What if the all the good corporate citizens out there suddenly incented their employees to volunteer with nonprofits and charities? Would there be a major impact in terms of community engagement, money raised, knowledge shared and overall benefit to society?

These questions are being put to the test with a new corporate sector swing to promote volunteerism among its workers. While the concept of corporate team-ups with charities has been around for awhile — historically in terms of donating money to worthy causes, whether altruistically or for photo-ops and image boosting — a couple of North American projects are underway that purport to improve how the for-profit world views volunteerism and rethink the ways in which it can positively affect communities.

A thousand points of light

Down in Atlanta, GA, the nonprofit Points of Light Institute has developed what they call the Employee Volunteer Program (EVP), which since 2006 has been gathering data on corporate volunteerism rates and sharing knowledge with companies on how best to inspire volunteerism.

(It should be noted that the institute describes itself as “the largest volunteer management and civic engagement organization” in the US. The institute’s Canadian partner is Volunteer Canada, which is developing a similar program through its corporate citizenship division.)

Last month, the institute issued its revised 2010 EVP Reporting Standards document, a work in progress that provides corporate partners with tools on how best to record and measure metrics for volunteer hours, volunteer frequency, valuation of volunteer hours, dollar rates of “Straight Return on Investment (ROI)” and “Social Return on Investment (SROI)” among others. But what kind of impact is this program actually having on the volunteer sector?

Asked how effective this major project has been, Syreeta Skelton, associate director of evaluation and performance management with the institute, told CharityVillage® that her organization had still “not conducted a formal assessment of the effectiveness of the EVP Standards published in 2006, the request for an updated set of standards came directly from the businesses.” She said this was an indicator for “a need for such standards” for companies to “meet their current needs for more comprehensive and advanced metrics to track their employee volunteer efforts.”

When pressed for any data about the impact of corporate volunteerism on the nonprofit sector in the US, Skelton replied that while there were no numbers available in terms of volunteer hours accumulated, the “implementation of a new benchmarking tool around the EVP Reporting Standards…will be able to provide this statistic in the future. In addition, we will be rolling out a second iteration of the ROI & Impact Study for EVPs, which gathers this type of information.” Additionally, the institute said it cannot currently quantify how much money EVP measures have saved nonprofits since 2006, but having this data would “be a goal in the future.”

However, Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship 2009 Community Involvement Report noted that in the US last year volunteering remained “a core element of most companies’ community involvement programs in a variety of forms. Perhaps a testament to the value of volunteering to effective community involvement is the finding that more than half (56.7 per cent) of companies in the survey offer employees paid time off to volunteer in at least some of their locations. And 55 per cent of companies’ volunteer programs feature a day or week of service at some of their locations in which all or most employees are encouraged to volunteer simultaneously.”

The Canadian connections

Though hard data may not yet be available in the US on this issue, the PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada Foundation (PWC), rolled out its Volunteer Continuum program in 2004, the company’s tool “that helps our team with developing, monitoring, evaluating and revising our suite of programs to help our firm and our people strengthen their level of commitment to the charitable sector and the effectiveness of their volunteer contributions,” according to PWC’s website. It releases a report on the program annually.

James Temple, PWC’s foundation manager, notes that the Volunteer Continuum suite of programs is designed to “ensure anyone involved in the foundation’s activities is participating in an experience that is sustainable and strategic, highlighting how someone can move from being a novice philanthropist having simple program awareness to a strategic philanthropist who is using their skills, expertise and resources in new and innovative ways.”

Temple said much of the impetus behind PWC’s drive to encourage corporate volunteerism stemmed from the 2006 Imagine Canada Knowledge Development Centre’s Survey on Business Support for Employee Volunteers in Canada. The survey revealed that 71 per cent of businesses surveyed reported supporting employee volunteerism “in some way.” But of those 71 per cent, only 14 per cent reported to have a corporate volunteer program supported by corporate resources; just 1/3 appeared to use proactive strategies related to volunteer recognition, promoting volunteer opportunities or allowing time off with pay for volunteer activities; and a majority (69 per cent) of companies that reported having a corporate volunteer program did not currently evaluate their support for the programs.

