Company Gives Money to Charities Where Employees Volunteer

For the last two years, Janice Laing, a part-time information analyst at Nationwide Mutual

Insurance Company, in Columbus, Ohio, has volunteered at least once a week at a soup kitchen run by Help House Community Outreach Center, a nonprofit organization that helps 30,000 homeless and poor people a year in rural London, Ohio.

Among her duties is welcoming and registering people who visit the center to receive food, clothing, medicine, and other necessities. It’s a good position to be in, she says, because it allows her a chance to get to know those who the center helps.

“The people we see are the ones who are falling through the cracks,” says Ms. Laing. “Many are employed but only making $7 an hour, many are disabled, and many come because they don’t qualify for the government-assistance programs that are in place.”

Last fall, Ms. Laing was offered another opportunity to help her favorite charity, this time financially — thanks to her employer.

Nationwide had announced it would start an employee-volunteerism program at its Columbus headquarters, in the hopes of eventually expanding the effort to the company’s 676 affiliates. Ms. Laing said she jumped at the chance to be one of the first Nationwide employees to earn grant money for Help House.

Through the On Your Side Volunteer Network, the Nationwide Foundation provides $100 grants to organizations for every 25 hours of volunteer service contributed by a Nationwide employee.

The program supports only charities that have registered with the Internal Revenue Service. Each employee can earn up to $200 per year in grant money, and can also earn a half day of paid time off for each 25 hours of volunteer work, up to two full paid vacation days a year.

Since the program started 11 months ago, Ms. Laing has earned a total of $400 in grant money for Help House from two grants she earned between September and December 2005, and from another two grants she has earned for the charity since January. Delores Heilman, the charity’s director, said the money from Nationwide pays for food the charity distributes to needy people.

1,861 Volunteers

Ms. Laing got involved in the On Your Side Volunteer Network program in its earliest stages but, since the start of the program in Columbus, the company has expanded the effort to its offices in other cities.

Nationwide officially established the volunteer program in June at corporate branches in major cities across the country, opening the program up to all its nearly 35,000 employees. So far, 1,861 Nationwide volunteers have earned a total of $64,600 in grant money for more than 200 nonprofit organizations.

Local chapters of the American Red Cross, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Court Appointed Special Advocates, plus Catholic Social Services, the Mid Ohio Food Bank, and many other groups throughout the country have benefited from the grants, according to Mike Switzer, a Nationwide spokesman.

Nationwide employees have spent 17,294 hours of their own time volunteering at charities, and have earned a total of 156 days off, since March 2006, when the company started offering paid days off as a way to stimulate volunteering.

The On Your Side grants are a small part of Nationwide’s philanthropy. The company last year gave away about $15-million, and in June it pledged $50-million over the next decade to the Columbus Children’s Hospital for a new building.

However, the volunteer network grants are an important part of Nationwide’s effort to attract and retain good employees. In surveys, Nationwide employees said they wanted the company to support them in their efforts to volunteer at causes that the workers chose, not at causes that the company selected. In the past, the company has encouraged employees to volunteer at local schools and assist in other community causes picked by the company.

Aside from the money Nationwide provides, the company has aided charities in other ways. For instance, Ms. Laing says she has used skills learned at her job to attract new funds to Help House.

Along with dishing out food at the soup kitchen, Ms. Laing puts in about 25 hours a week tracking how many people visit Help House and how often they return. She has collected data on how many clients have children, the number of meals served in Help House’s dining room, and the amount of food and clothing distributed from the pantries.

Ms. Laing has assembled that data in a detailed PowerPoint presentation illustrating every aspect of the center’s operations, which the charity uses to recruit supporters.

Ms. Heilman says she doubts that Help House, which operates on a $40,000 annual budget and relies solely on volunteers, could afford to pay someone to keep track of the group’s data, which Ms. Laing does free.

While Ms. Laing’s analytical work helped increase the group’s efficiency, her PowerPoint presentation was a key reason Help House was able to win money from the local United Way, funds Ms. Heilman has sought for three years. The United Way is now awarding the center $12,000 to build cooking facilities in the group’s new building.

The skills that Nationwide volunteers can offer to charities are important to organizations that don’t have enough staff members to do hands-on work, like cleaning up a neighborhood park, or working with a needy child, says Janet Jackson, chief executive of the United Way of Central Ohio, in Columbus. Some charities, she says, are so thinly staffed they don’t even have enough time to recruit volunteers.

“They’re limited in size, they’re overworked, and as dollars are being cut, they’re going to cut staff rather than cut programming, but the need for services is growing.”

So when a company like Nationwide gives workers paid time off and other incentives to volunteer, Ms. Jackson says, charities get badly needed volunteers without having to waste resources trying to attract them.

Helping Others

Among the employees who have started volunteering through the On Your Side program is Jeff Barkey, a recent college graduate who studied business management at Buena Vista University, in Storm Lake, Iowa. He took a customer-service job at Nationwide’s Des Moines branch four months ago. Mr. Barkey, the father of a toddler, said he wanted a way to get involved in charity work that would match his stage of life.

“Being straight out of college, I don’t have any money to donate, so I at least want to give something back to the community,” says Mr. Barkey. “Because, who knows, someday I might need help or my child might need it.” He eventually chose to volunteer at the Animal Rescue League of Des Moines, and at Heart Connection Children’s Cancer Programs, a Des Moines group that relies on approximately 400 volunteers to help organize summer camps and other activities to help children with cancer and their families.

Mr. Barkey started working with both groups last month. He works with the local humane society helping to teach children how to care for pets, and has volunteered at a charity car wash that raised more than $2,000 for the Heart Connection. He plans to help the latter group with administrative tasks, which he hopes will sharpen his business skills.

“There’s so much I still need to learn in the corporate world,” he says. “I have some skills that I can bring to the table, and many, many more that I believe I’ll learn.”

Though encouraging employees to sharpen their skills while doing good is bound to have some benefit inside Nationwide’s offices, it is not yet clear if the program will enhance the company’s image with consumers.

The company has begun to mention the volunteer grants in some of its advertising and has let local charities know about the new effort, but has not measured whether it is making any difference to the company’s public profile.

Nor has Nationwide surveyed its own employees to see if the On Your Side Volunteer Network program has bolstered morale or had any effect on turnover.

However, Chad Jester, president of the Nationwide Foundation, says the program is likely to be especially appealing to employees in the early stage of their careers, because they say they like Nationwide’s willingness to support the causes that are important to workers, regardless of whether the corporation as a whole shares that passion.

Mr. Jester sees efforts to focus on the interests of employees as essential to the success of large companies: “To have really great corporate citizenship in the future, companies should look at individual passions as well as corporate focus, and concentrate on how the two can complement each other.”