Ecclesiastical Insurance is the chief sponsor of the CO3 Awards and Conference. In this guest post, David Lane , Managing Director of Ecclesiastical Insurance Irish Business, explains how they’re different and why working with CO3 has proved to be a good fit for both parties.
By David Lane
Ecclesiastical Insurance is an insurance company that specialises in faith, charity care, education and heritage insurance. This is our 125th year, and we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. It’s a competitive field – but we feel that there are few key ways that we’re different from other players in the market.
Firstly, our structure is very rare within the industry. We’re not purely commercial – we’re owned by a charity and we aim to deliver a substantial share of our profits to back to charities. How we operate as a business fits perfectly with our ethos; it means that as well as offering a first-class service to charitable bodies, that we share value through supporting local communities. In all senses, we try to stand behind the work of the charitable sector and give it a platform to thrive on the island of Ireland.
We believe that we offer third sector bodies a totally integrated value proposition. Relationships are crucial to success in the voluntary and community sector – a co-operative approach is much more conducive to mutual future success. It simply isn’t feasible or sensible to take a short-term approach to these things; and as such we actively seek to take a long-term approach to relationships. It’s about going beyond the contract – paying out when something goes wrong. It’s about helping charities discover new ways to avoid these risks in the first place. Whether that’s on a strategic level, by helping them shape their corporate governance, or on an operational one, by tweaking and improving safety procedures around events requiring public liability insurance, we constantly aim to deliver something new. Every charity is different – there’s no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ policy and we recognise that the challenges our partners come up against will require a tailored solution. Fundamentally, it’s about the ability to listen and come up with creative approaches and our customers appreciate that.
One of the things that attracted me to Ecclesiastical Insurance is the palpable sense of dynamism throughout the company. There’s a genuine desire to give back that goes beyond the profit motive and is, I think, indicative of the kind of people that are attracted to working in third sector organisations. As a group we want to be the preferred partner for charities on the island of Ireland and in order to do so I feel that Ecclesiastical has to show that our culture and our organisational belief is much closer to that of the third sector than a conventional insurer.
I think we’re successful in doing that; in many ways, the team at Ecclesiastical reminds me of a family-run business. There are people who have been in the organisation for 20 years in Ireland and they continue to show tremendous enthusiasm and passion for the work they do. That kind of continuity is hard to come by and helps us to continually pass on our values to new team members.
CO3 is an organisation that’s all about leadership and that’s what attracted us to being the sponsor of the CO3 awards. Working in partnership with them will help us reach a broader audience and demonstrate how much we have to offer the third sector in Northern Ireland. A key quality of great leaders is a deep understanding of the risks and challenges that their organisations face, so we feel that there’s a real consistency across what both our organisations are trying to do.
As Ecclesiastical looks forward to the next 125 years with optimism, our culture and ethos will continue to inform and shape all the decisions we make. We’re committed to being a modern insurance company that brings all the benefits of modern technology to our customers and we welcome these awards and conference as a great way for the third sector in Northern Ireland to share modern methods for best practice.
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