Buy Social Europe

A bold initiative to support the procurement teams of multinational corporations to collectively spend €5 billion with the social economy by 2030.

Social procurement is the cutting edge of corporate supplier diversity initiatives – buying from businesses which are not just different based on who owns them but which deliver impact as part of their DNA and through every aspect of their business model.

The Support Offer

Following the success of a two-year pilot programme across Europe, the Buy Social Europe programme is following a proven delivery model which makes it as easy as possible for procurement teams and their colleagues to engage with social economy organisations. It introduces participating businesses to suppliers across Europe, engages and trains their staff, tracks spend and measures impact. Work is delivered individually to maximise the benefits to each company but reported collectively to de-risk engagement for individual businesses. The overall model for the programme is outlined below:

1. Internal Support

  • Benchmarking of your spend with the social economy

  • Identification of suppliers to increase your spend

  • Training of staff on the opportunity

2. External Engagement

  • Network with other corporate partners

  • Attend meet the buyer events with suppliers (in local language and category specific in English)

  • Support growth of EMEA B2B social economy supplier database

3. Collective reporting

  • Impact reporting and collective spend announcements

  • Policy engagement (EU + member states)

  • Communications and awareness raising

The Telos team are working closely with our partners at the Social Enterprise World Forum and Euclid Network as well as intermediaries across EMEA in order to bring suppliers forward. We will ensure that the profile of the programme is high across both the social economy and procurement networks and seek opportunities to profile partners where possible.

About the European social economy

Social economy organisations are businesses that are legally constituted to be impact first – buying from them means you are supporting local economies, creating jobs for those furthest from the labour market and seeing the profits from your spend reinvested in good causes.

The social economy represents 2.8 million enterprises across Europe – employing 13.6 million people and representing 8% of the EU’s GDP. They are also some of the most innovative businesses on the market, bringing innovation and value to your supply chain as well as impact.

Become a partner

Engagement in the programme is based on an annual subscription of €20,000 + VAT. The subscription includes all elements of the programme including all events, profiling, introductions and impact measurement.

We ask all participating programme partners to:

  • Commit publicly to supporting the programme’s target.

  • Provide a primary point of contact in the procurement team to coordinate activity across the business.

  • Nominate a sponsor within your organisation’s senior procurement leadership who has a European/EMEA/global mandate.

For more information please contact us