Corporate Philanthropy Volunteering Blog

How to Help Moore, Oklahoma Rebuild After the Tornado

Ryan Scott — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:13:00 GMT

In the wake of the historic Oklahoma tornado - one of the worst in the past 20 years - disaster relief crews continued their efforts this morning, assisting residents of the ravaged communities in the suburbs outside Oklahoma City, the heart of “tornado alley.” The vast and catastrophic tornado that touched down Monday afternoon has levelled entire neighborhood blocks, destroying local schools, family homes and hospitals in its path. Saddest of all, the death toll - which includes many children - is now at 51 and counting.

The number of displaced residents, amount of property damage and scale of overall destruction is staggering, so the need for aid is immediate and will only continue to grow as members of these quiet Oklahoma City suburbs try to rebuild. Many will do so without the help of adequate homeowners or business insurance policies to cover their costs, and renters may not have any insurance at all to lean on for support.

Local organizations such as the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma are delivering food and support to those affected by the storm, and the American Red Cross has set up shelters and is providing food, supplies and emotional assistance to those in and around the area. These organizations and others like it have rushed to the aid of affected communities and many are accepting donations to support their relief efforts.

Clients of Causecast’s Community Impact Platform will find it easy to mobilize company-wide support for these relief efforts. As of this morning, users have had access to one of our ready-made, Instant Disaster Response campaigns, which can be customized based on a company’s preferred nonprofit partner.

Our prayers are with the survivors of this tragedy. Through the work of participating nonprofits, Causecast hopes that local residents will receive the support and care that they need to persevere and rebuild.

Helping Boston

Ryan Scott — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:56:00 GMT

It’s tough to read the headlines about the Boston bombings without feeling a blend of outrage, despair and resolve. The attack fell on Patriots’ Day, a holiday commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, the opening salvo of the American Revolution. Patriots’ Day is a unique observance celebrated almost exclusively by the state of Massachusetts, but today is Patriots’ Day for the rest of the country. We all stand united with Boston, offering our hearts...and tears.

As you know if you follow this blog, Causecast creates disaster relief campaigns to help companies mobilize their assistance to those in need. Our ready-made campaigns help businesses quickly engage their corporate employees to support victims of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and beyond.

But Boston wasn’t a disaster; it was a tragedy.

While we won’t be issuing a formal corporate disaster relief campaign in this instance, we encourage you to seek out ways to help.

Red Cross

The Red Cross of Massachusetts has indicated that they have enough blood right now, but they may be looking for donations soon. Stay tuned to @RedCross for more updates.

Register or search their Safe and Well Website to find loved ones or register your status if you were affected by the bombing.

Salvation Army

The Salvation Army has deployed canteen trucks to the Boston area to provide food. According to one of their spokespeople, “As of this morning, 1,729 meals, drinks were supplied to the victims, the families and first responders. The runners, their families, and the first responders also received emotional and spiritual care from 12 Salvation Army officers and 23 Salvation Army staff volunteers. Eight Salvation Army officers were deployed to various hospitals throughout the Boston area offering pastoral care as needed."

Donate to the Salvation Army.

Boston Children's Hospital

Some pediatric victims were taken to the Boston Children’s Hospital. The Children's Hospital website also has useful resources for guidance on how to talk to children after a tragedy.

Follow @BostonChildrens on Twitter for updates and donate to the Boston Children’s Hospital.

Follow #BostonHelp

This hashtag has been established to steer volunteers towards specific ways that they can help. Stay tuned and step up.

If you wish to leverage your company’s Causecast Community Impact Platform to fundraise or volunteer for any of the organizations above, contact your corporate philanthropy manager right away.

How Will You Celebrate National Volunteering Week?

Ryan Scott — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:57:00 GMT

“Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.”

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural words will never ring as true than during National Volunteer Week, which this year falls on April 21-27. First instituted in 1974 by President Nixon, National Volunteer Week is a time to celebrate the power and social impact of service. This year’s theme is “Celebrating People in Action,” honoring those who take action to solve significant problems in their communities.

According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that leads United We Serve, President Obama's national call to service initiative, Americans are volunteering more than ever. 2011 saw the highest number of U.S. volunteers in five years; 64.3 million Americans volunteered an estimated 7.9 billion hours with an estimated economic value of $171 billion. Although the price of volunteerism is immeasurable, these estimates help organizations acknowledge the millions of people who dedicate their energy, talents and time to making a difference.

Endorsed and supported by President Obama, Congress and other national and state leaders, National Volunteer Week is also recognized by corporations and nonprofit organizations in numerous events throughout the country. Various corporations will exercise their corporate philanthropy nationwide in recognition of their employee volunteers.

In good company

Need ideas? Here’s what a random sampling of some organizations have in store:

Defense company Raytheon will encourage employees to volunteer by organizing and participating in events that represent Raytheon's key corporate citizenship areas: mentoring students in math and science, empowering veterans through education and supporting needs in their local communities. Raytheon employees have demonstrated passion about the communities where they live and work, having donated nearly 400,000 hours in the past two years.

Some of Raytheon’s National Volunteer Week events include in Portsmouth, R.I., "Creating Your Future in Math & Science" where Raytheon employees will introduce students from Kickemuit Middle School and the Lincoln School to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. Raytheon employees in the Washington, D.C., area will conduct interactive science experiments as part of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology's Techstravaganza. And in Boston, at a celebration of nanoscale science hosted by the Museum of Science, Raytheon employees will introduce parents to their MathMovesU^® program, a company initiative committed to increasing elementary and middle school students' interest in math and science education by engaging them in hands-on, interactive activities.