“There’s always a balance between business, the community and a person’s interest in the charitable sector. And how do we balance that to ensure that the best interests of the sector are always foremost? How do you build that into your performance plan when you’re sitting on a board of directors? The continuum could allow the [69 per cent] of companies to use our best practice to design effective programs,” Temple said. He adds that internally, PWC has increased its own charitable sector engagement from 26 per cent to 45 per cent since 2004 while getting “excellent” feedback from sector organizations all six years.

Feedback was measured, he said, in pre- and post-event surveys of community partners and employees by asking what their overall experiences were and whether the volunteering was effective in terms of time management; whether the outcomes were achieved “whether it was planting trees and using our hands and hearts, or looking at skill-based volunteering, such as resume development” initiatives.

To quantify what PWC has done with its volunteering, Temple said his organization’s volunteers have since 2004 contributed more than 70,000 hours back to the community through “paid time off work” volunteerism. He notes that while these employees are receiving remuneration for the efforts, “it’s not to use volunteerism as a motivator. It’s more to say the company supports getting involved in the community and that we’re fully committed to ensuring that if [employees] want to take the time to get involved, we allow that to happen.”

Temple says that PWC is part of Volunteer Canada’s Center for Excellence in Corporate Community Involvement, which heads up the nonprofit side of this equation. It currently partners with 24 companies committed to volunteerism in Canada.

He notes that the Points of Light Institute “does have regular contact” with PWC’s US arm, but that PWC Canada focuses its contact with Volunteer Canada, Imagine Canada and the HR Council, in order to use Canadian best practices. “But we are in open dialogue with all the international recognized organizations in this space.”

Temple says that the idea of “good corporate citizenship” has undergone drastic change over the last decade from simple community engagement to broader corporate responsibility mandates. “I would say there’s been an increase in the number of industry organizations that have taken an interest in this space. For example, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, Imagine Canada’s Caring Company Program…and there’s a broader recognition within the marketplace that it’s important to give back, to respect the environment and to help people in ways that embed this into corporate cultures. We’ve seen this in increased media attention and especially in new recruits, especially with Millenials (Generation Y). This is part of what they expect in corporations and what they look for in the recruitment process.”

The nonprofit perspective

Volunteer Canada’s director of corporate citizenship and fund development says that her organization’s partnership with the corporate sector has produced immeasurable volunteering results for the charitable sector in Canada in that it has helped raise the profile of the sector in the public eye and given it a sort of credibility that it hadn’t had before. It has also led to the creation of a social networking space in the form of the following website: www.corporatevolunteering.ca.

The site is a wealth of information on this subject and makes full use of social networking and Internet media streams to bring information to nonprofit sector and for-profit members.

Perhaps more importantly, Mitchell says that rather than the top-down model that existed before — where companies flew in to donate money or help to charities and then disappeared until the next round of fundraising needs — there is an emerging reciprocal relationship that is revolutionizing the way both partners profit from one another.

“Nonprofits are now more identified as professional services consultants. We’re finding a lot of success with that in our networks,” she said. “A corporation may be looking to develop its [volunteerism] programs…and they’ll now turn to a nonprofit for its expertise rather than going to an outside consultant. This is a mutual benefit that is becoming more and more prevalent.”

While Mitchell admits there aren’t any concrete statistics to demonstrate what numerological impact is being felt by the voluntary sector, anecdotally there is much good being done.

She notes that PWC’s Volunteer Continuum program, while developed internally for that company, spawned a mirror program that Volunteer Canada is now testing in a pilot phase with some of its stakeholders.

“We’ve created a parallel continuum that can be used by other businesses when they’re identifying their employee engagement needs. And we have a flipside model that helps nonprofits evaluate the types of engagement they have with business and how they can move to different levels of engagement with [for-profits],” Mitchell says.

“We are on the right track to moving away from chequebook giving…to the mutually beneficial realm. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.”

She adds that over the next year, Volunteer Canada, in concert with Imagine Canada, plans to hold a “Corporate and Community Forum” June 7-9, 2011 in Montebello, QC. The forum will bring together businesses and nonprofits interested in corporate citizenship and will include discussions on this engagement continuum. More details will be released in the New Year.

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.

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