Successful employee volunteering programs establish clear and measurable business goals that ensure the program aligns with the company's mission and contributes meaningfully to both business objectives and social impact. Those objectives then serve as a guiding beacon, allowing you to maintain focus and accelerate the decision-making process as you launch and grow your programs.
When creating your employee volunteering objectives, be sure to consider the following:
Align with company values and mission
Start by revisiting your company's core values and mission. Identify the elements that align with social responsibility, community involvement, or employee engagement. These foundational principles will guide the overarching goals of your volunteering program.
Also be sure that the goals of the volunteering program complement your company’s broader business strategy. For instance, if your company is focused on sustainability, your volunteering goals might revolve around environmental initiatives. Incorporate your employee engagement goals and integrate volunteer participation into company objectives and key results (OKRs).
Set specific, measurable and realistic targets
Consider what you aim to achieve through the program. Are you looking to enhance employee engagement, improve team dynamics, build brand reputation, foster community relations, develop employee skills, or address specific social issues? Be clear and specific about each objective.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with each goal. These could include metrics like volunteer hours contributed, employee participation rates, impact measurements on the community, employee satisfaction, or skill development.
Be realistic about what you can achieve right now at your size and stage:
- If you’re at an early stage, a time donation program can often be just the founder(s) doing something good (e.g. serving on a board). If you aren’t ready to create a formal program, you at least want to create a policy that outlines what your founders are doing and inspires other employees to follow suit.
- If you’re at a later stage, perhaps you’re ready to take advantage of an event or larger movement to engage your employees, i.e. Earth Day or GivingTuesday.For example, a goal like “10 hours of volunteering per employee” and/or “80% of the team volunteering once annually” can be good metrics to get employees activated.
Consider employee growth and well being
Factor in how employee participation in volunteering aligns with their development and engagement. Outline how the program might contribute to their skill enhancement, morale, or sense of purpose at work.
Reflect on what your team is already doing. What charitable activities are your team members involved with? What events might be happening within the company, such as holiday drives or disaster relief efforts? Consider this template to survey employees to get a sense of their interests and existing commitments as an input into your goal-setting and program design processes.
Integrate Participation into Company Goals
In addition to creating your own program goals, it’s helpful to integrate participation and employee engagement into company goals as well. This should complement the existing goals and seek to improve employee engagement, productivity, and belonging.
● Atlassian’s Marketing and Customer Service teams were first to integrate volunteer participation into their OKRs, setting and meeting ambitious goals like ‘25 hours of volunteering per employee’ and ‘95% of the team volunteering once per year.’
● This was so successful at engaging employees, that Atlassian expanded it into a company-wide program, called “Plan Your Good.” They pitched it to executives to embed it within company OKRs, and over 80% of the company’s teams have incorporated it.
● To ensure its continued success, Atlassian’s social impact team has leveraged their Marketing-Analytics, Data Science, Design-Research & Insights Team to measure how employee participation is positively contributing to Atlassian’s corporate culture and furthering goals. They’ve also developed a dashboard for all employees to access their own data and report on their team participation.
● Executive Leadership support and participation helped drive the “Plan Your Good” initiative and OKR goal setting for teams.
“Not only are our employees able to meaningfully participate in initiatives that they’re passionate about outside of Atlassian, but we’ve seen incredible levels of engagement, productivity, and feelings of connection between team members within our company. This has been the proof we need to continue to embed our Time Pledge into our corporate and individual team goals.”
Impact Program Manager
Evolve Based On Your Company’s Size And Stage
Build a plan for your current company size, but also acknowledge that this will change as you grow. When you’re first starting off, it’s usually easiest to commit to only one or two organizations to volunteer with or a few structured company-led opportunities per quarter or year. Later, you can diversify and increase this number.
Determine your external impact goals
What external impact are you hoping to have on the organizations and communities your employees serve? To start, consider how your strategy might maximize the power of your team’s unique skills to address a specific need or build capacity in the social sector. Think about how you will measure the efficacy and impact of your volunteer work for your team members and the organizations you support, and why those metrics matter.
Aligning and measuring your company’s impact alongside the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is one approach that many companies take.
Outputs vs. outcomes
As your program becomes more robust, we recommend setting goals around both outputs (hours volunteered, often differentiated by direct service vs. skills-based, region, team, etc.) and outcomes. Goals related to outcomes should be tied to quantifiable impact targets of focused company-led programs (e.g. number of mentorships that led to a certain number or percentage of intern placements).
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Measure and track impact using performance indicators and metrics beyond outputs (VTO hours) alone. Start with setting goals at the executive team level and share impact out in a visual way. It’s great for employees to see individual, team, and whole company impact, as well as impact by cause.”
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Senior Director of Employee Volunteerism |
Consider Pairing Time with Other Assets
Often companies will pair a time pledge with product donations or small grants. This is an effective way to drive even greater impact. Some companies get creative with how they donate time. For example, if you need development resources in order to make your product usable for nonprofits, dedicating one engineer for a year could be your form of donating 1%, rather than giving all staff the option to volunteer. For companies who are service providers, your time IS your product. You might leverage your pro-bono services as your product pledge and couple this with a VTO policy that empowers employees to leverage their time in other ways to support other causes they care about.
Build alignment and consensus
Communicate these goals and secure buy-in from stakeholders, leadership, and employees. Alignment and shared understanding of these objectives are crucial for successful program implementation.
Regularly review and adapt
Regularly review and evaluate these goals. As the program progresses, you might need to adjust or refine the objectives based on the insights and feedback gathered from participants and impacted communities.
By having well-defined business goals for your corporate volunteering program, you'll not only ensure alignment with the company's mission but also measure the program's success in contributing to both business and social impact objectives.
Alicia_Schmidt
VP, Member Impact, Pledge 1%
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Last update:
03-03-2024
04:18 PM
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