BASF Germany featured in the 2022 Responsible Care Awards Gallery: “Supporting Ukraine and a sustainable EU society”
Following the Russian attack on Ukraine, BASF organised its first global employee donation campaign under the motto #ColleaguesFor Ukraine. The outcome exceeded all expectations: BASF employees donated €2,110,156 – the highest result of such a campaign in BASF’s history. The company has doubled the amount. This means that a total of more than €4.2 million benefits people affected by the war in Ukraine.
50% of the total amount, the sum donated by employees, will go to BASF colleagues from Ukraine, where the company has more than 220 employees, many of whom have lost everything. The second half of the total amount, the sum added by BASF, will benefit Ukrainian refugees as a whole through UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe, the national Partner of the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR in Germany. This is in addition to €1 million in emergency aid already provided by BASF at the end of February and the company’s ongoing financial support for Ukrainian colleagues.
There are several reasons that made #ColleaguesForUkraine special and so successful:
First truly global donation campaign
For the first time, all 111,000 BASF employees in more than 100 countries around the globe were invited to donate.
Smart motivational approach and cooperative setup
The donations benefit not only the people in Ukraine in general, but also BASF colleagues in Ukraine. With this setup, the company fulfilled the wish of all colleagues. It enabled us, for the first time, to specifically highlight donation recipients – our own colleagues! – show their fate and what happened to them during the war. Moreover, every Euro donated was doubled by BASF. All this increased the willingness to donate immensely.
Effective dual “top down” and “bottom up” strategy
The donation campaign was not only driven from the headquarters, but also in a decentralised manner. To promote this, among other things, BASF made calls with the people responsible regionally and locally, when colleagues from Ukraine reported on the situation and the war. This boosted the motivation enormously of all those involved . Local managers made this donation campaign their own cause at regional and country level. For example, in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, local fundraising campaigns were set up to contribute to the global campaign.
Successful global multi-channel communications concept
The fundraising campaign became the cornerstone of BASF internal communications on Ukraine. The company did not just announce the fundraising campaign once, but permanently for 6 weeks across all internal channels (intranet, newsletter, town halls, its internal social media channel Yammer…) and levels (global, regional, country, all divisions). Among other things, they used emotional storytelling about Ukrainian colleagues on the run.
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