Staff at Bristow & Sutor, one of the UK’s leading players specialising in debt recovery, recorded over 3.7 million steps during Debt Awareness Week, in a campaign aimed to highlight the free advice available when anyone faces financial hardship. Debt Awareness Week (DAW) is organised by StepChange, one of the leading debt advice charities in the UK, to bring more awareness to the issues faced by people who find themselves in problem debt.
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For one week at the end of March, employees from across the Bristow & Sutor Group undertook the ‘Steps for Stepchange’ initiative, which required teams of colleagues to competitively track and measure the number of steps they recorded each day, with the winning team receiving engraved gold medals. Sponsorship money raised was matched by Bristow & Sutor with all proceeds going to StepChange. Those not taking part in the challenge were still able to help promote the campaign too, through initiatives such as a competition to devise the best money-saving advice tips. The ideas suggested will be featured in the company’s first ‘money-saving mag’, which is set to be published across the Group soon.
In addition to the challenges taking place offline, Bristow & Sutor dedicated the week with a ‘Social Media Takeover’. All activity and updates online related to DAW and posts were designed to give ongoing insight to followers into how to support the campaign. Useful links and direction towards helpful related advice and services were featured and daily updates were provided to employees, raising discussion points on topics such as supporting debtors, physical and mental health, financial wellbeing, mindfulness, coronavirus implications, employee assistance programmes and much more.
Collaboration between enforcement firms and the debt advice sector is sometimes surprising to some, but important work between both sectors takes place regularly. Many goals and ambitions are aligned and joint involvement in campaigns like DAW can only be beneficial for people who find themselves engaging with either type of service.
As part of an ongoing commitment to help debtors improve circumstances and outcomes, Bristow & Sutor regularly offer training sessions and presentations on processes to debt advice providers. The company attempts to add social value to every community they engage with and understand that debt advice professionals must have a strong and accurate understanding of their methods so that they can discuss options confidently when these conversations arise. Enforcement is a vital component of the debt cycle, and in many cases, it is at this stage that debtors are convinced to seek help.
Kim Parsons, Bristow & Sutor Group Employee Experience Manager, says, “We understand how important it is to raise debt awareness amongst all people young and old, as anyone can find themselves facing problem debt for the first time. Helping over-indebted people to resolve their problems is our social responsibility, but also improves our chances of collecting debt. By balancing our drive for results with our relationships with debt advice providers, we will continue to support people to resolve their circumstances and exceed our clients’ expectations. We also recognise the positive well-being implications of undertaking tasks like this and believe it is good for the physical and mental health of our staff to exercise, as well as see what their efforts do for others. We want to ensure the support we offer to the people we engage with is also available to our people too.”
Bristow & Sutor and has over 42 years of experience in the collection of local council tax, non-domestic rates and unpaid Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs). The company prides itself on delivering an ethical, compliant and high-quality service to the public and private sectors. Employees are trained to the highest standard and use modern technology and data to achieve market-leading performance, whilst protecting the most vulnerable in society and the reputations of clients.
