Kinovo rebrand puts social value centre stage

Following a recent rebrand, property services company Kinovo PLC has adopted the Thrive social value platform to track and report their ESG and sustainability work across the business.

Through the rebrand process, Kinovo realised that, due to the nature of their business and who they serve, social value was always at the heart of what they were doing. However, this wasn’t well communicated to staff, stakeholders, clients or even the community where they were helping.

The company focuses much of its work in the social and affordable housing sector and are keen to be seen to ‘walk the walk’. Kinovo’s work in the community is not limited to the remit of the projects that they carry out, as being on the ground on behalf of local authorities and housing associations means they have first-hand knowledge of the help people need on a daily basis and staff are encouraged to assist where they can. 

They realised that their culture was already one of a caring and positive workforce – effectively social value in action and on the spot, delivering real and tangible benefits at the point of need. The rebranding exercise also saw Kinovo take a meticulous approach to its decision-making around supply chains and partnerships.

Lee Venables, chief operating officer at Kinovo, said: “We committed to producing a sustainability report in the last quarter of this financial year and we installed Thrive so that we would have the ability to look back through what we have achieved over the past year. Not only that, but it also provides us with the group’s social value benchmark, which we will improve on.” 

With social value being given a much higher weighting in tenders, in some cases up to 20%, Kinovo sees Thrive as being crucial in quantifying its social value and ultimately in helping the company to win more work. “Thrive will give us the ability to provide more tangible information about the social value activities that we carry out, in our bids, which in turn will help us to win more contracts,” said Martin Stone, group bid manager at Kinovo.

With ESG and sustainability firmly at the core of Kinovo’s new identity and with the increased importance of companies in the sector meeting the UN sustainability goals, now more than ever Kinovo needed to have an accurate and consistent way to report their progress on their social value objectives - hence the link-up with Thrive.

Using a tool to both track and report on the social value activities they are doing is a logical one, as it enables them to let more people know about the good work which runs throughout the wider company. Also, knowing what others across Kinovo are doing provides motivation and camaraderie amongst the staff as well as demonstrating to shareholders that this is a company with heart that is making a real difference.

In addition, by applying Thrive’s social value measurement tool to be able to see both tangible and fiscal benefits from the decisions the company have made, such as the social return on investment of using solar panels and ground source heatpumps, means that Kinovo can continue to make fully informed strategic purchasing decisions and help towards their goals of being a net zero company.

Mary-Louise Fellowes, head of analytics at Thrive, commented: "We have been working closely with Kinovo since the beginning of the year and its truly exciting to see the strides the business has already made now they have access to tracking and benchmarking of their social, economic and wider ESG activity across the whole organisation."