#15 Volunteering Can Boost Your Bottom Line

Volunteering is the oldest and perhaps purest form of corporate social responsibility.  Giving something back; not just to charities and communities but also to employees.

To ensure it becomes a pillar of purposeful business in the present day, rather than a relic of the CSR era, we need to take a new approach to volunteering.

One that creates value for all involved - as shown in the case studies below.

A purpose-led, skills-based approach also leads to better outcomes for the company and can generate measurable improvements to financial performance.

Here's how...

6 min read

Lead with Purpose

The first and most important step is to create a strong sense of purpose, shared by everyone across your organisation.

This is the platform for successfully linking positive impact to financial performance for any ESG initiative, and it is the same with volunteering.

Other editions (such as #4 and #5) cover this in more detail, but in short: purpose is at the intersection of your commercial strengths and societal impact.

Painting Fences

The traditional form of volunteering many of us will be familiar with is the litter-picking, fence-painting type.

More about getting out of the office, bonding with our teammates in a different environment, and hopefully doing some good at the same time.

This does not necessarily need to be abolished or consigned to the past.

Many non-profits rely on this form of volunteering; it adds great value to them, if it is done properly.

And it can still be a rewarding experience for staff if it means something to them.

The key is for a company to do this in a purposeful way.

For example: litter-picking is a great choice for a consumer products company that uses recycled materials or plastic-free packaging - it's an impactful way of showing employees (and customers) why it cares so much about sustainability.

Encourage employees to choose causes that align with your purpose, whilst allowing them to pursue what is important and meaningful to them personally.

Skills-Based Volunteering

This involves employees using their professional expertise to help a non-profit by addressing a skills gap it would otherwise struggle to fill.

It's important to carefully match the skills of your team with the needs of a charity.

An edgy creative agency taking-over a hospice's social media for a week may result in some brilliant content, but it might also scare-off important donors.

Take the time to find the right fit: be guided by your company’s purpose and align your team’s skills to the charity’s needs.

Skills-based volunteering requires more time investment and deeper partnerships, but doing this well creates huge value for all involved: non-profits and local communities, as well as employees and their companies.

Here are two excellent case studies of purpose-led, skills-based volunteering:

COOK

Purveyor of small-batch frozen meals with home-cooked love and flavour, COOK was one of the first B Corps in the UK.

I love this company - not just because their products can be a life-saver at dinner time with young kids, but because of how deeply its purpose is infused into everything it does, and how it translates into financial performance.

More on this another time - back to volunteering...

COOK has a range of high-impact initiatives, providing millions of school meals to children in the world's poorest countries and supporting those in need closer to home.

It has a long-standing partnership with a local church-based charity, helping its community kitchen provide free meals.

They kitted-out the church kitchen with freezers and regularly send end-of-batch leftovers, which also reduces food waste.

And every Friday, two members of the COOK team make the short journey to the community kitchen to help prepare lunch. 

The co-founder and some of the team have also supplied and cooked Christmas dinner at the church in recent years.

It's a great example of a company using the skills of its employees (as well as its products) to support a local non-profit, in perfect alignment with its purpose of "nourishing people and planet".

IBM

In 2008 IBM sought to create a Peace Corps for the corporate world.

IBM Service Corps has since delivered over 1,500 projects in more than 40 countries, at an estimated commercial value of over $100m.

Supporting NGOs in emerging markets, 'IBMers' apply their technical and business expertise to help address social challenges, ranging from education and economic development to healthcare access and aligning with its purpose of being "the catalyst that makes the world work better."

The program has been widely praised for the level of skill-based support it brings to non-profits, making a lasting impact that goes beyond traditional volunteering initiatives.

IBM, also receives "a significant return on its investment": the Service Corps has become a strategic tool for leadership development and brand enhancement, demonstrating how corporate volunteer programs can drive both community impact and business performance.

The Human Element

Beyond the impact on non-profits and the communities they serve, volunteering has a powerful and positive effect on the participating employees.

The human brain is hard-wired to help others, and we receive a whole range of benefits to our physical health and mental wellbeing from volunteering, as explored in this TED talk.

A recent study by William Fleming, research fellow at Oxford university’s Wellbeing Research Centre, analysed survey data from 46,000 employees across 233 organisations.

Across 90 different wellbeing initiatives included in the study, volunteering had the highest overall participation rate and was the only workplace intervention found to improve wellbeing at an individual level.

(Sadly, this is not good news for free yoga sessions and mindfulness apps...)

Linking Impact to Financial Performance

Many studies have demonstrated clear links between volunteering and employee engagement, and the positive impact this has on individual job performance.

77% of respondents in a Deloitte survey said that company-sponsored volunteer activities are essential to employee well-being.

And companies with highly-engaged staff are 23% more profitable on average, according to a meta analysis by Gallup totalling more than 3 million employees.

According to a Project ROI study, a well-designed corporate social responsibility program can increase employee productivity by 13% and revenue by 20%.

Furthermore, as explored in edition #14, purpose-led marketing can attract customers that buy-into your mission and values; it is these customers that spend more, stick around for longer and are worth 23% more on average, according to another Gallup study.

There are clear links between effective volunteering programs, employee engagement and performance. And this of course leads to stronger financial performance for the company overall, as explained in a recent FT article titled 'Companies reap bigger dividends from happier staff'.

This should not come as a surprise, but the vast majority of companies are not approaching impact initiatives like volunteering through this lens.

To ensure such initiatives create a measurable improvement to financial performance, they need to be planned and executed like any other key project or workstream in a business.

There needs to be clear objectives and detailed action plans to reach them, with a set of KPIs to help track progress along the way.

Here's some tips on how your company can implement this:

Next Steps

1. Align with Purpose: Revisit your company's purpose and identify volunteering initiatives that would be a good fit.

2. Develop a Hypothesis and Set Targets: Estimate the impact volunteering will have on employee wellbeing and how that will translate to performance in different areas. 

   Unless you are already implementing this way, you will need to begin with a hypothesis, e.g. "we think this scheme will increase engagement by x% and we expect this will translate to y% improvement in Metric A and z% increase in Metric B"

3. Track, Refine and Optimise: Continuously monitor the impact of your volunteering initiatives. Are you seeing improvements in employee engagement? Is that translating into measurable performance gains?

   Regularly review these results and refine your approach, focusing on the initiatives that demonstrate the strongest link between purpose, impact, and financial performance.

The journey towards a better way of doing business

We are on the cusp of a new paradigm of responsible business, and helping impactful companies pair purpose with profit will accelerate the shift.

I believe this holds the key to solving many of our greatest challenges and inspiring positive change throughout society.

If you can think of two or three others that would find this newsletter helpful, please invite them to join at this link.

Thanks for your support.