In another nationwide effort, thousands of employees from Wisconsin-based Kohl’s Department Stores are celebrating National Volunteer Week and Earth Day by volunteering in their local communities for Kohl’s fourth annual National Go Green Event. Employees will volunteer for youth charities by participating in environmentally-based activities through Associates in Action, Kohl’s employee volunteer programs. Kohl’s will also engage in corporate giving by donating a total of $2 million to participating charities. A few of the planned activities include volunteering with land trust Growing Power to plant, weed and do construction work in support of community gardens and an urban farm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. New Jersey employees will do a beach clean up in Sandy Hook and to support children’s environmental education in Texas, associates will help clean up the Austin Zoo.

Members of the American Gaming Association (AGA) will be holding their annual “All In for Giving and Volunteering” campaign during National Volunteer Week. The initiative features gaming companies across the country participating in employee volunteer recognition activities while also engaging in local community volunteer projects.

In Las Vegas, Aristocrat Technologies has events planned for every day of the week, including building wooden toys for Toys4Smiles, assembling food and toiletry bags for seniors at Helping Hands, and helping with spring cleaning at Street Teens.

Isle of Capri in Boonville, Missouri is aiming to log 100 total employee volunteer hours during the week. Planned activities include food prep at a food bank and general maintenance and storm clean-up at a local animal shelter. Some employees will also build houses for Habitat for Humanity and host a resident birthday party for seniors at an assisted living center.

Nonprofits: how are you stepping up?

Non-profits are encouraged to seize the moment and not only celebrate the week through volunteer recognition but to also promote community outreach by offering plenty of volunteer opportunities.

For example:

In Chicago, Heartland Alliance, which helps the impoverished improve their lives and realize their human rights, is requesting volunteers for their spring service projects. The projects include office work, gardening, clean up and construction at various mental health and homeless shelters along with teaching banking and money skills to Heartland Alliance clients.

The Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) of Sarasota County, Fla. will celebrate National Volunteer Week by holding volunteer recognition events and participating in public health and emergency preparedness activities. Volunteers will serve as MRC leaders and offer health education as part of a local public health initiative and provide medical care and counseling for victims, families and responders.

Various organizations nationwide will be holding events to combat hunger in their local communities. The Hunger Heroes Project in North Central Massachusetts is holding a volunteer event to help establish food security in local food pantries by packaging 20,000 meals. Another Massachusetts non-profit, Cooking Matters, an organization that teaches nutrition education is looking to train as many volunteers as possible to teach hands-on cooking skills to low-income families. And the Twin Cities United Way’s Caring Connection Program has a full week of volunteer activities, from serving meals for hungry families and homeless youths at various shelters to sorting and packing food at Second Harvest Heartland.

Since our nation's founding, volunteers have been the backbone of social action and change. Technological advances and social networking have now made volunteering even simpler, and as societal needs grow amidst shrinking budgets, volunteers are needed now more than ever. National Volunteer Week highlights the spirit of giving and the enormous contributions that volunteers make every day.

Your Volunteer Program Won’t Survive on Twigs and Berries

Ryan Scott — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:12:00 GMT

Most companies recognize that investing in employee engagement and development are vital to remaining competitive in a constantly evolving business world. When companies spend time and money improving the skills of their employees, they send a message to workers that they want to invest in their future. And in return, companies expect to see increases in job performance, organizational commitment and job satisfaction from their workers.

Employee training and development often focus on hard skills; the basic proficiencies needed to perform one’s job duties. But good employee training also generally also covers soft skills such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving and public speaking - the unquantifiable abilities necessary to give companies a competitive edge. This doesn’t come cheap: according to human resources think tank Bersin and Associates, the average training cost per employee in 2010 was $1200, with most of that money going towards developing soft skills such as management and leadership abilities.

So if soft skills are as vital as hard skills - and pricier to boot - where can employees acquire and cultivate these talents without breaking the bank? One place to look: employee volunteer programs.

Corporate volunteering and corporate giving programs not only help fulfill a company’s CSR mandate; they also offer workers a unique opportunity to participate in teambuilding efforts and develop job-related skills. On top of that, these programs are a bargain. According to the Trends Of Excellence In Employee Volunteering Series by Points of Light Institute, a company will spend about $416 on each person that participates in an employee volunteer program. That’s significantly lower than the $1200 that it costs per employee for one training program.

Clearly, businesses can reap much organizational value from supporting employee-directed corporate philanthropy. So why do so many companies under-fund their employee volunteer programs? You wouldn’t expect an athlete to do well on a starvation diet, right? Well, your employee volunteer program can’t thrive on twigs and berries either.

When a company’s volunteer activities don’t align with its values and cultures, management often doesn’t see the correlation between volunteerism and how it benefits their company. Since successful volunteer programs should relate to a company’s core business, it’s important to first define a company’s corporate philanthropy strategy, expectations and goals. That’s often missed in the “check the box” mentality which overwhelmed administrators sometimes apply to their company’s volunteerism.

What’s the solution?

Give ‘Em Choice

When empowered by their companies, employees tend to be more engaged and happier in their work. One path to empowerment is in supporting causes that are important to employees and offering them an environment in which they can make an impact. Long gone are the days of relying on United Way because that’s all your lone, part-time administrator could handle. A new era is upon us in the field of corporate philanthropy, and that innovation must trickle down to your employees. Engagement comes from meeting employees where they are, not expecting them to mold their passions solely around your CEO’s signature cause.

Walk The Talk

Volunteer programs also work best when supported by the company’s top executives, so senior management should lead by example by participating in and promoting their initiatives. When employees are clear about their company’s vision, they’re more motivated to represent the company’s brand, build relationships and strengthen their communities by sharing their skills and passions.

