Cor­po­rate Vol­un­teer­ing: Doing good and talk­ing about it

Mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, both for your own employ­ees and for soci­ety as a whole — that’s what Cor­po­rate Vol­un­teer­ing is all about. But which projects make sense? And what needs to be con­sid­ered for a suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion? We pro­vide answers.

Goals — What good is good enough?

With their vol­un­tary engage­ment, employ­ees give some­thing back to soci­ety. But what actu­al­ly? Nar­row­ing the field of engage­ment is a chal­lenge, but at the same time it offers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring the cor­po­rate strat­e­gy back to mind.

Plan­ning and resources — Who are we and if so, how many?

Cor­po­rate Vol­un­teer­ing includes more than just the annu­al Social Day. Depend­ing on the objec­tive and tar­get group, oth­er for­mats may be more appro­pri­ate. From one-day events to a six-month place­ment, any­thing is possible.

The crux of any action plan­ning is the ques­tion of resources. Many non­prof­it projects quick­ly inter­fere with oper­a­tional process­es, raise tax and insur­ance issues and have to be dealt with accord­ing­ly. Effort and costs guaranteed.

On the oth­er hand, it is such projects in par­tic­u­lar that have the chance to make a real, prov­able dif­fer­ence: The two-hour work assign­ment is less sus­tain­able than a long-term engage­ment pro­gram. So any­one who is seri­ous about social respon­si­bil­i­ty should not be deterred by high­er costs.

Impact — The search for KPIs?

The ques­tion of what can and should be mea­sured and how depends heav­i­ly on the objec­tives and design of indi­vid­ual mea­sures: The food bags at the Day of Car­ing can be count­ed and com­mu­ni­cat­ed as a total num­ber. The changes that the men­tor­ing pro­gramme has brought about in indi­vid­ual young peo­ple, on the oth­er hand, require much more dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed eval­u­a­tion instru­ments.

Match­ing — The nee­dle in a haystack?

For Cor­po­rate Vol­un­teer­ing to suc­ceed, suit­able orga­ni­za­tions are need­ed to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for vol­un­teers. Let’s clear up a mis­con­cep­tion right away: Most of the orga­ni­za­tions are high­ly pro­fes­sion­al and speak the same lan­guage as businesses!

Region­al orga­ni­za­tions par­tic­u­lar­ly can pro­vide real added val­ue — they know local needs very well, already have an infra­struc­ture for cor­po­rate engage­ment and offer employ­ees a high degree of identification.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion — con­stant drip­ping wears the stone?

Report­ing well and, above all, con­tin­u­ous­ly on Cor­po­rate Vol­un­teer­ing pro­grams is fun­da­men­tal to its suc­cess. Patience will be need­ed to legit­imize the project inter­nal­ly to super­vi­sors, to moti­vate col­leagues and to win over man­agers. Only then can cul­tur­al change be achieved.