Offering ways for employees to give back is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a necessity. In fact, 71% of employees now expect their employers to support philanthropic initiatives. If your business doesn’t provide any charitable giving or volunteering benefits, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities to recruit, engage, and retain team members.
Fortunately, launching a successful employee volunteering program is easier than you may think. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:
- What are Employee Volunteering Programs?
- The Proven Benefits of Employee Volunteering
- Employee Volunteer Program Examples for Inspiration
- How to Design an Employee Volunteering Program: 6 Steps
- Expert Tips for Boosting Employee Volunteer Engagement
- Cheat Sheet: 15 Ideas for Your Employee Volunteering Program
Whether you’re just getting started with employee volunteering or are looking for ways to expand your program, this guide will help you create a more meaningful impact.
What are Employee Volunteering Programs?
Employee volunteer programs are corporate initiatives designed to empower team members to volunteer, whether individually, in small groups, or as a full team.
Companies can offer a range of volunteering opportunities and benefits for employees to provide local communities with corporate support. From planning on-the-clock team outings to bestowing corporate grants on nonprofits that employees volunteer with, there are plenty of ways to empower your employees to give back with their time.
The Proven Benefits of Employee Volunteering
Volunteering for a good cause changes lives, but it doesn’t just benefit the people you’re helping. Launching an employee volunteering program also comes with several well-established benefits for your business.
Beyond assisting the community and making a difference for important causes, these programs help your company:
- Boost morale and improve company culture. Volunteer programs that incorporate team members’ interests can improve employee morale, workplace culture, and overall brand perception. When employees know that their employer lives by the company’s values and actively supports their own charitable interests, they develop more trust and loyalty.
- Provide mental health and wellness benefits. According to one research study, volunteering is the only corporate initiative that actually improves individual employees’ well-being. Volunteering regularly helps team members be healthier, happier, and more productive in their day-to-day lives.
- Increase employee satisfaction and retention. Happier, healthier employees who trust their employers are more likely to stick around long-term, reducing costs associated with turnover and hiring. Plus, certain volunteer programs provide opportunities for employees to develop important skills and further their careers, which can boost employee satisfaction even more.
- Meet other CSR goals. Employee volunteering is a great addition to your company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts (which 81% of employees value!). Depending on the kinds of work they do, volunteers can help your business generate more positive environmental, ethical, and economic impacts on the communities your company operates in.
The benefits don’t end here! When you maintain and promote engaging employee volunteering programs, your business can improve everything from recruitment to customers’ perceptions of your brand.
Employee Volunteer Program Examples for Inspiration
What does employee volunteering actually look like? Images of cleaning up your local park or working in a food pantry may come to mind, but some programs encompass so much more. Let’s explore three real-life employee volunteer program examples that we love.
Tito’s Vodka: Community Garden Support
Tito’s has a robust corporate philanthropy program called Love, Tito’s, which includes components for giving, volunteering, and sustainability research funding. Its employee volunteer program, Block to Block, focuses on partnering with local nonprofits to create and upgrade community gardens across the country. The company has worked with sustainability and food-based nonprofits in almost 20 different states to nurture community spaces.
The company’s website explains how the Block to Block program makes fresh produce more accessible while “reconnecting communities through transformative volunteer projects.”
RingCentral: Unlimited Volunteer Time Off
At business communications company RingCentral, corporate responsibility means prioritizing diverse hiring practices, employee-driven charitable giving, and volunteerism. Its generous employee volunteer program includes funding causes that team members volunteer for with Dollars for Doers grants and unlimited volunteer time off.
In 2023, RingCentral and its employees volunteered for over 200 hours and donated $424,000 to charitable organizations.
Mission Wealth: Annual Volunteer Events at Firm Retreats
Mission Wealth, a financial services company, offers several different opportunities for employees to volunteer with corporate support. They can organize local team volunteering events, use volunteer time off to give back during work hours, and participate in annual firm-wide volunteer events at company retreats. In recent years, Mission Wealth employees have cleaned up community parks, taught financial literacy programs, and more.
According to its website, Mission Wealth employees “average more than 400 hours of volunteering across 120 nonprofits” each year.
How to Design an Employee Volunteering Program: 6 Steps
Now that you’ve seen some examples, let’s break down the steps to creating an impactful employee volunteering program for your company.
1. Gather employees’ input to gauge interest.
Since one of the top benefits of volunteer programs is boosting employee engagement (and because your employees will ultimately be the drivers of your program), it’s vital to consider employee opinions from the very beginning. Before you decide on a specific cause to support or which type of volunteering to offer, survey your employees.
