Why Setting Clear Goals Matters
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.
Key Considerations When Setting Goals
1. Align with Company Values and Mission
- Revisit your company’s core values to identify connections with social responsibility and employee engagement.
- Ensure your volunteering program complements broader business strategies. For example, a sustainability-focused company might prioritize environmental volunteering initiatives.
- Integrate volunteer participation into company objectives and key results (OKRs) to enhance engagement and accountability.
2. Set Specific, Measurable, and Realistic Targets
- Define what success looks like—enhanced employee engagement, improved team dynamics, increased brand reputation, foster community relations, develop employee skills, or address specific social issues? Be clear and specific about each objective.
- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with each goal. These could include:
- Volunteer hours contributed
- Employee participation rates
- Community impact metrics
- Employee satisfaction and skill development
- Be realistic about what you can achieve right at your size and stage:
- Early-stage: If you’re at an early stage, a time donation program can just the founder(s) doing something good (e.g. serving on a nonprofit 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.
- Growth-stage: If you’re at a later stage, you might be ready to take advantage of an event or larger movement to engage your employees like Earth Day or GivingTuesday. Structured goals, like "10 hours of volunteering per employee" or "80% employee participation annually” are a good way to get employees motivated
3. Consider Employee Growth and Well-Being
- Factor in how employee participation in volunteering 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? Leverage employee surveys to align volunteering opportunities with team interests and existing charitable activities.
4. 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.
- Example: Set a goal like "95% employee participation in volunteer activities annually."
- 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
5. Define 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.
- 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 |
6. Leverage Additional Resources for Greater Impact
- Often companies will combine time with other assets, such as product donations or grants, to amplify social contributions.
- Example: 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.
- Example: 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.
7. Secure Stakeholder Buy-In
- Communicate your impact program goals and secure buy-in from stakeholders, leadership, and employees. Alignment and shared understanding of these objectives is crucial for successful program implementation.
- Regularly review and evaluate your 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 setting clear goals, integrating volunteerism into corporate strategy, and leveraging both internal and external resources, companies can build a volunteer program that drives meaningful social impact, enhances employee engagement, and strengthens business objectives.
Alicia_Schmidt
VP, Member Impact, Pledge 1%