Turbocharge Your Systems

Other reasons for under-funded employee volunteer programs are a lack of employee enthusiasm due to disorganization, too much tedious administrative work and difficulty in calculating a return on investment. An efficient program management system like Causecast’s Community Impact Platform addresses these challenges with its well organized and easy to use interface, tools to measure and communicate community impact, a menu of volunteer opportunities and creative giving options that allows employees to support causes they care about in the ways they want, and a personal concierge service to help administrators adopt novel strategies and execute their volunteer programs throughout the year. An effective employee giving and volunteering management resource eases administrative overload and greatly expands the possibilities for corporate volunteer programs.

Companies today recognize that maintaining a competitive edge requires investment in their number one asset: their employees. Employee volunteer programs - when well-fed and supported by corporate management - offer a cost-effective way to develop the skills of a company’s workforce while improving the lives of those in need.

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Learn about Sustainable Computer Recycling

Sustainable Computer Recycling for Earth Day

Ryan Scott — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:11:00 GMT

As evolving technologies keep us hooked to new and updated gadgets, and Americans now own (according to the Environmental Protection Agency) an estimated three billion electronic products, one inconvenient question lurks constantly in the shadows:

What are we supposed to do with all of our old gizmos?

While responsible businesses and consumers want to recycle their outdated technology equipment - and often think they are - the reality of the electronics recycling business is an eco-horror show. Rife with misperception and abuse, the e-waste industry is notorious for cashing in on the good intentions of those who want to do right by Mother Earth and then delivering nothing but more problems for old mom.

Electronics recyclers claim that they’re lawfully disposing of electronics after stripping them of their hazardous contaminants. The ugly truth is that after charging exorbitant fees for collection, recyclers often send waste to countries like China and India, where rules are lax and dangerous materials are commonly dumped near farms or sources of drinking water, or burned after the electronics are mined for reusable microchips, copper, and silver. Because circuit boards are fireproof, the workers who burn or smelt down electronics just end up carbonizing the circuit boards and creating more emissions, then filling up landfills with the residuals. This isn’t exactly what most people have in mind when they think “green.”

Enter Materials Conservation Company (MCC), an e-waste company that prefers to think of its mission as recovering materials rather than recycling end of life electronics. Using a proprietary mechanical process, MCC safely reduces electronics to two new raw materials, rendering them into a metal concentrate or powder. The company then sells the metal to refiners, who employ an electrolytic system to make commodity grade metals, such as copper. The end result is that electronic equipment - the toughest material to recycle - is 100% reutilized.

Think of it as a reverse Amazon, but instead of ordering products and putting them into a cart, you put products you already have into a cart. That cart comes in the form of collapsible reusable containers that are sent to businesses by MCC, then picked up from company loading docks within 48 hours after being prepared to ship to regional centers. Recycling partners disassemble the electronics, the scrap is sold to scrap channels, then the circuit boards and wiring are sent back to MCC where the processing begins to extract the metals to be reused in other ways, and recycles the circuit boards into an epoxy resin for use in waterproofing.

Did I mention that the cost of this to businesses and consumers is $0?

“Over the course of several years, we have developed a unique business model that takes our proprietary technology processing combined with eCommerce software, and leverages it with the existing physical infrastructure,” explains founder Michael Burney. “We work with existing companies to handle the logistics and disassembly so that we don’t add trucks to the world, we generate no emissions in processing, and the only consumable is electricity. The whole process is designed to be efficient.”

Most businesses do their recycling based on depreciation schedules; only when a piece of equipment is fully depreciated (aka broken) do they recycle, and they do this by paying waste companies significant sums for retrieval. MCC offers a different model, where all locations of a company have pre-arranged access, the cost to the business is free, and organizations are provided with reporting on their materials. And all of this is done sustainably.

MCC’s main competitor? The trash industry, a business that thinks in terms of tonnage. According to the EPA, 2.37 million tons of electronics were ready for end-of-life management in 2009, but only 25% were collected for recycling. The rest of that tonnage went to landfills or was exported, where most of it will not be reused or recycled.

Earth Day may have long come and gone, but Causecast salutes companies like MCC that are thinking of the earth every day, innovating ways to nurture our planet back to greater health and pave a greener path for the future.

Contact Causecast now to learn how we can help you have a positive community impact simply by disposing of your electronics in a sustainable way.

Priceless: Volunteers Bring Financial Literacy to the Masses

Ryan Scott — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:17:00 GMT

Financial know-how is one of our nation’s most pressing issues. Efforts to support financial literacy already exist — including programs from banks, brokerage houses, technology firms, professional services companies and from at least 13 states which require personal finance coursework as a high school graduation requirement. Despite these efforts, however, only 35 percent of teens know how to manage a credit card and only 20 percent of teachers feel prepared to teach the subject.

To help combat this critical social gap, corporate philanthropy initiatives of all shapes and sizes have been created. Leading companies are working to empower people across the country (and world, in some instances) by putting their core financial literacy competencies to work.

For example, PwC is mobilizing its most important asset — its 35,000 people who are skilled in finance, accounting and business — to address youth education with a focus on financial literacy. The firm’s centerpiece commitment, formally titled PwC’s Earn Your Future, was launched at Clinton Global Initiative America in June. It's a five-year commitment to reach more than 2.5 million students and educators and represents a $160 million investment for the firm, $60 million in cash and 1 million service hours.

The firm is already activating on its pledge. This fall it teamed up with Knowledge @ Wharton High School to offer a 3-day, all-expenses paid training session for more than 200 educators around the country to shore up their skills in the subject.

And most recently, during Martin Luther King, Jr. day, which is known as a national day of service, PwC employees spent the day giving back—from teaching financial literacy modules in schools to hosting career exploration programs for youth organizations. This approach not only helps the staff develop their skills, but also aligns with Dr. King's work to empower individuals and strengthen communities.

