Havas Village Ukraine: Doing Good Deeds and Highlighting Your Brand Attributes — That’s What CSR Projects Are about.

Havas Village is an agency that has been on the Ukrainian market long enough to remember the first requests for CSR strategy development 10–15 years ago. With offices abroad, it has gradually changed its business approach: from random social projects to systemic support for the military. In the spring of 2023, Havas created the AIDA Foundation, a charitable organization where, together with partners and clients, the agency fulfils current social needs. Moreover, Havas Village creates conditions to foster charity among company employees. How does it work for them? On that, we have talked to Havas Village CEO Nataliya Morozova.

Can you recall the very first pro bono project that you’ve implemented with the Havas team?

This year, Havas is celebrating its 30th anniversary. I can’t remember the first one, but I do remember the anti-corruption project for Transparency International — “They Wouldn’t Be Silent.” On a banknote with Lesia Ukrainka, we put a rubber band so that it covered her mouth. That’s how we communicated that giving bribes is not okay, and that it’s also not okay to keep quiet about extortion.

What kind of CSR requests did large companies come to you with 10–15 years ago?

The first client requests for CSR development involved different motivations, but they were strategic in nature: Businesses were looking for ways to structure their approach to philanthropy. For example, Kyivstar came to us 10 years ago with a request for a CSR strategy because their PR department was receiving 3,000 charitable applications of various categories and formats every month. Though the foundation had the money, it lacked the understanding of where and how to allocate it. We formed criteria for selecting projects and developed a system and procedure for reviewing applications while taking into account the company’s positioning and values. We identified five or seven areas that Kyivstar would focus on and wrote down about 20 criteria, including website, reputation, reporting, transparency, and whether the project fits the chosen focus areas, since CSR projects are both about doing good and highlighting your brand attributes, demonstrating what stories are important to you. And this definitely needs to be systematized.

What are they coming up with now? And has the focus of social projects changed after the full-scale invasion?

There has definitely been an increase in requests for the development of CSR projects in order to find funds for cooperation, support their own initiatives, or build their HR brand.

For the past five years, foundations have been coming to us with requests to develop mechanisms and find partners. We communicate, check reputation, and then offer joint projects to our clients. Here, we are intermediaries rather than initiators.

Previously, we planted trees, visited children, and walked dogs. Since the full-scale invasion, our focus has shifted to humanitarian, near military, and military support. However, as large international corporations are often prohibited from helping the military, we have to be creative.

I don’t know any businesses that are idle in terms of charity or social projects. I think company owners understand that they need to help the country and invest in its future so that this future can happen.

Sometimes, businesses say that they don’t make their help public to avoid accusations of PR. They say that good deeds should be done quietly. Do you think it’s necessary to talk about them?

I wouldn’t say that we should talk about good deeds directly. We have several clients with whom we’ve been working for a very long time, and they haven’t left the Russian market due to the decision of their head office. At the same time, they donate crazy amounts of money to charity, looking for ways to do so. Still, they can’t talk about that. Any good post will cause a flurry of comments. I understand them perfectly well, support them, and thank them for their continued help. Society is currently on edge, and any miscommunication can trigger a negative reaction. That’s why I understand when brands do good things quietly.

In our CEO club, people compete to see who will donate more: Someone sends UAH 10,000, someone UAH 20,000, someone UAH 100,000, and someone wants to “outbid” them and donates UAH 150,000. However, none of these people shout about this. Besides, everyone has their own business with a CSR focus. We record the most active participants, and even if a person has never donated before, they will start doing so there. Communication aims at developing a culture of charity.

Sometimes, I think that making a post about buying one Mavic is somehow embarrassing. On the other hand, if you do, someone sees it and understands that people are doing something, and so they should join too. By the way, we have attracted many employees to charity through such examples.

Some businesses have told us that they measure CSR effectiveness in terms of the number of lives saved. What kind of quantitative impact do your clients want from their CSR strategies?

They never tell us that. International companies report accurately because CSR can affect, for example, the value of their shares, but that’s a global story. In Ukraine, unfortunately, we don’t have any analytics on how CSR has affected sales and reputation.

I agree that helping the military is a matter of life and death. However, there are cases when CSR reports are produced because companies want to sell their business or receive certain offers. Their motivation may vary, but I want to believe that it is for the common good. Anyway, if businesses measure themselves by their good deeds, for God’s sake, let them measure themselves forever.

What areas does your agency’s own foundation focus on?