Ask about their charitable interests and what kinds of volunteering they already participate in. Include questions on your survey like:
- How can we best support your volunteering activity?
- Would you prefer to volunteer alone, with your team, or as a full company?
- Did any previous employers have any volunteer programs you really enjoyed participating in? Please describe the program.
Gathering firsthand input will help you put the employee experience first, prioritize what they find important, and give them a voice in decision-making.
2. Choose employee volunteer programs to offer.
With employees’ preferences in mind, determine which opportunities your program should initially offer. You can always add offerings or shift gears once your employee volunteer program is up and running, so don’t feel pressured to choose a perfect option.
Start with one or two of these common types of employee volunteering, and build out your program from there:
- Direct and indirect service volunteering: Your employees can volunteer directly with an organization, such as by mentoring students or planting trees, or they can volunteer behind the scenes. Indirect volunteering may look like preparing meal kits for unhoused individuals or writing messages to hospitalized children. Either way, your employees perform some kind of service for a nonprofit’s beneficiaries.
- Virtual volunteer opportunities: If your company hires many remote employees, consider connecting them with fully online volunteer opportunities. They might transcribe written documents for a cultural museum, moderate the chat during a nonprofit’s virtual fundraising event, or compile online resources for a free job training program.
- Skills-based volunteering: Most nonprofits don’t have access to the professional resources or qualified talent to function effectively. A donation of professional expertise by skilled employees (such as marketing support or legal aid services) can help fill those gaps.
- Team volunteer outings: Whether this looks like a company-wide volunteer day or small teams volunteering locally, team outings are often employees’ favorite way to volunteer. At these events, they get to help the community while building relationships and improving their teamwork skills.
- Dollars for Doers grants: Also called volunteer grants, this type of employee volunteering program involves your company donating funds to an organization after one of your employees volunteers with them. You might offer $100 grants for every 20 hours someone volunteers, for example.
- Volunteer time off (VTO): Many employees want to volunteer more, but they just don’t have the time in their busy schedules. By providing VTO days, your company can help individuals pursue volunteering activities whenever it works best for them.
No matter which offerings you choose, set specific guidelines for each one. Determine which employees can participate (full-time, part-time, retired), what kinds of causes they can support, and how many outings, grants, or VTO days they can request.
3. Determine and invest in necessary resources.
Next, ensure you have the personnel and resources to run a volunteering program effectively. For instance, establish a formal leadership or governance structure for your employee volunteer program before launching it.
An organized structure will extend the reach of your staff, provide development opportunities for employees, and sustain the momentum of continually increasing community impact. Most effective employee volunteer programs have some type of leadership—either committees or individual champions—to support the program’s management and operations at a local or regional level and scale the program’s initiatives over time
You’ll also need corporate philanthropy software that streamlines program management and helps you track success. Invest in a tool with features like intuitive hours tracking, self-service event registration, employee volunteering profiles, and more to make participation easy. Uncommon Giving includes all of these capabilities and an engaging Generosity Feed for employees—plus a user-friendly mobile app and support for all types of corporate donations.
4. Give your program a name and mission.
Once you’ve got all the logistics sorted out, think about how you’ll discuss your new employee volunteering program with team members and the public. Write a mission statement for the program and choose a compelling name that gets to the heart of your volunteer efforts. This will make it easier for employees to connect with the program. Plus, it’ll help you highlight your CSR efforts and their impact to customers later.
If you need ideas, get inspired by the real-life examples discussed above and other companies in your sector.
5. Launch and announce your employee volunteering program.
Celebrate the launch of your new employee volunteer program and encourage team members to start participating as soon as possible. Boost engagement by hosting a launch meeting, sending out informational messages, and having managers discuss volunteer opportunities one-on-one with their directs.
6. Measure program results.
As employees start volunteering, keep an eye on participation and your program’s impact on nonprofits. Consider tracking:
- Employee participation rates for each volunteer outing and program
- Volunteer hours logged by individual, team, and event
- Number of volunteer projects or events completed
- Employee satisfaction rates for each type of volunteer program offered
- Volunteer impact metrics, like the monetary value of a volunteer hour
- The estimated cost of services donated by employees
A good corporate giving and volunteering platform will make it easy to track, monitor, and analyze these metrics. Use custom reports and dashboards to gauge your company’s charitable impact and determine which opportunities resonate most with employees. Adjust your offerings based on participation data and qualitative feedback to improve your program’s success.