“We identified a set of projects that supported PwC’s Earn Your Future commitment and helped the markets support them,” said Heather Wright, Corporate Responsibility Director at PwC. And the response was powerful. Wright describes the feedback from participants as “tremendous,” noting that they “just lit up when we empowered them with this knowledge.”

PwC’s Earn Your Future serves as a testament to how such skills-based initiatives can make a significant and tangible social impact both at the micro level (such as helping empower the homeless) and the macro level (teacher training seminars that specialize in financial literacy). Wright notes that learning about financial literacy appeals to a wide group of people; indeed, the housing market crash and economic recession illuminated that financial literacy is imperative for people of all income levels and socioeconomic classes.

For PwC, the skills-based program isn’t just about altruism. “It’s a shared value concept," says Wright. "PwC is helping our youth develop strong financial foundations that enable them to contribute to a growing workforce and healthier economy; and we’re providing our partners and staff opportunities to both develop their leadership skills and give back to our communities."

In short, the greater the number of financially literate and empowered people, the more PwC is able to succeed. It’s a win-win.

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The Virtues of Virtual Volunteering and Online Fundraising

Ryan Scott — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:15:00 GMT

Your employees want to perform community service; they really, really do…but amidst their busy schedules they just can’t seem to find the time.

So how about making volunteering easier than ever by offering virtual volunteer opportunities? It's just one more tool that savvy companies are using to sharpen their employee volunteer programs, and by extension, their overall corporate philanthropy complexion.

Online or “virtual volunteering” allows people to help non-profits in a variety of ways, from web design and social media strategy, to translation, accounting, research, data entry and a host of other needs. This kind of skills-based volunteering allows virtual volunteers to contribute as much or as little time as they can, all from the convenience of their computers or smartphones. When employee volunteerism includes online opportunities and fundraising, your employees can effortlessly donate their time and talents.

Bringing Global Support to Local Nonprofits

Overcoming geographic boundaries and time constraints, virtual volunteering connects volunteers of various backgrounds, skills and cultures that may not be available locally to a charity, thereby enhancing an organization’s resources. The hope is to also mobilize additional support as virtual volunteers learn about a non-profit and the people it serves. In turn, volunteers can share this information with their companies and communities, creating a network of support.

You've got would-be volunteers who aren't web wizards? No problem. If volunteers can read, write or do math, technology can help them tutor a child without even leaving their desks.

For example, Innovations for Learning, Inc. (IFL), an Illinois nonprofit that develops innovative technology to supplement reading and math instructional programs for K-2 classrooms, offers a web-based tutoring program that remotely pairs tutors and students. “Tele-tutors” talk to students over the phone while sharing a mutual screen on their respective computers, where they can read stories, work on word activities and do homework together. All of their work is integrated with the classroom instruction, and the tele-tutors are seen as an extension of the teacher while providing individualized attention to each student. Since no travel is involved, more time is spent working one-on-one with each student, allowing for convenience and flexibility for the tutor. Because of tele-tutoring, teachers have reported improved student performance; students look forward to their weekly virtual appointments and are motivated to work as they anticipate the call from their tutor.

Micro-Volunteering Makes it Even Easier to Contribute

Even if your employees only have ten minutes to volunteer, there’s an app for that. Using a touch of a button on your smartphone, you can “micro-volunteer” by doing simple volunteer projects in small increments of time. While they're waiting for the bus or sitting in a boring meeting, your employees can be doing volunteer work.

Micro-volunteers are generally not required to undergo a screening process nor do they need to make a specific time commitment. Besides donating money, an example of micro-volunteer work is helping a museum add tag words to the tons of images in its database to help them be searchable for future use. By crowdsourcing the task of tagging the photos to micro-volunteers, the museum can catalog a greater number of photos without the expense of paying staff.

Companies such as cause integration leader Causecast make it easy for businesses to get their employees volunteering online. Causecast's Community Impact Platform helps companies promote virtual volunteering opportunities within an online volunteer and giving platform, to make volunteering as accessible as possible for busy employees. And if the charities that a business wishes to support don't offer virtual volunteering, Causecast will help those nonprofits develop online volunteer opportunities or source other nonprofits that can be supported through online volunteering.

So apply some strategic philanthropy to your corporate giving. Let your employees know that they can hop on their computer or phone, get to work, make the planet a better place and feel good about themselves. But carving out the time…now that’s the part only they can do.

Also Read:

How Corporate Volunteer Programs Increase Employee Engagement

6 Tips for Creating Employee Volunteer Programs

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Professionalizing Pro Bono Volunteering

Ryan Scott — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:25:00 GMT

I'll volunteer that I’m a big fan of the Taproot Foundation, an organization that's been an instrumental player in the pro bono movement in 2001 and has been steering the way ever since (matter of fact, I’m a new board member of the organization). Through award-winning programs, groundbreaking thought leadership and partnerships with companies to develop and scale corporate pro bono programs, Taproot works to engage the nation’s millions of business professionals in applying not just their time, but their skills, in the service of the nation’s nonprofit community.

Now I’ve got another reason to salute my friends at Taproot; they’ve just announced the launch of a new platform that will serve as a one-stop shop for nonprofits and businesses engaged in pro bono work.

Thanks in part to organizations like Taproot, pro bono is big business these days, a hot-and-getting-hotter marketplace estimated at $15 billion that’s drawing participation from global corporate leaders. Indeed, just one of the campaigns that Taproot helped spark, A Billion Plus Change, has already secured an estimated $2 billion in pro bono resources from leading companies across the country. As Taproot founder Aaron Hurst sees it, “The movement is fundamentally to have professionals recognize the honor and privilege to be able to work in their field, realizing that many can’t afford their services and changing what it means to be a professional to include doing good work, pro-bono work, which is the literal translation.”

