Corporate Employee Volunteering

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:

• Employer-supported volunteering: Is it volunteering if people are paid to volunteer with time off from work? From whose perspective?
• Pro bono service: Is this volunteering?  From whose perspective?
• Do we draw the line on rewards/incentives in volunteering? From whose perspective?

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.

This article examines a research report done at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada by Evelina J. Rog, S. Mark Pancer, and Mark C. Baetz: “Corporate Volunteer Programs: Maximising Employee Motivation and Minimizing Barriers to Program Participation.” The research was done on the Ford Motor Company’s employee volunteer programme and is based on in-depth interviews with over 100 staff. It outlines six key points to increase employee volunteering. The Research-to-Practice article highlights where the findings resonate with other volunteering research, but also notes some areas where convincing companies to have an employee volunteering programme might encounter barriers not addressed in this research.

Although South Africa has a long history of volunteering, employee volunteer programmes are a relatively new trend. Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (CAFSA) has been actively encouraging and facilitating employee giving for a number of years. They have recently embarked on a new campaign designed to raise the awareness of employee volunteering and to increase the number of companies offering employee volunteering programmes to their staff.

This article describes the context and tradition of South African volunteering in general and employee volunteering in particular. Then there is a detailed account of the first-ever Employee Volunteer Week run by CAFSA in early 2005, with a thoughtful discussion of the effort’s successes, challenges, and plans for 2006. Also included are a PDF of the how-to toolkit developed for employers and nonprofits, several photographs, and a brief video clip of the public service announcement filmed for promotion.

This edition of Research-to-Practice looks at three reports that examine corporate employee volunteering. Employee volunteering is an area of considerable growth and of great interest, but how can volunteer-involving organisations and volunteers managers make the most of relations with business? The three reports reviewed here are a survey of employee volunteering from national research in the UK, a study of corporate responsibility and volunteering in 7 countries, and a research project to evaluate the employee volunteering scheme of one bank in the UK.

The emergence of employee volunteer programs has been one of the most significant developments in volunteerism in the past 20 years. In this issue of “Along the Web,” we look at 42 resources from six countries with solid information to help both businesses and charities make use of this new approach to volunteering.