Introducing the Wilful Foundation Programme
At Wilful, we pride ourselves on being a leading PR agency for sustainability and that means we need a brilliant team of PR professionals with a strong skillset and a real ambition to deliver positive change. After all, it is our mission to use communications to accelerate progress for planet and people positive organisations and we need great people to help us do that.
That’s why we take the opinions of our team very seriously, and why every six months we conduct an anonymous survey to ensure that people can feedback to us on the bits of the business that can be improved.
Back in 2023, our team told us that they would like to see more gender, ethnic and socio-economic diversity in the company and we responded. We immediately implemented an overhaul of our office and operations to ensure we were providing inclusive spaces for work. We reviewed and evolved our recruiting process, adding new processes like sharing questions in advance to make interviews fair. We actively collaborated with recruiters offering a diverse pool of candidates and we implemented more training on DE&I.
We knew that to be an agency offering best-in-class PR campaigns that reach all citizens, we needed to reflect those people in our team. We needed diversity of thinking, an understanding of different communities and a clear focus on how we could better serve groups too long neglected in PR.
However, we still struggled to improve diversity within our team and quickly realised that the problem was more widespread than we thought. In fact, perhaps the talent pool, in other words the candidates applying for roles in the industry, were not very diverse at all?
That’s why in 2024, we launched The Wilful Foundation Programme, an initiative designed to improve future diversity across the PR industry. If we cannot attract diverse talent from an industry perspective, how can we change as an agency?
We needed to start before career decisions were made and that’s why the programme focused in schools, with GCSE students and school sixth formers. By introducing PR as a career to school leavers, they will become better aware of the industry and the opportunities it presents. By talking to these young people, we could quash any myths and demonstrate the different routes young people can take to work in communications.
Our team now visits schools in diverse racial and socio-economic areas, sharing the career opportunities available in the public relations industry. GCSE and sixth form students are then invited to join a short “taster-placement” with Wilful to experience PR in action.
The Wilful Foundation Programme was launched in October 2024 and has already reached over 750 school age students from right across the UK including Northern Ireland, Manchester, West Yorkshire, Nottingham, and London.
We have welcomed students who are neurodiverse, and who have English as a second language. We have met with and consulted people with different needs and from very different backgrounds and heard from organisations on how we can improve inclusion within our industry. It’s been an amazing experience.
It’s small steps and there’s more to do, but we are proud of the feedback we have received to date and we’re on the lookout for more schools to work with in 2025. If you are interested in hearing more about a career in PR or if you would like our team to come and talk to your school, please email us at hello@thewilful.com and we’ll tell you all about our Wilful Foundation Programme.
Here’s to a bright and diverse future for the PR industry.
