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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)


Guides for Brides is committed to being a responsible business; we are ensuring we have clear and fair policies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

As a responsible business, Guides for Brides is committed to ensuring we have clear and fair policies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Our policies centre around 4 pillars:

Environmental Responsibility

We strive to minimise the impact our business has on the environment, implementing positive measures where we can and actively encouraging and educating couples and businesses to do the same.

This website is hosted Green - checked by thegreenwebfoundation.org

As a responsible business, Guides for Brides is committed to ensuring we have clear and fair policies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Our policies centre around 4 pillars:

Environmental Responsibility

We strive to minimise the impact our business has on the environment, implementing positive measures where we can and actively encouraging and educating couples and businesses to do the same.

Ethical Responsibility

We carefully balance the needs of the couples, venues and suppliers that we serve. We seek to educate and encourage our clients, customers and competitors, in order to elevate the wedding industry as a respected and ethical sector.

Philanthropic Responsibility

We support and promote relevant and appropriate charitable causes with connections to our sector or that are meaningful to team members. We actively encourage couples and businesses to do the same.

Economic Responsibility

We charge our clients fairly and pay our suppliers promptly. We compensate our team fairly and appropriately, based on their contribution to the company’s aims and not on gender, age or race.

Social Responsibility Aims

You can read more about our current aims for Sustainability, Charity and Diversity & Inclusion for this year, below.

These statements are discussed, reviewed and assessed annually by our team.

Sustainability

Guides for Brides is committed to helping reduce the wedding industry’s impact on the environment. In 2021 we began communication with the Sustainable Wedding Alliance, and we started actively working with them in 2022 to educate couples and businesses on their environmental impact and to promote the businesses who are making a concerted effort to be more environmentally friendly.

We are aware of the impact weddings have on the planet with the carbon footprint of many weddings being greater than the annual footprint of the average household*. Every year in the UK, approximately 279,000 weddings take place (in 2022 this is estimated to have nearly double due to the pandemic backlog of postponed weddings).

According to the Sustainable Wedding Alliance, each wedding emits around 14,500 kgCO2eq (or 14.5 tons CO2e). If we all make considered and sensible choices, the Sustainable Wedding Alliance estimates that these emissions could be halved with the remaining emissions being offset.

At Guides for Brides, we are doing our bit for the environment by making small, achievable changes that lower our carbon footprint and finding ways to encourage businesses and couples to make more sustainable choices. They are as follows:

  • In 2022 we added an Eco-Friendly Category to our venue pages. These pages are checked and vetted on a monthly basis. Businesses will either need to be accredited by the Sustainable Wedding Alliance (they take an international standard and use ISO 20121 as an assessment tool), be Certified B Corp or be able to prove that they are making a concerted effort to be more environmentally friendly through clear, public sustainability commitments.
  • We hope this will encourage couples to look at venues that are actively doing their bit for the planet and should have a knock-on effect with their ongoing wedding planning.
  • We will endeavour to do something similar for suppliers in the future. However, for the time being will actively feature advertisers who are accredited by the Sustainable Wedding Alliance in blog features.
  • We will encourage businesses that we know are making these clear sustainability efforts to join the Sustainable Wedding Alliance and get accredited to increase couples’ confidence. In 2023 we will be adding a Sustainability focused element to listings, where businesses can outline their efforts and aims to couples.
  • As a business, we try our best to use energy responsibly by turning our heating down, and ensuring the lights are off in rooms that aren’t being used and doing similar activities within our office that can have a big impact in the long-run. We are also conscious of and avoid wasting water at work.
  • We do our best to ensure we are recycling and reusing as much as we can, reducing our waste to the best of our ability.
  • We try to work digitally and avoid printing where possible.
  • Our team is on a hybrid work pattern, with many working one day a week from their home offices which reduces CO2 emitted through travel to the office by 20%.
  • When it comes to meeting clients we will do at least one of the following:
  • Have the meeting online to reduce the need for travel
  • Arrange meetings with multiple businesses in the same area to make the most of needing to travel to that location
  • Use public transportation where we can.
  • If more than one person on our team is attending the meeting or event, we will ride share where possible.

*Facts and figures obtained from the Sustainable Wedding Alliance.

Charity

As a company that celebrates love, Guides for Brides is proud to be an official collaboration partner of VOW for Girls; a growing global movement that partners with wedding professionals, couples and individuals to end the international child marriage crisis.

VOW's vision is a world where no child is ever a bride. Guides for Brides are committed to raising awareness and funds for this exceptional charity so that we can end child marriage in our lifetime. We believe every girl deserves the chance to live a life she loves and choose love on her own terms. Love is our business, VOW aligns with what our business does and is committed to a cause that our team feels strongly about.

100% of the money raised by couples and businesses for VOW for Girls is invested in underfunded grassroots efforts that advance girls’ rights through job training, educational opportunities and vital life skills - all of which reduce the likelihood of a girl becoming a bride and empower her to own her future.

How we support VOW for Girls:

  • We regularly meet with the team at VOW to find ways to collaborate and raise awareness of the cause through social media, blog posts and more.
  • We take part in their online awareness days - i.e. International Day of the Girl.
  • We raise funds during our annual awards ceremony to support the cause.

Find out more about VOW for Girls.

Diversity & Inclusion

Guides for Brides has the pleasure of representing wedding venues and suppliers from across the UK and being a trusted resource for wedding planning by couples and their support networks. We always aim to provide a place of work and platform that is welcoming and respectful to all, and our team is committed to learning and growing in our understanding of different genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, cultures and religions.

We understand that it is our responsibility to offer a safe and welcoming platform online and at our in-person wedding fairs, networking events and awards ceremonies. Fair and respectful representation is important to our clients, our couples and our team. A key diversity and inclusion aim for 2023 is to give a fair reflection of the UK’s diverse population in our social media and blog posts. We began doing this in 2022 and are slowly improving our website's diversity. We understand this will take consistent effort and time to achieve.

Following our 2023 review, we aim to do the following:

We aim for approximately 20% of the posts you see on Guides for Brides to feature individuals and couples who are Black, Asian, Latin, Mixed Race or in Interracial relationships.

  • We aim for approximately 5% of the posts you see on Guides for Brides to feature couples and individuals from the LGBTQIA+ community.
  • We will also do more to raise awareness of our sister website, Pride Guide, which is dedicated to showcasing venues and suppliers who are trusted within the LGBTQIA+ community.
  • We endeavour to grow our educational content in 2023 to help our audience learn about both the traditional and modern weddings of different cultures and religions and increase the representation of the businesses that service these weddings on our website.
  • In the future, we would like to make it easier for couples to find venues and suppliers to service their cultural or fusion weddings. In 2022, we added ‘Dry Hire’ as a key venue category as well as making this more prominent in blog content.
  • We aim to increase our representation of the disabled community in our social media and blog posts. However, we are also conscious that not all disabilities are visible and while 19% of the UK adult population is disabled, this cannot always be represented fairly in imagery.
  • We aim to include accurate image descriptions in captions and/or alt text to make our content more accessible to those relying on screen readers.

In 2023, we will work with The University of Oxford's Student Consultancy programme to understand the public's current view of our platform and the inclusivity of our brand.

We would like to expand the voices we feature in our written content and on our podcast this year. However, as a small team who are limited on time and resources, we acknowledge that this could be difficult for us to seek out. We welcome the submission of non-commercial, educational and discussion-based articles from all who would like to educate our audience about diverse weddings or would like to write about their lived experience as a member of a minority community at weddings.

Last Updated 30th of November 2023