The women behind the Heroes: Bringing a global initiative to life

At Delivery Hero, caring is at the heart of what we do. It’s one of our core values for a reason as it is reflected in every decision that is made. Every year, October marks an important moment at Delivery Hero: Hero Month. An initiative where employees come together to give back to the communities around them. To celebrate this year’s Hero Month we sat down with Liana Barcia from the Internal Communications and Events team, Len McCarthy from the Digital Communications team, and Carmen Loesche, from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team to hear what it took to make this year’s event happen.

Read on to find out exactly how our Heroes came together to make this global initiative happen.

From the inside out

I am Liana Barcia and I am part of the Internal Communications and Events team at Develiver Hero Central, which is under the Corporate Communications Team. I work on central and global business events and internal communication campaigns for a range of topics – such as people and culture, business strategy, and crisis and change. 

My role involves making sure that all Heroes know everything they need to know about Hero Month – why we do it, why it’s important, what it looked like in the past, why it’s worth participating in, how they can sign up and volunteer. While the CSR Team has taken the lead in organizing Hero Month and making sure everything runs smoothly, I need to see to it that all their hard work is communicated clearly and well, so that employees are empowered to engage and participate in the month’s events. I also work closely with Len of Social Media, and together we take care of all the communications around this project. The goal is to tell the story cohesively, clearly, and in an engaging and interesting way. My work involves regularly checking in with Len and the CSR Team, aligning, sharing ideas, materials, content whenever possible. It has been a real collaboration. 

My role involves two “dimensions” – central internal communications and global internal communications. Central communications were a bit easier to prepare because it is already Delivery Hero’s 5th Hero Month, which means we have some past communication plans and drafts that we could build on. The CSR Team also already had some learnings from the past, even from a communications-perspective. 

The more challenging part of this year’s Hero Month, at least from an internal communications perspective, is also what made it more unique and special – the global dimension. Although Hero Month has been happening for a number of years across some Delivery Hero brands and entities, this year is the first time we wanted to link all the different global initiatives and tell one coherent story. This was in place of brands and entities previously just communicating individually, to their local markets. We felt that it was a waste to have the different entities continue on their own volunteering initiatives in parallel, without highlighting the common threads that we have, such as making an impact and living out our value of care in our communities.

Deciding how to communicate more globally was challenging because we had not done it before, so there were no existing processes, or even any knowledge of the different capacities of the entities, or any alignment on what it meant to have a more unified global Hero Month. Len and I then met with the various comms and CSR Teams across the Delivery Hero Group, and together with all of them, we arrived at a flexible comms plan that encouraged the different entities to tell their stories about volunteering and making an impact. It’s been a great experience because we wanted to all learn from each other, and we revised our plans a few times to accommodate new learnings or insights from our counterparts. From the process, we also learned that we need a bit more time to work on such a big project – so next year we plan to meet two months in advance to plan the global communications with all our participating entities. What we would really love is to be able to highlight what is unique or interesting about the way different brands and entities “do” Hero Month, so that we can all learn from each other. 

Getting the word out

I am Len McCarthy and I sit within the Digital Communications team, which is part of the wider Corporate Communications team here at Delivery Hero Central in Berlin, and I’m responsible for all things comms from a Social Media standpoint.

Alongside my team, we conceptualize and create content that reflects Delivery Hero’s identity, and effectively tells the story of the company across our Social Media channels for a consistent brand image. I also offer support on various projects across the company from a Social Media perspective. This includes working closely with various other stakeholders within the business, fielding their requests on cool things they have going on that they’d like to communicate to an external audience but maybe just need some extra guidance on how to tell their story the Delivery Hero way. And this is exactly where I fit in for Hero Month!

For this campaign my role is to make sure we’re telling the story of Hero Month in an exciting, easy-to-follow way for our external audience on Social Media.

Most importantly, it needs to be engaging and informative! Everyone who works at Delivery Hero knows about Hero Month (thanks in part to Liana!) and why it’s important to us, but we can’t assume an external audience will know what it is, and what exactly we’re trying to achieve with it. 

This is the first year we went truly global with Hero Month, we had to make sure we were aligned with all of our amazing entities around the world. Some entities had taken part before, but this edition of Hero Month has every brand taking part in some capacity. Liana and I came together and met with the various comms teams from around the Delivery Hero world to chat about what to expect – from what Hero Month has looked like in the past, to what we could do together going forward. Hero Month is a great opportunity to highlight our shared passion of making a positive impact together, and show that we believe in our core value of being Heroes because we care across all of our locations throughout the world.

One thing I was really conscious about was making sure nothing looked opportunistic or self-gratifying. Whilst it’s my job to communicate about the different initiatives going on for Hero Month on social media, I also want to make sure it’s clear that we’re taking part in these activities because we genuinely care and want to give back to the causes we care about within our communities. Hopefully our communications inspire and give ideas to other companies who want to start their own volunteer initiatives!

Although this was my first Hero Month, I could tell we were building upon an already-impactful and meaningful initiative. 

This Hero Month was especially different because we really wanted to emphasize the global aspect; we’re a company operating in 70+ markets across 4 continents, and we have an opportunity to contribute in a positive way to so many communities because of this. Also, many of our entities have been carrying out charitable initiatives for a while now, but this was the first time we really united as one under the Hero Month umbrella, so it’s cool to be coming together under the one global initiative.

Organizing volunteers

I am Carmen Loesche and I am a Senior Specialist Corporate Social Responsibility and part of the CSR & Sustainability team at Delivery Hero Central in Berlin. Our team is in charge of managing the corporate volunteering initiatives for Delivery Hero.

This year was my second Hero Month, which is very exciting because I was able to use my experience and learnings from last year to take the organization of Hero Month to the next level. This year was easier to facilitate in-person events and to bring larger groups together compared to the last few years. It was really great to see our Heros meeting, wanting to connect and jointly give back again! Apart from our office in Berlin, we always have some of our global brands joining the initiative as well – this year we had more brands than ever before participating, which makes Hero Month even more a global and joint initiative for Delivery Hero. Furthermore, while I was organizing Hero Month by myself last year, we had support from different teams across Delivery Hero this year, which was really helpful and the whole initiative feels like a great team effort.

This year, one of my main tasks was to organize the events, which means connecting and aligning with the local partner organizations to see how and when we can support them best and to be their point of contact. I also managed our group of volunteer champions, which is a dedicated group of volunteers, who take the lead on one or more events, which is a great help for us.

It’s overall a very busy time when Hero Month comes around, however;  it is a lot of fun to work together with the different teams and people and no day looks the same or runs as planned.

I am really proud of what we were able to organize this year, how dedicated the volunteer champions were and the feedback we got from volunteers and also organizations on how our efforts and help were appreciated and useful to them. Hearing this kind of feedback always puts a smile on my face and makes me really happy about my job and the impact we can provide with Hero Month.