Expert Tips for Boosting Employee Volunteer Engagement
While most employees want to volunteer, they need a little encouragement to take full advantage of your volunteer programs. Use these tips to inspire more participation.
Simplify participation with corporate volunteering software.
Look for a corporate volunteerism platform with a user-friendly mobile app so it’s as easy as possible for employees to get involved in programs. Some solutions also offer personalization and gamification features to boost participation further.
For instance, Uncommon Giving lets volunteers:
- See upcoming volunteer events, details, and lists of employees already signed up.
- Register for events and log hours directly through our mobile app.
- Share volunteer events with their friends and team members.
- Create and promote their own volunteer events on the app.
- Add their own photos from volunteering efforts.
- Keep up with nonprofit social media posts via their Generosity Feed.
- See their impact on their favorite causes from a personalized dashboard.
All of these features will help your company engage employees and inspire them to volunteer more often.
Give employees more flexibility.
The more flexible you can make your volunteer program, the better. Just imagine all the diverse interests and perspectives your employees have—there’s not one perfect volunteer opportunity for your entire company. Individual team members will want to support different causes, participate in different ways, and volunteer on different timelines. Meet their needs by providing as much flexibility as you can.
This might mean setting less restrictive guidelines for volunteer programming or offering VTO in addition to team-wide volunteer outings. Instead of providing a list of nonprofits that employees can volunteer with, for example, you could allow them to support any registered 501(c)(3) organization.
Ask about nonprofits’ needs.
Ultimately, your employees will be more excited to volunteer if they know it will make a real impact on the causes they care about. There are several ways you can demonstrate this impact to employees, but one quick strategy is to simply ask local nonprofits how your company can support them. If an organization specifies why it needs volunteers and how pivotal they are to a certain program or initiative, more employees may participate.
Cheat Sheet: 15 Ideas for Your Employee Volunteering Program
Excited to launch your volunteering program but still not sure what it should look like? We’ve compiled fifteen of our favorite ideas here:
- Dollars for Doers grants to nonprofits that employees regularly volunteer with
- Team volunteering outings, such as a tree planting day or serving Thanksgiving meals at a soup kitchen
- Skills-based volunteer opportunities that enable employees to build professional skills while giving back to the community
- Volunteer time off (VTO) so employees can volunteer for a certain number of hours during the work day
- Pro bono services, such as free legal aid or graphic design for a nonprofit fundraiser
- Online tutoring or mentoring for underprivileged local students in need of academic support
- Food banks and soup kitchens—employees could serve food, sort through donations, or organize food pantry supplies
- Teaching financial literacy workshops so young adults and other community members can better manage their money
- Building or repairing homes as a team through Habitat for Humanity or another organization
- Environmental cleanup activities at local parks, beaches, trails, etc.
- Compiling resources for individuals facing homelessness and/or distributing them to those in need
- Support for community centers, whether they need custodial, administrative, or other kinds of assistance
- Planting food in a community garden to make fresh food more accessible in your city
- Animal shelter cleanup or support—this may include walking dogs, sorting through donated supplies, cleaning kennels, etc.
- Reading at a local library or school to local children or helping develop a literacy program
Many of these can be seamlessly combined or integrated with other workplace giving programs to maximize employees’ engagement and impact. For example, you could provide a grant or sponsorship to the community center where your sales team volunteered. Or, host an in-kind donation drive for the animal shelter leading up to your volunteer event.
Wrapping Up: Continually Improve Your Volunteer Program
Following the tips in this guide will provide a strong foundation for your employee volunteering program, but don’t let the work stop there. Keep monitoring results and requesting feedback to find ways to improve.
And remember, the right CSR software makes it much easier to implement a volunteer program, engage your employees, and ultimately make a bigger impact on the world. Contact our team to learn more about how Uncommon Giving can help.
Looking for more resources before you dive in? Check out these blogs we’ve compiled to help you through your journey to corporate philanthropy success:
- Dollars for Doers Programs: The Complete Guide + Examples. Dollars for Doers is one of the most popular types of employee volunteer programs. Dive deeper to see if it’s a good fit for your company.
- 10+ Top Corporate Volunteering Platforms for Making an Impact. The right platform will greatly improve the effectiveness of your employee volunteering program. Explore this list of the top providers we recommend.
- Corporate Social Responsibility for Beginners: A Guide. Employee volunteering is typically only one part of a holistic CSR strategy. Learn more about what CSR is and how you might expand your program.
