As a leading international brewer, Scottish & Newcastle need to ensure that their business acts responsibly and their products are used as intended.

The Challenge

Each year, leading brewer Scottish & Newcastle face the challenge of developing a team of international graduates. They are recognised as high-potential and belong to an accelerated promotion scheme within the organisation. As such, any development programme must provide ownership, build business skills, increase personal impact and influence, enhance leadership capability and maximise transferable learning.

Solution

These ambitious objectives were met in a ground-breaking development programme designed and delivered by Impact in partnership with Scottish & Newcastle’s learning and development team. We recognised a powerful learning opportunity and partnered Scottish & Newcastle with Turning Point, the UK’s leading provider of substance misuse services serving over 50,000 clients each year.

This partnership served as a unique consultancy assignment for the graduates over 12 months. The assignment tasked the graduates to partner with a key stakeholder working towards solutions to shared issues around the role of alcohol in society.

The graduates were tasked with creating an advertisement campaign that would successfully make Social Care an understood and meaningful issue to the general public. In addition the campaign had to raise awareness of Turning Point and create measurable benefit for the service users. Their carefully considered response eventually took the form of a viral marketing game, “You are Joe”.

Woven into the assignment were a series of learning modules taking place in London. These modules covered the topics of project management, understanding business, influencing skills, leadership, managing change and communication - allowing skills development to be directly applied to the assignment.
Key learnings achieved throughout the assignment included:

•    Managing stakeholders through single points of contact
•    Managing teams across geographical borders
•    Tapping into existing resources
•    Manage a budget during implementation
•    Identifying milestones & objectives,
•    Defining a long term plan and a lasting legacy

Result

"The assignment has been so successful for both organisations that they are building upon the work already achieved for a sustainable, ongoing partnership for the future.

The partnership with Turning Point is an important element of Scottish & Newcastle's approach to responsible drinking. This project provided an opportunity to practise the skills learnt in the workshops and has enabled our graduates to learn the realities and practicalities of working as a team. They also developed an understanding of the social impacts of the irresponsible consumption of alcohol, and hence the importance of Scottish & Newcastle’s Responsible Marketing Code."
Kieran Simpson
Head of Public Affairs
Scottish & Newcastle

"Creating a genuine partnership has been the key to success for Turning Point and Scottish & Newcastle’s approach to CSR. By rooting the programme in an understanding of each organisation’s objectives and business goals, we have produced something which is robust, creative, has longevity and adds real value to all organisations and our end users."
James Huitson
Turning Point

Read more about Impact's approach to Integrating Graduates
Read more about Impact's approach to Community Action Learning