Employee volunteering

Keep In Mind

It’s easy to assume there are lots of corporate-specific volunteer opportunities already designed and waiting for your teams to rock up and get stuck in. However, this is rarely the case. Volunteer opportunities take time to organise and plan and they must meet an identified need within the organisation.

Companies generally come to these relationships with the upper hand, in terms of human and financial resources, and therefore need to be mindful of their requests and expectations so they support rather than overwhelm the non-profit.

What to consider

• What are the needs of the community group or organisation? You may need to do some research to find this out.
• What sort of budget do you have for supplies and materials and/or to donate to the non-profit to cover the costs of engaging your employees.
• How are you looking to engage your employees? Is it via a one-off group volunteering activity or via an ongoing volunteer opportunity sponsored by the company? Or maybe you are looking to encourage employees to find their own individual volunteer opportunities on their own time?
• What type of volunteering are your employees interested in? Are they interested in sharing your professional business knowledge in areas such as building and facilities maintenance, finance, quality assurance, document control, HR, fundraising, marketing and so on?
• Do you have a team that wants to help with a hand-on activity whether that’s maintaining a garden, redecorating indoor facilities or supporting the local County Council or environmental group with cleans ups in your area.

Maybe your teams would like to support young people by providing reading support, mentoring, STEM activities, storytelling, careers events, coding, educational gaming, entrepreneurship, employability or financial literacy. Or they could be interested in diversity and inclusion and looking to support migrant populations by providing language cafés, cultural awareness programmes or back to work supports.

To discuss how you might go about finding the best volunteer opportunity for your company that meets the needs of your local community contact our Corporate & Programmes Manager at [email protected].