Scott Somerville is well aware of the positive impact sport can have on communities and the businesses that serve them. As director of external affairs at E.ON UK, one of Britain’s leading energy providers, he’s also well-versed in communicating the benefits.
Indeed, for Somerville, E.ON’s sport for good strategy boils down to just three words and one primary consideration: ‘Is it real?’
“Ultimately, that manifests as: is there work on the ground to be done?” he says. “When we’re working with a partner, is investment going into those people that will benefit? Our belief is that, if we do work for real, everything else will follow.
“Of course, we do due diligence. Of course, we try and do the right things. But ultimately, it’s about what’s the project? And then from there, you can add on the other bits. If you try and do it the other way around, people can very quickly see through it.”
E.ON UK was one of 11 brands honoured in the 2024 Laureus Sport for Good Index for using sport to drive positive social and environmental impact. Specifically, its partnerships and purpose-driven activations with the likes of English soccer’s Football Association (FA), Premier League club Nottingham Forest and Extreme E outfit Veloce Racing were hailed for driving sustainability, diversity and community engagement.
While their objectives differ, what unites each of those partnerships is Somerville’s ‘is it real?’ mantra. “We won’t do [a sponsorship deal] where it’s just a sticker on something,” he continues. “It has to start as a proper programme that’s delivering real benefit.”
Green goals
In partnership with the FA, E.ON has created ‘Greener Game’, a sustainability programme intended to make grassroots soccer clubs more sustainable while reducing energy costs. As part of the scheme, around 100 clubs across the UK will receive sustainable energy improvements to upgrade their facilities, with E.ON having committed to investing over UK£1.5 million (US$1.8 million) annually over the next five years.
According to E.ON, four clubs that participated in the pilot phase of the programme are already experiencing significant energy savings, including up to a 25 per cent reduction in annual energy costs through the use of solar power and battery solutions. Across the pilot clubs, it is estimated that the installations carried out by E.ON could save an average of around UK£3,000 (US$3,740) per year, per club, depending on their energy usage.
“Ultimately, it’s about creating opportunities for people,” explains Somerville. “If you look at grassroots football clubs, energy is a big part of their costs. We can help through a few simple interventions, help those clubs maximise the money they do have, make it go further, with the benefit in terms of sustainability.
“It’s about putting money into getting people on the pitch, but also, if you think about a grassroots football club with a clubhouse, that’s a community organisation. You don’t really need to talk about football – whether it’s a pensioners group that’s in there, it’s the cups of tea, it’s everything else. It’s that community asset piece.
“At the end of the day, it’s about how do we help those clubs do even more of the good that they’re already doing?”
E.ON UK’s work with Premier League high-flyers Nottingham Forest complements its decarbonisation efforts at the grassroots level. As a partner of Forest since 2021, and as a major employer based in Nottingham, the company is working to help the club build a sustainability strategy and promote sustainable energy within the local community under its consumer-focused E.ON Next brand.
As part of those efforts, E.ON previously created a fan zone at Forest’s City Ground which is powered by solar energy and also used on non-matchdays, saving an estimated 2,472 kg of CO2 emissions each year. The partnership has also since been expanded to include support for the club’s women’s team and Nottingham Forest Netball.
“You can see the impact,” says Somerville. “The work we do there is exactly like the FA which is, how can we work with them as an organisation to bring benefit to people?
“We were involved long before the upturn in the club’s fortunes in recent years, and that’s because we’re here and we’re part of this community.”
Driving diversity
Away from soccer, E.ON is also active in motorsport as the title partner of the E.ON Next Veloce Racing Extreme E team. That partnership centres on boosting gender equality and diversity in the male-dominated world of motorsport, as well as improving access to careers in racing for children and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
With top female racers like Jamie Chadwick and Molly Taylor on its books, in addition to a dedicated esports arm, Veloce Racing appealed to E.ON because it is pushing the diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) agenda at every turn. Together, the two parties have cocreated education programmes and events such as Kids in Motorsport, which gives primary school-aged children the opportunity to develop STEM-based skills, as well as providing media training and lessons in graphic design.
“It’s elite motorsport but actually it’s not about cars,” says Somerville. “At the end of the day, it’s about opening people’s eyes to the fact that there’s opportunities for you wherever you look. That’s a really powerful thing to see.”
In a further move intended to tie together each of its sports partnerships, last year E.ON began hosting Women in Sport forums, bringing together elite sportswomen and influential female voices to advocate for gender equality across all business sectors, not least energy.
“That’s just very much about making sure that there’s a platform beyond people involved in elite sports,” says Somerville. “It’s about skills, and it’s about those opportunities for us as an energy company.
“Of course, it’s about sustainability, but actually we’re creating loads of different jobs. We’ve got customer-facing roles, marketing roles, engineers. We’ve got meteorologists in the business. That’s the thread that runs through all of these things; it always comes back to, ‘is it real?’”
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Reputational gains
According to Somerville, authenticity makes justifying any sponsorship investment considerably easier for every department within the business. For one, marketing and communications teams have little trouble building stories around brand values and organisational purpose. Commercial teams can also rely on the fact that the partnership objectives are rooted in sound logic and genuine alignment rather than vanity metrics, with outcomes tied to identifiable business metrics.
To measure the success of its various partnerships, E.ON tracks a range of commercial and reputational indicators, including feedback through customer surveys and partner interviews. To that end, the company leans on internal insight teams and constant monitoring by outside specialists, including House 337, a marketing and creative agency that has supported E.ON’s sports partnership strategy and execution for several years.
As Frank Lawley, House 337’s commercial director for sport, explains, the agency’s role focuses on maximising the value E.ON extracts from its partnerships whilst ensuring they ladder up to its wider CSR and ESG objectives.
“Brand reputation is key,” he says, “which is quite interesting from a strategy perspective. You’re not looking at driving people to a website or looking to get energy tariffs in front of people. It’s about what do fans actually care about and then what can E.ON do to improve that? With the FA, for example, there’s a really clear link and clear role for E.ON.”
For Lawley, only once the company’s role is defined in an authentic way can the real work of driving positive impact begin – both for the business itself and society at large.
“One of the things I’ve really liked about working with E.ON is it goes beyond the surface level of what you would expect an energy company to be doing – it’s the why,” says Lawley. “Why are you doing that? You’re not just making things more sustainable, you’re doing it because there’s a community and societal impact. And then obviously that has a brand impact for E.ON.
“It feels like quite a circular way that we’re looking at impact, which is across the strategy and how they’re partnering, but then also how they’re activating.”
The Laureus Sport for Good Index shines a light on brands making a positive social or environmental impact through sport. Find out more about the honoured brands and their successful campaigns here.
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