Tele-Volunteering Allows Corporate Volunteers to Give Back from Their Desks

February 25, 2015 | Read Time: 2 minutes

If you’ve worked at a nonprofit long enough, you’ve probably heard some version of the following: “I’d love to volunteer if I could find the time.”

So, how do you harness people’s good intentions without overburdening them?

One program offers a solution: Let people volunteer from their desks.

In 2002, the Illinois-based nonprofit Innovations for Learning started a program called TutorMate for corporate volunteerism. Once a week, volunteers spend 30 minutes on the phone with first- or second-graders, teaching them to read. The tutor and student use the same computer program, so the tutor can see what the student is reading as he or she listens along. They also use a common scheduling application that allows the tutor to pick which 30-minute block to reserve for a given week.

Corporate volunteers are working with students in 14 cities, including Detroit, Miami, and New York. Participating companies include AT&T, Bank of America, General Motors, and JPMorgan Chase.

“You want to minimize the impact on employee productivity, and you want to minimize the back-office support needed to promote and administer the program,” says Dan Weisberg, the program’s national director.

To do the latter, TutorMate provides all of the promotional materials companies use to advertise the program. They also provide staff who can answer volunteer questions so that company liaisons don’t, in Mr. Weisberg’s words, “have to become experts.”

He admits there are drawbacks to a volunteer program where so much of the activity takes place in isolation. It’s hard, for example, to build office camaraderie with such an arrangement.

“It’s not the most team-building type of program out there,” Mr. Weisberg says.

TutorMate tries to bridge that gap by encouraging offices to adopt a classroom, so that employees work with students who know each other. At the end of the semester, the tutors and students meet for an in-person party.

To find corporate partners, TutorMate uses “every trick in the book,” says Mr. Weisberg. That includes referrals from friends, referrals from school districts, and social-media outreach through Facebook and LinkedIn. Most companies have a person or team of people responsible for corporate social responsibility. In some cases, TutorMate contacts a company’s chief diversity officer, since the program tends to serve students from minority groups.

When contacting companies, TutorMate knows some will want a more hands-on experience. But for those who feel they can’t make a larger commitment, TutorMate offers an outlet: Even without changing physical location, volunteers can still escape the workaday world.

“It’s just such a joy to go from a budget meeting to a tutoring lesson with a second grader,” Mr. Weisberg says.