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It’s hard to talk about corporate volunteerism without imagining painful stereotypes: standalone projects, third-party organizing services, hosting 200 employees for an ad hoc event, one-time events for skilled professionals, staged photo ops, reporting via the company’s digital CSR tool, hunting for grant dollars, other mutually performative behaviors, and so on and so forth.
Much that’s been said about the motivations and outcomes of skills based volunteering (SBV) has been written from the corporation’s perspective. We know less about what motivates or what it takes to engage a SBV program from a nonprofit point of view.
In this e-Volunteerism feature, authors from NC State University and the Southeastern Council of Foundations examine the experience of one nonprofit as they expand their already robust volunteer program to incorporate skills based volunteerism. Their findings examine how SBV is perceived from different organizational levels, and the benefits and pitfalls of engaging such initiatives. Using a case study with 20 interviews from multiple stakeholder groups, the authors also discuss the coordination and resources it takes to implement a successful SBV program. This important feature provides insight into capacity considerations for any organization interested in implementing a SBV program.
More and more, companies want to engage their communities through employee volunteering programs. For most businesses, this means calling a nonprofit and scheduling an activity. The nonprofits that can readily design and host successful employee volunteering events will find themselves critical and necessary assets in what has quickly become a key business strategy. Understanding why employee volunteering is important to companies is key to creating a good partnership. In this article, author Chris Jarvis provides some insights into what companies want from employee volunteering programs, and how nonprofits can position themselves as an indispensable corporate partner.
In April 1973, the Saturday Review published a special business supplement, “Can the Businessman Meet Our Social Needs?” In this series of essays, noted business authority Peter F. Drucker and then New York City deputy mayor Edward K. Hamilton debated the pros and cons of this question. Though “corporate social responsibility” was a relatively new concept at the time, the issue of balancing responsibility among businesses, the nonprofit sector and government remains fresh 40 years later. This Voices article looks at the history of business philanthropy in the late 20th century, rediscovering examples of workplace volunteering that have faded from sight.
Points of View authors Susan J. Ellis and Steve McCurley attended the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service – a fascinating, huge and baroque affair that every manager of volunteer programs ought to experience at least once. There is no other venue, especially in the United States, which exposes managers to such diversity of volunteer programs, and to both the weaknesses and strengths of our volunteering systems.
There’s a huge train leaving the station, and it’s loaded with resources that many say have the potential to fire a capacity building revolution in the nonprofit/government organization service “industry.” Let’s call it “The Pro Bono Express.” Pro bono is the latest buzzword whenever folks gather to talk about volunteerism and service in the United States. Highly skilled volunteers are not a new phenomenon, but the current twist means that for-profit corporations, especially, are seeking to offer the expertise of their employees in strategic ways that make a difference to the community.
But what’s powering this train? What is it carrying? Can the promise be delivered? And why are some nonprofits and government organizations already on board and others concerned they’ll be left waving at the station? In this e-Volunteerism feature, author David Warshaw explores these questions and argues that finding a way to engage pro bono volunteers should be on every organization’s agenda.
In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’re casting a wide net to explore a number of volunteerism issues from the diverse perspectives of people involved in volunteering. “From Whose Perspective?” will include a discussion of such important issues as:
We’ll engage a few corporate and community sector volunteer managers, a public sector volunteer manager and a volunteer to help us gain multiple perspectives in this next Keyboard Roundtable.
The nonprofit sector has long been the domain of organizations and individuals interested in philanthropic activities and charitable work. However, this is changing, as Corporate America discovers that nonprofits and employee-volunteering programs can be legitimate and useful business tools to promote their brand value.
The latest trend for companies is to create corporate nonprofit foundations and employee-volunteer programs to demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although having noble missions, the real intention of these corporate nonprofit foundations and inspired employee-volunteer efforts is to enhance brand value, increase overall company profitability, grow customer loyalty, and reflect company values in tangible ways.
Two for-profit corporations, Bank of America and Toyota, are both enhancing their brand name through their respective nonprofit foundations and employee-volunteer programs, each of which helps Bank of America and Toyota to build stronger relations with their communities and stakeholders.
In this article, Kevin Kalra, himself a 2004 Toyota “Community Scholar,” explores what “brand value” is and how CSR furthers it.