The pro bono movement is a win-win for everyone involved. As companies seek to engage employees in their corporate philanthropy, they’re tapping into the skills and resources that are the core of the company. Businesses have been paying a lot of attention lately to crafting employee engagement programs that reflect what employees care about and that can be seen as an employee benefit. As a part of these programs, companies are instituting policies such as matching gifts programs, payroll deductions for nonprofits, employee days of service and disaster relief campaigns, to name a few. Skills-based volunteering is often a centerpiece of all of these initiatives, one which delivers high impact to employee and nonprofit alike.

Effective pro-bono initiatives feel authentic, springing naturally from an alignment between employee interests, community needs and company programs. When all of the pieces are in place, skills-based volunteering programs yield tremendous benefits. Employees gain leadership training, job skill development and internal networking beyond the highly valued community service experience. According to a study on skills-based volunteering by True Impact, skills-based volunteers are 142% more likely to report job-related skills-gains than traditional volunteers, 47% more likely to report high satisfaction from volunteering than traditional volunteers, and 82% more likely to report that volunteerism generated new recruits for their company versus traditional volunteers. And from the nonprofit point of view, pro bono and volunteering of skills and talents can be as much as 500% more valuable for nonprofits.

Taproot wants to further expand the pro bono market by increasing the accessibility and professionalization of pro bono services. How? By helping nonprofits better define their needs and connecting with organizations that can fulfill those needs. Taproot’s new interactive tool allows nonprofit users to browse the most common pro bono projects and learn about the scope of each project as well as the benefits, risks, and skills necessary to ensure successful engagements. And to facilitate connections with pro bono providers, Taproot has partnered with LinkedIn to open up the pool of resources available to nonprofits.

This new platform is just one more step towards realizing Taproot’s original mission. As Hurst puts it, when he founded the organization, “I saw the barriers that nonprofits face and wanted to scale the impact they’re reaching for in society. I realized that yes, money’s an issue, but a huge part of the problem is the lack of access to talent, the functional talent that is really needed to scale an organization. And so Taproot came out of that entrepreneurial “ah ha!” moment, from seeing that we could create a parallel philanthropic marketplace, a consulting marketplace of talent.”

Taproot’s latest step is to increase its arsenal of powerful new online tools as well as its advocacy. For example, Taproot recently helped to publish Powered by Pro Bono: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Scoping, Securing, Managing, and Scaling Pro Bono Resources, which shares advice for nonprofits that Taproot garnered from serving 1,600 nonprofits, training 13,500 professionals, and designing 20 corporate pro bono programs. And Taproot is also launching the Pro Bono Pledge, a web-based advocacy campaign to enlist professionals to donate their talents through the Taproot Foundation and, more importantly, to flex their social entrepreneurial muscle, help build pro bono programs, and challenge their professions to adopt pro bono service as a core value. The Pro Bono Pledge takes a grassroots approach to empower professionals, not just companies, to lead the effort to make pro bono a core part of business.

Taproot and other pro bono advocates hope to establish pro bono volunteering as “the new normal” in workplaces everywhere. Given the profound benefits that pro bono offers to professionals and nonprofits alike, I’m rooting for the continued success of this exciting movement across the world.

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5 Ways to Create Social Impact With Matching Gifts

Ryan Scott — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 23:53:00 GMT

Companies like financial services firm Ernst & Young understand that matching gifts programs aren’t just a perk for your staff. Indeed, Ernst & Young doesn’t see these programs as a perk at all: rather than a side project, their matching gifts program is an integral part of Ernst & Young’s overall strategy.

The matching gifts program at Ernst & Young has tight parameters, rewarding employees for donating only to an accredited nonprofit college or university in the United States. Small donations need not apply - the company only tracks donations over $25 (or $100 for more senior personnel), and the donations to a single college or university must be over $2,500 for a calendar year to be matched. Despite the restrictions, or perhaps because of them, the program has flourished, allowing Ernst & Young to maintain close connections with the accounting and business programs at top American universities.

Companies looking to create a matching program of their own are often at a loss for where to start. Even companies with long-standing matching gifts programs would do well to examine potential improvements. Ellen Glazerman, Executive Director of the Ernst & Young Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees matching donations for Ernst & Young employees, was happy to sit down with us and describe how her company’s matching gifts program has thrived.

Here’s Glazerman’s list of the five ways you can maximize the benefits of your own matching program:

1. Pick a Focus

“Long ago, we decided that we wanted to focus on creating a talent pipeline,” says Glazerman. Ernst & Young wanted to support higher education, and it also wanted to create a crop of accountants with top-notch training. From this strategic focus, the current matching gifts program was born. “We are driving specific goals that relate to our strategy,” Glazerman notes. “While people will always come to you looking for other ways to give, you simply can’t do everything, so it’s important to put a lot of thought into where your company decides to help out.”

2. Know Your Interests

What philanthropic ventures does your company have a vested interest in? That’s the question you must ask yourself as you begin a matching gifts program. For Ernst & Young, “If there’s not a pipeline of bright, interested people coming out of accounting and business programs, we don’t have a business,” Glazerman notes. While Ernst & Young employees are not bound to donate to accounting programs, much of the money is directed that way simply because people tend to give to the places that they came from. Thus, while not every donation will result in a swarm of new, hungry recruits, the lion’s share of donations will wind up serving this strategic goal.

3. Automate

Automation makes things easier on your employees and encourages more of them to participate in your volunteer and corporate giving programs. At Ernst & Young, employees need only sign onto a website, enter in their donation and wait for the end of the year. They don’t have to spend time trying to figure out how much of their donation is tax deductible and how much qualifies for matching gifts; their giving platform does all of that for them. The easier your matching gifts program is to use, the more employees will want to participate.

