Taking a strategic approach
As corporate community involvement and employer supported volunteering become more established, most employers are taking an increasingly strategic approach to their volunteer programmes. Volunteer commitments are expected to relate not just to the company’s CSR strategy, but to its broader business objectives. Volunteering is treated like any other business activity, with defined goals, business plans and evaluation mechanisms.
The Points of Light Foundation, a US organisation advocating and mobilising volunteering, says that effective volunteering programmes must do three things:
- Meet company priorities
- Address employee interests
- Target real community needs
This framework provides a starting point. In practical terms, this approach involves:
- Setting objectives related to the benefits the organisation seeks to achieve (employee development, contributing to the community, enhanced reputation, cutting recruitment and team-building costs etc)
- Identifying issues to work on that are in some way related to your own organisation’s activities – for example, safety education for insurance companies, or business and financial mentoring for banks
- Aligning with the objectives of your intended community partner – there has to be a win-win
- Defining joint goals and measures of success
- Thinking about how long a commitment is required. Will you be able to sustain the necessary contribution? On the other hand, will a one-off event hold any benefit – for you or the community?
- Monitoring and evaluating the outcomes to decide whether to continue when a project reaches a natural end or break-point
According to MORI’s 2003 survey of community involvement in the City of London for Heart of the City, the most popular causes for support were:
- Children and youth (39% of businesses were working in this area)
- Disability (32%)
- Education and training (25%)
- Poverty relief (22%)
- Overseas aid (18%)
- Arts and culture (17%)
MORI has found that these areas fluctuate over the years, with children and youth becoming increasingly important and the environment dropping down the list.
Employer supported volunteering can cover a huge range of activities, ranging from small-scale one-off team challenges to major international investments of time, effort and resources. However most have some consistent elements.
Firstly, they tend to focus on local activities , both for practical reasons and to ensure volunteers make most difference to the immediate communities they work in.
See these government websites for further information www.communities.gov.uk
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/thirdsector
Secondly, they tend to be heavily led by staff , either with proposals originating from staff or by involving staff in local committees that decide which projects to support.
Finally, increasingly, companies take a skills-based approach , identifying what talents and know-how they contain, and how they can make them available most effectively to their local communities.
www.bcconnections.org.uk/ this website has very helpful information on how to take a strategic approach when looking at working in partnership.
Involving staff
For an employer supported volunteering programme to succeed, it helps to have an enthusiastic workforce. Employees will want to be involved in generating ideas and organising activities, and by involving all your employees they will feel ownership of the programme.
According to Business in the Community’s ECI+ 2000 membership survey, 84% of respondents consult and involve their staff in developing their employer supported volunteering programmes. Involve your employees by asking them the following questions:
- What volunteering is already taking place?
- What issues and causes are employees interested in supporting?
- What skills would employees like to offer to the community?
- Are there any issues that employees would prefer not to be associated with?
- Would employees be more interested in continuing involvement or a one- off event?
- Would employees prefer to volunteer at a place near to home or to work and do they have access to transport if there is a distance factor?
- Would employees prefer to be involved in team or individual activities?
Sometimes this staff-led approach can be formalised into a permanent feature of community involvement strategy. For example, Abbey has created 20 local staff charity groups including retired staff and local charity stakeholders, which meet regularly to consider support for charities in their local communities.
The skills-based approach
Developing volunteer projects that utilise the distinctive competencies and skills of your organisation and its employees will also bring added benefits. Increasingly, organisations as diverse as universities, international banks, local businesses and local authorities are seeking opportunities to put their knowledge to work for the wider benefit of the community.
Taking a skills-based approach involves identifying your organisation’s particular areas of expertise and thinking creatively about how local community and voluntary organisations could put them to use. There may be a huge range of opportunities, for example writing business plans and reviewing business operations, supporting marketing and communications, advising on legal issues or providing IT support.
Volunteering may also create opportunities to bring together different skills and functions that don’t usually work together – what Barclays calls ‘joined-up volunteering’ – to help create new bonds between different parts of the organisation.
Ways of working
There are a huge range of different kinds of working relationship to choose from – deciding which projects to get involved with will depend partly on what kind of commitment you can make. Possibilities identified by Business in the Community include:
- Regular but low-level time commitment (e.g. 1-2 hours per week)
- One-off team challenge events
- Full-time staff secondments
- Individual part-time assignments to undertake a specific project
- Management committee, trustee or non-executive positions (e.g. school governor, charity treasurer)
Organisations starting out in volunteering may find it useful to consult a local broker, such as your local volunteer centre). Brokers will help provide both strategic advice – what kind of opportunities are right for you and how much resource will they require – and guidance on particular organisations to work with and projects to support.
KPMG
KPMG has been running an employer supported volunteering programme since 1995. Its CSR community focus is on education and enhancing social inclusion, in line with staff preferences highlighted in a 2000 Mori poll. In 2005 KPMG surveyed volunteers to make sure that they still thought that KPMG were supporting the right sort of community programmes – more than 97 percent believed that KPMG was right to concentrate on these areas.
There are two strands to the community involvement activity; community investment programmes which focus on employee volunteering, and a programme of charitable giving.
The level of commitment and nature of programmes are varied to reflect the work needs of staff and are divided into five areas: Mentoring, Employability, Enterprise, Leadership and Team Challenges.
Volunteer numbers continue to rise, in 2004/05 35% of KPMG’s staff volunteered through the working day.
KPMG in the UK is a founding member of the Number Partners consortium, which is part of mentoring opportunities that help enable staff to support pupils' numeracy skills in primary schools. The project was developed to support the National Numeracy Strategy and the National Curriculum.
Employability focuses on fighting social exclusion. One of the programmes is “Ready to Go”, a pre-employment training initiative helping ex-homeless people find their way back into work, together with Business Action on Homelessness, Barclays, Marks and Spencer and Marsh. Enterprise encompasses a number of programmes the main focus being with the Prince's Trust Business Mentoring start-up programme.
