Corporate volunteering is certainly one of the best ways to present your brand as a “good corporate citizen”! However, in order to maximize the return on those efforts, it is important to measure your company’s impact. This allows you to better understand exactly how your company is helping to shape a healthier community, who you are helping, and how much. In this blog post, we will show how to measure your volunteer impact so you can maximize your social return on investment!
According to a Giving in Numbers Survey conducted by CECP, the most successful volunteering programs have three core principles: (1) set specific goals for your program, (2) track these goals, and (3) measure the volunteering impact. Despite the importance of tracking volunteer impact, in 2013 only 22% of companies measured the Social Return (SROI) of their corporate volunteering efforts. If your company isn’t currently measuring its SROI, you are probably wondering what metrics are crucial for implementing the most successful volunteering program possible.
Measuring Volunteer Impact
1. Economic Impact
One way to measure the impact of employee volunteering is through tracking the hours and estimated dollar value of their community service. As an example, we will look at the dollar value of Canadian volunteerism.
In 2014, Volunteer Canada reported that 13.3 million Canadians out of a population of 34.1 million volunteered; that’s 39% of the population! Their efforts amounted to over 2 billion hours of volunteered time! Based on the 2014 average hourly wage this equates to a dollar value of over $46 billion of contributed value that directly benefited society. It’s no surprise that Canadians are championing social change with these numbers!
Applying this approach to your business, it is crucial to accurately capture total hours contributed and use either national averages for volunteer work or a company specific estimate of the hourly value. From there, it’s simple math: Total Hours x Hourly Rate = Total Economic Contribution.
Of course, there are also ways to measure the societal impact of your employee volunteering programs through tracking social impact.
2. Social Impact
Volunteerism improves the capacity of nonprofit organizations in three core ways:
- It allows nonprofits to use less resources — in terms of time or money.
- It increases effectiveness — by allowing nonprofit workers to focus on key tasks.
- It increases reach —enabling the nonprofit organization to help more people!
In these 3 ways alone, your company can have a huge impact on the community! While we already discussed how the first can be measured based on an estimated dollar value of service, the other two depend on getting feedback from the nonprofit organization itself. Ideally these two variables should be collected as the work occurs, while memories are fresh.
If you want better measure the value of your corporate volunteer contributions, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the best way to measure volunteer impact is to use a shared-value approach that links the social and economic gain. GozAround.com can help you track the volunteer hours your employees put in while simultaneously gathering real-time feedback so you can measure your contribution to bettering your community.
Measuring Volunteer Impact with GozAround
Ultimately, getting meaningful data on volunteer impact can be tricky. This is where GozAround can help you! GozAround is an expert in helping companies measure and share all your team’s philanthropic endeavours, so the world can see exactly how your company is helping to make the world a better place. This maximizes your company’s social return on investment, while reducing the costs associated with data entry and expensive HR software. Many employers already do this using internal and often manual processes, and can expend a tremendous amount of time and money managing this information — but GozAround does this as a core capability and can help your company by:
- Providing you with ongoing and regular reporting and metrics to keep you up to date on how your company’s valued contributions.
- Help you get your message into the community in a bigger way, through targeted communications campaigns that reflect specific projects rather than sometimes meaningless annual figures without context.
- Helping to connect your team resources to organizations who are looking for volunteer help, and providing for the potential for joint marketing and promotions that can benefit all participants.
If you are interested in helping your company or organization increase its Social Return on Investment and better connect your team to important causes and volunteer opportunities — contact the experts at GozAround at 1.888.472.0290 or email at info@gozaround.com. We’d love to help!