4. Include Employee Voices

When asked about the best way to overcome any challenges a matching gifts program presents, Glazerman suggests involving employees. “Everyone needs to feel encouraged to share their point of view,” she says. This not only heads off potential employee resentment about how decisions are made; it also allows you to mine all the energy of your engaged employees to find the best solutions.

5. Evaluate Your Goals

Before and after the matching gifts program is up and running, you need to evaluate your goals and progress. “You have to look at what your interests are, but also what you’re interested in,” Glazerman says. “Maybe your goals have changed,” she continues. “Always ask yourself, ‘Is this what we want to do today?’” There’s one added benefit to evaluating your company’s goals with regards to your matching gifts program: “it provides a good excuse to start making changes.”

A matching gifts program tends to attract the types of highly engaged employees that every 21st century business is looking for. It also (hopefully) aligns with your company’s strategy, allowing you to grow your brand while leveraging strategic resources and making a social impact. The success of your company’s philanthropic programs will largely rest on how carefully you consider strategic questions ahead of time. “There are a lot of good causes, but you have to select the best ones for your business in order for them to really pay off.”

Related articles:

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How Volunteer Grants Double The Impact of Employee Volunteer Programs

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Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; A Day of Community Service

Ryan Scott — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 04:52:00 GMT

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that acts of service were the great equalizer. “Everybody can be great,” he noted, “because everybody can serve.” That’s why Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, once said that "the greatest birthday gift my husband could receive is if people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds celebrated the day by performing individual acts of kindness through service to others."

Since 1986, three years after President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law, every third Monday in January is designated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a federal holiday that celebrates Dr. King’s life and work. In 1994, Congress named MLK Jr. Day as a national day of service, and since then Americans have often celebrated the day through acts of service, dubbing the holiday “A Day On, Not a Day Off.” This movement also aligns with President Obama's national call for all Americans to incorporate volunteerism and public service into their daily lives as a responsibility of citizenship.

This year, on January 21, 2013, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), a federal agency that leads President Obama's national call to service initiative, is encouraging organizations to honor MLK Jr. Day by volunteering for projects that support veterans and military families, educate communities on disaster preparedness, promote education and provide economic opportunities to the underprivileged. More than 30 national organizations, including the American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Habitat for Humanity, are strategic partners with the CNCS and will be holding local events through their chapters in various U.S. cities.

One of the goals of the MLK Jr. Day of Service is to put into action Dr. King’s teachings and philosophy of nonviolence to help solve social problems through service projects that empower people and build bridges in order to strengthen communities. U.S. cities throughout the country will offer a variety of volunteer opportunities for its citizens to participate in community outreach and corporate philanthropy.

For example, The New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH) represents more than 1,200 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City that feed the over one million low-income, hungry New Yorkers. This year, NYCCAH volunteers and their partner nonprofits will serve meals, distribute food bags, stock food pantries where the low-income can buy discounted groceries and even clean up homeless shelters to commemorate MLK Jr. Day. Chicago Cares is sponsoring educational programs at several schools to teach children about Dr. King and his message, in addition to holding a volunteer-driven discussion group about Dr. King at St. Leonard’s House, a halfway house for men recently released from prison. Boston’s Central Square will continue Dr. King’s message of unity through community service by hosting hundreds of local volunteers engaging in a variety of activities including making scarves and blankets for the homeless, bookmarks for people in literacy programs, Valentine’s Day cards for shut-ins, and sorting cans of food, winter clothing and children's books for people in need.

On the West Coast, San Francisco based Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization working to achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, will be holding a family-oriented Day of Service by organizing volunteers to participate in park conservancy in the Golden Gate National Parks. In the Seattle area, the American Red Cross will bring together local volunteers for a day of disaster preparedness and education by canvassing throughout neighborhoods, talking with residents and leaving behind bilingual fire safety information. And in the spirit of Dr. King’s vision of a Beloved Community, a place where people come together to make their community a better place to live, Los Angeles area citizens and corporate volunteers will participate in a schools beautification project by revitalizing the campuses of various local schools.

Some national businesses like Allstate Insurance will be holding their company-wide day of service on MLK Jr. Day, where employees on every level and in every position throughout the U.S. are encouraged to volunteer for any cause in their local community. Target Corporation’s employee volunteer program will take part in the MLK Day Jr. Day festivities by participating in 30 unique project sites throughout Chicago, where employee volunteers will host multicultural fairs for students to educate them on diversity, sort donations at homeless shelters, spend time with senior citizens and create artwork to brighten learning environments. Washington D.C. Target employees will join their fellow corporate volunteers in this day of service by helping the CNCS and Points of Light assemble and fill assorted items in toiletry kits for active U.S. military personnel, wounded warriors, veterans and first responders.

For nonprofits and community groups, MLK Jr. Day is an opportunity to introduce their causes to new volunteers and find potential funders and partners who can support their organizations throughout the year. Meanwhile, businesses recognize that contributing on this Day of Service is the ultimate demonstration of corporate social responsibility. Not only will participating in this day promote employee engagement, companies will also give their employees a rare benefit…an opportunity to feel great about themselves.

To participate in MLK Jr. Day activities, companies and their employees can find volunteer opportunities through Causecast’s Community Impact Platform.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'" On MLK Jr. Day, Dr. King’s dream of a nation of freedom and justice for all becomes every American’s dream as people throughout the country come together to answer his question.

How Corporate Philanthropy Improves Employee Recruitment

Ryan Scott — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:33:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

Now that the economy is picking up steam, top talent is in even higher demand. So how can you make your company stand out from the crowd?

