Cushman & Wakefield's B:Responsible website helps bring community values back to shopping centres
Published: 02 October, 2009
A new website is transforming the way Hermes’ shopping centres communicate with their audiences at both consumer and business-to-business levels.
The recession has pushed sustainability off the top of the shopping centre industry’s agenda: after all a void unit has a pretty low carbon footprint. But behind the scenes progress is still being made. Cushman & Wakefield is using the web to co-ordinate green activities in a number of its managed shopping centres. Its website, www.bresponsible.co.uk, grew out of the Bee Aware campaign it managed on behalf of Hermes and it is now being rolled out for other clients as well.
According to Trudi Cummins in Cushman & Wakefield’s asset management team, the genesis of the idea was a desire to communicate to a wider audience than just property professionals. “Hermes placed sustainability at the core of what it does, but the challenge was how do we tell the wider community what we’re doing?” she says.
After a 12-month development programme, working with web designers Vuture, the website is now live. It’s a lively, colourful site that appeals to children and adults alike. And flexibility is key to its design, allowing new sections to be bolted on as the concept expands. “It’s always changing, we’re constantly adding more to it,” explains Cummins.
And just as importantly it’s easy to update, so individual centre managers do not have to spend hours amending and updating their sites. Eventually, keeping the site up-to-date could be one of a manager’s Key Performance Indicators when they face their annual assessment.
The B:Responsible site will become one of the main ways centres can communicate with their local communities and highlight steps they are taking to improve their environmental performance. For instance Crystal Peaks in Sheffield and Idlewells in Sutton-in-Ashfield have just taken delivery of their own beehives. Not only are they doing their bit to protect threatened bee populations but this time next year they will be selling their own honey.
Another strand focuses on children. The St John’s Centre in Leeds has already recruited over 1,000 members to its Bee Club, which involves children in community initiatives like sunflower planting and cycle safety.
“The target is four-to-eleven year olds,” explains Cummins. “They’re too young to come to the centre on their own so when they come they bring their parents. It’s definitely having an impact on footfall when we hold Bee Club events, and it’s helping trade for retailers like The Entertainer.”
While the Bee Club is for children, the five components of B:Responsible are aimed at building closer relationships within the entire community. Each element – B:Clever, B:Healthy, B:Green, B:Social and B:Safe – uses shopping centres as the focal point to spread the ethos of the campaign, using events and promotions unique to each centre. As part of B:Social, for example, The Brunswick held a Village Fete event raising £800 for a local charity.
And B:You, a four-week promotion designed to improve people’s lifestyles, brought all shopping centres involved in the scheme together. Each centre hosted a range of free activities for both adults and children, including a recycling fashion workshop, and visits to the Fire Service and Camden Volunteer Centre.
And because of the site’s flexibility Cushman & Wakefield is also able to use the B:Responsible site as a portal for its tenant liaison activities. A password-protected section for each centre can host environmental data for the centre monitoring energy usage, recycling rates and so on.
And it will equally become the place where tenants can go to access marketing plans and service charge budgets. “The aim is to have a totally open book,” explains Cummins.
The first non-Hermes centre has already signed up for the system, and now Cummins’ priority is to offer the service to a wider audience. “The cost is minimal – less than £3,000 per centre and that will come down with economies of scale,” she explains.
And although B:Responsible is a Cushman & Wakefield project it has deliberately kept its own branding off the site, in the hope that other managing agents will be encouraged to pick it up and run it across their own portfolios, in return for a license fee.