Havas has always supported various projects and has always donated, but in quite a fragmented way, with no one sharing anything. We decided to bring it all together and institutionalize, bring order and, in addition, develop HR stories in this way. The foundation was established on the initiative of my partner, a philanthropist with 30 years of experience Yuriy Kogutyak:

“We do so much but never talk about it. Let’s create a foundation and talk about it on its behalf. We’ll also involve our clients and employees in this, doing it in a more systemic and structured way.”

Starting from 2023, we allocate a share of our net profit to the foundation and distribute it into three areas:

1) What we do best — creative, strategic, PR, and communication projects for foundations and teams. Our foundation covers the cost of the agency’s work. For example, for the Black Forest brigade, we did positioning, branding, recruitment, and fundraising campaigns, thus providing them with a turnkey solution. Moreover, we compensate the agency’s employees for the time they invest.

2) Assistance to employees and their relatives who are serving. We cover the needs for drones, vehicles, ammunition, and medical treatment.

3) Collectors’ club. This is also an initiative of my partner Yuriy Kogutyak. He collects art, and we support young artists and exhibitions. After all, advertising is a form of art, too.

We support charitable initiatives undertaken by our employees: Some weave camouflage nets, some open shelters for cats and dogs, and some make stretchers. We have an application form where people can write down what they need and in what quantities, and we then purchase that all.

We also have an emergency fund for cases when an employee’s windows have been broken by explosions or those regarding other consequences of shelling, and we use these funds for repairs.

Another story is that we have been running a large project with a military hospital since 2014. We repaired it, built a bomb shelter, and during the COVID-19 pandemic installed oxygen in the wards.

Is there a difference between working on commercial and social projects? How do you choose pro bono projects?

The workflow is the same for both commercial and CSR projects. If it’s about recruiting for the military, we study the issue the same way we would a new brand on the market. We research, conduct in-depth interviews, identify insights and triggers, and develop messages. There is no difference here between advertising a brigade or some other story — everything works according to the methodology.

How do we select projects? We are open to proposals and collaborations, but the main thing is that there is transparent reporting and a clear reputation history for both the foundation and its founders so that we can apply our communication and creative components — develop a strategy, brand, logo, fundraising, or recruitment campaign. It should not be a request like “just give us money.”

I’ve once had a bad experience with charity. I worked with a foundation, checked it out at first, and everything was fine. But then the manager continued taking money for the foundation, even though, as it turned out, he had not worked there for two years. One day, he simply didn’t give me the report, and I decided to check again and revealed the unpleasant truth. Now, I always check everything, because if they are fraudsters, they count on you never going to an orphanage to deliver presents, for example. Half of them drop out at the “give me the documents” stage, with another part leaving at the “show me your website” stage.

You help the state with what is called cultural diplomacy. How do you process such applications?

My partner Yuriy Kogutyak, founder of the collectors’ club, has been supporting artistic initiatives for a long time and has thousands of paintings in his own collection. At first, cultural projects came through him. Later, artists and galleries learned that we involve in arts, and cooperation increased. Now, these projects come through me as well.

Last year, the Paris office of Havas came to us to do a big fundraising campaign for Ukraine. They said that we have mechanics in the Fortnite (Epic Games) game, i.e., monetization for creators: If you create a map and people spend time there, the company pays the creators. We built a map of Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and used it to raise funds to rebuild a hospital the Russians destroyed.

This story was submitted to the Cannes Lions International Festival and made it onto three shortlists. Nowadays, advertising contests have shifted from commercial to CSR cases. Thanks to these contests, socially important stories win awards and get promoted.

Do you currently have any state requests?

The map in Fortnite is a state project, on which we worked with United24.

We’ve also been to the presidential administration to develop an international campaign to thank the countries that help us and to remind the ones that have distanced themselves of what is happening here. At some stage, though, it all came to a halt.

As we are constantly coming up with new ideas, we try to nurture them, find contacts, reach out, and implement them.

How do you envision the future of the foundation after victory?

I think there will still be a lot of work to do. Rebuilding the country, providing psychological support, and helping victims. Right now, within the Soborna Ukraine project, we support the children of fallen heroes. I have several children there who are less than a year old, and I will support them until they turn 18. So, I think we’ll have work to do, just with a different focus.

We will definitely continue assisting orphanages and animal shelters, since this support is always relevant. Moreover, if it’s already in your DNA, you will do this for the rest of your life, you just won’t be able to help that. For our employees, charitable projects are a breath of fresh air. They motivate employees as the latter are doing good deeds within the scope of their main job.