Three words: corporate volunteer programs. But don’t just take my word for it; there are firms out there that actually research these things. For example, a 2011 Deloitte Volunteer Impact study found that 61% of Millennials would consider a company’s commitment to the community when making a job decision. The study also found those who frequently participate in workplace volunteer activities are more likely to be proud, loyal and satisfied employees.

For a real-world example that proves the connection between corporate social responsibility and recruitment, take a look at what Timberland does to help preserve Mother Earth for future generations—and increase their own bottom line.

Many recognize the iconic yellow Timberland boot, but few may be aware of the company’s consistent efforts to foster corporate philanthropy. Manufacturers of rugged outdoor footwear, apparel and accessories, Timberland sets a great example of how to attract employees, protect the environment and still maintain the corporate giving bottom line.

Everyone Rolls Up Their Sleeves

Timberland’s commitment to corporate social responsibility starts at the top and is supported by just about every employee on a volunteer basis. Their Path of Service™ program, which recently celebrated its 20th year, provides employees with up to 40 hours of paid time off for community service. Employees are also offered the opportunity to apply for extended Path of Service™ opportunity to serve in the wake of a disaster or to work longer term on a capacity building project for a nonprofit organization. For over 20 years, the company has sponsored City Year, a type of urban Peace Corps, and for the past fourteen years they have sponsored Earth Day events all over the world. Employees (and sometimes their kids as well) have cleaned up New Hampshire beaches, planted trees were planted in Germany and Thailand, improved urban spaces improved in Spain, picked up rubbish picked up in Japan, and planted, weeded and fertilized a field of tree seedlings in China.

Senior Manager of Community Engagement Atlanta McIlwraith reports positive proof that Timberland’s community service and social responsibility activities help with recruitment. Timberland administers an Employee Global Survey every two years and the most recent survey showed 67% of employees saying they strongly agreed or agreed that the company’s commitment to the community and its Path of Service™ program played a strong role in their decision to work at Timberland.

Once approval for a particular non-profit is given by one’s manager, community service hours are tracked through the payroll system and results are provided each year in the company’s corporate social responsibility report. “Rather than just writing checks, if we support people in having a taste of the difference they can make in their community, hopefully they will take on more of that type of activity on their own time,” says McIlwraith.

In addition to recruiting great employees, the company sincerely believes that community service matters to consumers. As the general public becomes increasingly environmentally conscious, they in turn expect companies that they do business with to share their values in the products they offer and the way they operate. That’s why Timberland continuously monitors and measures its environmental impact, whether it’s making products from recycled materials, volunteering in local communities or improving working conditions in suppliers’ factories. “We are a values-driven brand,” McIlwraith concludes, “and when consumers see us show up in their community and serve, it just augments that impression of being authentic in our commitment to the environment and to communities.”

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Lights, Camera, Impact: Warner Bros. Employees Run the Corporate Philanthropy Show

Ryan Scott — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:25:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

Pop quiz: if your employees ask you how you’re going to support their community outreach efforts, is the right answer “we don’t”?

That would be an emphatic no.

Which is why Warner Bros. recognizes that if it is going to continue to attract top talent and engaged employees, it must be the company of yes.

Indeed, when you’re one of the biggest entertainment companies on the planet, you’ve got a huge corporate social responsibility burden to shoulder. But Warner Bros. employees don’t consider CSR a “burden,” and the proof is in the proverbial pudding - with the Warner Bros. giving program boasting a participation rate of 31 percent. While this might not surpass some companies’ claims of 90 percent or more employee volunteer participation, it is in fact 12 percent above the corporate average.

That doesn’t come from a bunch of employees being "voluntold” - Warner Bros. doesn’t demand participation from employees. Indeed, the company’s giving program didn’t come out of a desire at the C-suite for strategic philanthropy; rather, it grew out of employee demand for a civic engagement outlet.

Warner Bros.’ giving program, called Impact, addresses four areas that present some of the most fundamental challenges confronting humanity today: youth enrichment, global outreach, environmental stewardship and community engagement. Whereas at most companies, different areas of community impact are divided up (for example, mentoring, general philanthropy, community service, and employee matching funds), Warner Bros. manages all community involvement under the employee-driven Impact program. Employee contributions to the dialogue aren’t without management oversight; however, employees are the driving force behind where and how Warner Bros. chooses to give back to the community as a company.

The process of deciding where to get involved begins when Warner Bros. solicits employee engagement in the form of a survey. Every two years, when the company looks for nonprofits to partner with, employees nominate nonprofit organizations that they consider important. A steering committee reviews these nominations, winnowing the list down to 24 nonprofit candidates; Warner Bros. employees then vote on which nonprofits they think would work best for the company. This allows for targeted employee donations to any of 12 employee-selected nonprofit partners.

Impact boasts appealing features in more ways than one. For example, the company’s volunteer grants program goes above and beyond what we’ve come to expect from CSR standards; when an employee volunteers for 30 hours or more, Warner Bros. gives a grant of $500 to the non-profit in question.

The company also provides matching gifts of up to $1,000 for every employee at the company. During select times of the year, Warner Bros. offers double matching donations, effectively tripling an employee’s donation.

And Warner Bros. believes that showing employees how they’ve contributed is essential to keeping employees engaged. This means more than just reporting back on dollars and cents. Photos of employees pitching in or anecdotal stories about how employee volunteer programs make a difference both go a long way toward concretizing the effects of civic involvement.

So where is all this community engagement going? Within the four cause areas that Warner Bros. targets, Warner Bros. employees work with local nonprofit organizations such as A Place Called Home, a youth center in South Los Angeles and Volunteers of the Burbank Animal Shelter, an animal service agency devoted to providing medical, social, behavioral and financial care for animals at risk. Warner Bros. also works with global organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, the World Wildlife Fund and Doctors Without Borders.

