Technology Helps Companies Do More to Encourage Employee Volunteerism

Companies are increasingly using their internal computer networks to persuade employees to volunteer —

making it faster and easier to recruit workers to help charities, administer service projects, and measure the effect that their volunteers are having.

Corporations are designing or purchasing software that allows their workers to find and register for volunteer opportunities, record their hours, and even request company grants for the charities they serve. Some systems also give employees tips on volunteering and tools they can use in their charity work.

Corporate officials who oversee volunteerism efforts hope that the new technology will encourage more people to give their time, cut down on the effort it takes to manage those volunteers, and allow employers to measure the impact of their charitable efforts.

“We were hearing anecdotal feedback about what a great time some of our employees had volunteering, but we didn’t have a way of capturing any information — where people were volunteering, their areas of interest, how many hours they were volunteering, the projects they were working on,” says Carrie Varoquiers, director of community relations at the McKesson Corporation, a health-care technology company in San Francisco.

Coordinating Volunteers

Since McKesson introduced the employee-volunteering section on its internal Web site in January, more than 2,000 of the company’s 23,000 staff members have registered.

The data the system is gathering will help the company tailor its volunteerism efforts to employees’ interests, says Ms. Varoquiers. For example, thus far the company has learned that its employees feel strongly about animal welfare, so McKesson might design animal-related volunteer projects.

Hard numbers about volunteers might make it easier to justify the cost of the volunteer program to company officials, says Marcia Argyris, president of the McKesson Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm. “We can’t just pretend that we’re out in la-la land doing this,” she says. “We have to relate this to the business.”

Starlette Balsoma, a marketing employee who on her own time coordinates volunteer activities at Xerox’s Wilsonville, Ore., office, says that online volunteer management has increased participation in the company’s volunteer activities and made her job as coordinator a lot easier. For example, she says, when she first took on her role, spreading the word about a volunteer project meant creating and posting fliers — which her colleagues tended to ignore — and coordinating sign-ups by hand.

But the technology still posed a problem, Ms. Balsoma says: Employees in the manufacturing division don’t have access to e-mail or the Internet at work. As an experiment, Xerox has installed three monitors in the cafeteria that display information about forthcoming volunteer activities and photographs of past projects.

“The monitors have helped us reach a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t be reached,” says Ms. Balsoma. She also believes the photos of co-workers enjoying service activities are helping recruit new volunteers. The company is watching the results of the experiment and thinking about installing the monitors in other offices.

Tips and Tools

Corporations are turning to their internal Web sites for more than just the administrative tasks involved with their volunteer programs. Some companies are also offering information and tools designed to improve their employees’ volunteer experiences.

Twenty-nine companies, including the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Coca-Cola Company, and Target, use VolunteerMatch Corporate, a service that allows the companies to offer a database of more than 30,000 volunteer opportunities through their Web sites. Created in 2000 by VolunteerMatch, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that uses the Internet to link people with volunteer opportunities, the service also gives companies the tools they need to administer their volunteer programs online.

To use the service, corporations pay a fee based on the number of employees they have and the amount of customization they ask VolunteerMatch to provide. Annual fees start at $5,000 and climb as high as six figures, according to Luisa Perticucci, VolunteerMatch’s group director of business services. In 2003, fees from participating companies totaled more than $1-million, and the organization says the corporate Web sites helped match more than 14,000 volunteers with charities last year.

VolunteerMatch Corporate has been a good addition to Nike’s volunteer program because it gives employees a way to get involved without having to talk with their supervisor or the company’s volunteer coordinator, says Mary Roney, global employee involvement manager at the Beaverton, Ore., company.

“Giving your time can be very, very personal, and sometimes people don’t really want to call and ask a particular person,” she says.

Representing the Company

In November, the IBM Corporation, in Armonk, N.Y., introduced a new section of its intranet, On Demand Community, that offers employees tools to help them be better volunteers.

For example, an employee who wanted to make science presentations to schoolchildren could go to the site for lesson-plan ideas. In addition to listing experiments and other hands-on science activities, the site also offers advice on classroom management, information on cognitive and behavioral development for kids of specific ages, and even a reminder to find out how long each class period lasts.

“We want IBMers not to be seen as a burden or somebody who needs to be taken care of by the school or the not-for-profit, but somebody who’s really prepared and walks in and can make a difference,” says Robin Willner, IBM’s director of corporate community relations.

Ms. Willner says that the new site is part of the company’s effort to encourage its workers to think about how they can bring the company’s skills and technology to bear on their service work. For example, she says, while company employees may choose to prepare and serve food at a local soup kitchen, they might be able to make more of a difference to the soup kitchen by helping it develop a technology plan. If an employee decides to do that, the site offers a technology-planning volunteer primer, among other aids.

Cisco Systems, in San Jose, Calif., is also encouraging its employees to think about how to use their professional skills in their volunteer work — and, like IBM, the company is employing its intranet in the effort.

Cisco is inviting nonprofit organizations to post their volunteer opportunities directly on the company’s new Volunteer Connection System. Charities, particularly ones that are not located near a Cisco office, can also submit volunteer tasks that employee volunteers can complete online.

Employees, in turn, enter a profile into the system that includes what type of organization they’re interested in working with and the skills they want to use in the assignment. The system then searches the database to look for appropriate matches.

Says Michael Yutrzenka, executive director of the Cisco Foundation, “We feel that the best way to get our employees engaged is to make it as easy as possible for them to find the right kind of opportunities.”