How to elevate employee volunteering and measure impact
Two themes keep coming through in our work with CSR leaders:
- Leadership wants to understand the real impact value of volunteering, not just traditional outputs e.g. hours and headcounts.
- Companies that use technology as an enabler, are the ones breaking through participation, scale, and admin challenges, while realising corporate ambitions.
1) A simple way to articulate ROI: focus on impact value, not just outputs
Rather than leading with “X hours, Y volunteers,” frame ROI as impact value at both business and community level. A simple structure:
Business impact: how volunteering advances core priorities
- Talent and culture: Evidence and storytelling of employee volunteering driving belonging, connectivity, purpose, well-being and development – especially for early‑career retention and satisfaction of staff.
- Strategic positioning: How initiatives align with key markets, products, or themes (e.g., financial literacy, digital inclusion, health equity) that matter to your strategy, stakeholders and drives sustained community impact.
2) One quick win to increase participation: treat technology as the enabler, not an afterthought
A practical quick win we see use technology to overcome key admin, planning and operational challenges and personalise participation improving employee engagement.
For many companies, employees want to volunteer, but they experience:
- Poor engagement, communication and follow up
- Limited relevance to their role, skills, location, or schedule
- Inability to help maximise the desired level of change and impact
A specialist platform (Rosterfy is one example) can:
- Automate the admin and planning pain: Shift scheduling, reminders, check‑in/out, and basic compliance from spreadsheets and inboxes into automated workflows – especially critical once you move beyond a handful of events.
- Integrate with your HRIS: Use existing employee data (role, location, department, work patterns) to be able to; target opportunities more intelligently, reach deskless and frontline workers who are often missed, ensure secure access and accurate reporting.
- Improve the end-to-end employee experience: Make it easy to discover, sign up, show up, and receive recognition – in a way that feels joined up, not like a separate side project.
If this resonates and echoes your own experience and would be interested in chatting further, please feel free to shoot me a line newman_andrew@outlook.com
