Lessons learnt by a new boy.
In 2021 some distinguished real estate figures, and me, started an entity to help the UK’s most disadvantaged students and, specifically, to introduce them to the huge range of jobs available in real estate and real assets.
This was hardly an original idea, but we thought we would approach it in a slightly different way.
One year on and The Academy of Real Assets is established and active. Here are some of the things I have learnt along the way…
Numbers matter
It became clear very early on that many schools, particularly those in the most difficult areas, were not particularly responsive to one-off approaches from business. Teachers told me that they were too hard pressed to respond to every company that contacted them by email with some offer of help.
So, lesson one, to get the attention of teachers and students at the most hidden away schools the offer needs to be ‘big’ and the communication personal. Scale helps.
Initial contact with schools should not be via a generic email address or a third party provider/marketeer.
Numbers do not always matter
We started by asking asset-owning firms to become members of The Academy. Inevitably, if you are from a returns- focused world it is in your DNA to ask, “How do we/you measure the success of this initiative?”
In many CSR, or Social Impact reports, the main emphasis is often on the number of students engaged with.
After a while I realised that these bare numbers could be manipulated. If your main motivation is to make contact with lots of students then, quite simply, you would concentrate on those schools that already have existing active programmes of engagement with the commercial world. At a stroke you could demonstrate your programme was ‘impacting’ large numbers of students.
But, but, but… We all felt strongly that the very point of The Academy should be to help those students who are at the moment outside this sphere of regular contact with business. By definition these schools are hard to reach and very unlikely to respond to a round -robin email or social media push.
To get to these most hidden-away students you need patience, a little bit of ingenuity and imagination. If an Academy initiative managed to encourage just one student from a school without a history of connections with the business world then, to my mind, this would be at least as big a ‘social impact’ as getting to a hundred students from a better-connected, better-resourced school.
