Emma Bradley on: Being a Director of Global Goodness
This episode features Emma Bradley, outgoing Director of Global Goodness at Global radio. Global is home to some of the UK’s much-loved radio brands, reaching 31 million people across stations like Capital FM, heart, Classic FM, and LBC.
Originally starting her career in the travel industry, she realised that she wanted to do something more purposeful. Moving to BBC Children in Need and then to Global where she worked for over 8 years setting up charitable initiatives and helping them raise over £20 million.
What ‘Directors of Global Goodness’ get up to
I’ve been at global for eight years, it is a lovely role, albeit with a daunting job title. I moved from the BBC, where I’d been working in various marketing and comms roles, including on Children in Need. But when this role came up, I jumped at it. I thought it was a really nice thing to do. It had a bit of a blank canvas … So, there was an opportunity to come in and make a mark.
My role is less about operations. It very much is the privilege of talking to 25 million people every week through our radio platforms and knowing that we have the power to influence, communicate and bring people on a journey, whether that’s raising money or raising awareness.
Initiatives that Global run
What we’ve tried to do is go with some lead flagship initiatives that work across demographics, but manifest in different ways through brands. Our best-known piece of activity is our in-house charity [Make Some Noise], for which we have a broadcast appeal that runs across all of our stations but will look very different on each. We may talk about, for example, a music and dementia project on classic FM, whereas we might talk about the Youth Mental Health Project on Capital.
We also sponsor a secondary school, which is about creating a level playing field for young people to get into the creative industries, which traditionally has been quite hard. Diversity and inclusion hasn’t always been a priority in the industry. But we’re hoping to really open the industry to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
We try and work with smaller charities, that would never normally get advertising space on one of our radio stations and give them some coverage. We also run some learning programmes with them. We look at the skills that we have in the business and run master classes with them on how to improve their websites, how to improve their social media etc. to upskill them.
Her journey to Purpose
I had quite a few years in commercial marketing in the travel industry and loved it. I was then headhunted for a role in travel, so I went to see the head-hunter and he asked me ‘what do you want to look back on when you’re 80?’ I hadn’t prepared that question, so I answered it from the heart. I said, well, that I’ve played a part in making the world a better place in some way, otherwise, what’s the point? And he asked, so what does that look like? So, I answered, I guess that in some way, whether it’s in my professional role or my personal life, I’m doing something that I can feel proud of, and that I’ve made a difference and a contribution. He then put away the job description and got another one out of the drawer, and it was marketing and fundraising director for BBC Children in Need, and he said, I think we should be talking about this job.
That was probably a life-changing moment for me because that question at that time [in my life], really made me look inside myself. So, I sort of have him to thank for a slight change in direction albeit still using my marketing and communication skills but wanting to put that into a better cause.
Posted by Katie Daley
