Responsible reboot: a fresh start-up

The idea that companies could apply their purchasing power to support sustainability was the seed.” Frances Atkins, co-founder of Givvable

Frances Atkins is a woman who combines clear-eyed pragmatism with a sense of what’s right. Before co-founding Givvable, a platform that helps companies find and track sustainable suppliers, she followed “a pretty typical corporate career path”. A Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws at UNSW first led her to become a financial services lawyer at multinational law firm Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst). “I really enjoyed it,” says Atkins. “Beyond my work in financial services, I was active in the pro bono program, mostly working on common assault and domestic violence cases. In a way, it ended up shaping what I’m doing now.” It was the next phase of her career, when she tapped out of a decade-long banking role at J.P. Morgan to have three children, that would change her trajectory. Atkins and her sister, Naomi Vowels – a former diplomat, financial economics graduate and mother of two – were both pregnant when they got to talking about all the kids’ parties they were going to. “I love parties but what we didn’t love was kids getting 20 to 30 gifts and all the waste that went with it – not just the plastic but all the wrapping and cards, too,” says Atkins. The sisters built a platform where guests could “crowd-fund towards one gift for the child and any leftover funds would go to a charity”. The idea became a business called GoodGivs. In 2019, Atkins went to AGSM to finish the MBA she had commenced while working at J.P. Morgan. On campus, she spotted flyers for a Founders Program and convinced her sister to do it with her. “It worked really well with my MBA because I’d just done a design-thinking intensive,” says Atkins. “Entrepreneurship and the way you develop a concept involves exactly that so I was directly applying my MBA.” The sisters hadn’t realised the Founders Program was a competition – but they ended up winning. UNSW encouraged the sisters to apply for its Founders 10x accelerator program for high-potential start-ups. They decided to create something beyond the GoodGivs platform. “We went back to first principles: sustainability and social impact,” says Atkins. “The idea that companies could apply their purchasing power to support sustainability was the seed for what is now Givvable.” The spark caught fire. In 2020, Givvable was accepted into Mirvac’s Impact Accelerator program, was awarded a NSW Government grant and won the $300,000 prize in the CBA/Microsoft Xccelerate 2020 program. Today, Givvable is emerging from soft launch with a number of customers, ready to take off. Using proprietary algorithms, Givvable maps the sustainability credentials of suppliers to widely used frameworks, including the SDGs. It’s free for suppliers to register their credentials for assessment; for buyers, there is a subscription model. “We also do reporting for clients. As you can imagine, a lot of big corporates have thousands of suppliers. It’s often hard to get general business information on a supplier, let alone trustworthy information about their sustainability.” The reporting piece is key. “Givvable aims to give businesses the information they need to report to their stakeholders. There are regulatory pressures to do this and also [pressure from] the investor community – a lot of fund managers are embedding ESG criteria into their investment mandate, which means that companies need to be able to demonstrate exactly what they’re doing. And, of course, there’s pressure from consumers, too.” Atkins says her MBA from AGSM and the Founders Program at UNSW trained her to always keep the “elusive product market fit” in mind. “We’re always asking ourselves: have we nailed it? How do we make the platform more sticky? Naomi says it’s like selling compliance software 15 or 20 years ago – new then, now it’s commonplace. Businesses will increasingly need sustainable supply chains and tools to track [them].”