The list of ways that Warner Bros. is involved in its community would be admirable for any organization, but it’s even more impressive because of the grassroots nature of Warner Bros.’ engagement. After all, few companies can boast that their CSR efforts are almost entirely driven by employee demand, which is the most genuine, sustainable and effective kind of corporate philanthropy of all.

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“Scale Is Sexy:" Global Conglomerates and Corporate Social Impact

Ryan Scott — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:06:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

With more than 300,000 employees in over 90 countries, HP is a large company by anyone’s standards. This size and scale allows them to make an impact in a way that smaller organizations cannot.

“Scale is sexy,” says Caroline Barlerin, director of global community involvement in HP’s Office of Global Sustainability & Social Innovation, who points out if all HP employees took advantage of the four hours of paid time off to volunteer the company offers every month, it would equate to more service than the Peace Corps. While she doesn’t believe the company will single-handedly change the world, Barlerin is cognizant of the impact a company as large as HP can make through sheer numbers alone, as well as how it can lead the overall dialogue around shared value.

The numbers are impressive: HP employees volunteered more than 1.4 million hours in 2012 to date, worth $80 million, which is a significant increase from the year before. Yet, despite the high number of volunteer hours, the company is striving for an even greater number of participants in these programs, allowing it to further fine-tune best practices in employee volunteer programs, with a current focus on skills-based pro bono work.

HP seeks increased community engagement through a celebration of its employees making a difference, and then telling those stories about how skills-based pro bono work and other community service activities are changing the world both internally and externally. The benefits of this promotion speak for itself: not only are more employees using their paid volunteer hours than in years past, more are getting involved in the skills-based pro bono programs that HP is so assiduously advocating.

Employee involvement pays off in more ways than just additional volunteer hours clocked or more pro bono projects; it also pays off in stronger partnerships with nonprofits, a powerful tool for creating lasting community impact. In 2011, HP built its infrastructure to support these partnerships through 19 country gateways and now has launched 48 country gateways to enable employees to engage. This more than doubles the number of regions where HP and its employees are able to make an impact in a single year.

HP leaders and employees are proud to speak of the company’s ability to positively affect the communities in which it does business. When surveyed, nearly 90 percent of HP’s nonprofit partners said that HP helped them to offer “higher quality services”, “be more innovative” and most importantly, “serve more people”.

Further, the company has found that employee engagement increases when its people are given chances to volunteer. This engagement is even higher when employees are engaging in pro bono, skills-based opportunities. In fact, HP found that employees who participate in skills-based volunteer events are 59 percent more likely to feel that the company is a “great place to work”. This underscores a core tenet of HP’s community involvement: “We have a shared value approach at HP.” says Barlerin. “Economic interest and social impact are not at odds with one another. We truly believe they should work in tandem.”

Indeed, one of the biggest questions going in the world of shared value is how to balance doing good with doing well. At HP, however, this is a nonsensical question as the two are not considered mutually exclusive. “People are going to volunteer,” says Barlerin. “The challenge is figuring out how to harness that energy in a meaningful way that will make a tangible difference in communities. I want HP to be the example of how to do it. It has a multiplier effect upon the community, allowing us to attract and retain top talent and build a reputation in the marketplace,” Barlerin notes.

So what is HP’s strategy for community engagement? Local knows best. “HP is a global company with global goals. It’s not a simple matter of taking what we do in the United States and exporting it to China,” said Barlerin. And while the company works around the globe, it tailors programs and opportunities to each location’s specific needs. Some examples of how the company is changing communities include:

An employee in Japan helped Doctors Without Borders to improve its IT security. This in turn helped the organization avoid security breaches that would interfere with its work providing medical care to war zones and disaster areas.
Employees in Morocco helped teach high school students in Casablanca how to start their own business through Junior Achievement Morocco’s Entrepreneurship Master Class.
Employees in Mexico are teaching young people how to craft resumes and cover letters that will help them to find gainful employment and provide for their families.
Employees in India organized HP Hackathons that brought together programmers and developers to quickly generate new solutions to old problems. HP employees are providing mentoring services to Global Health Corps (GHC) Fellows, an organization that promotes global health equity by connecting outstanding young leaders around the world with organizations working on the frontlines.

The point is simple: HP employees are engaged in ways that align with the needs of their communities—from healthcare and education to sustainability and disaster response—as well as in ways that help showcase the power of technology to positively change lives. This process effectively engages talented professionals to make a tangible difference in the communities where they live and work and show how HP can provide viable solutions to everyday needs. “I’m shameless about asking people to step up and volunteer, especially when it leverages their skills in a new way,” says Barlerin.

Barlerin sees HP as just one company with a lot of leverage when it comes to the global conversation about volunteering and community impact. To be a part of this conversation, HP is involved with A Billion + Change, a national campaign to mobilize billions of dollars of pro bono and skills-based services from corporate America. HP Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Bruscino will speak at the “Innovations in Corporate Service” thought leader summit in Palo Alto, a celebration of skills-based, pro bono volunteer programs. Companies pledging to A Billion + Change will come together to learn about the latest and greatest innovations in the world of service, the role of Millennial employees and collaborations between the public and the private sector.

A Billion + Change already has secured nearly $1.8 billion in corporate pledges and 12 million hours of time and talent to pro bono programs. If your company would like to sign on to A Billion + Change, go to www.abillionpluschange.org for more information.

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Stepping Away from the Rat Race to Create Community Impact...for a Year

Ryan Scott — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:45:00 GMT

This post was featured in The Huffington Post.

Employee volunteer programs are one thing, but what about centering your entire enterprise around service? It might sound like a pipe dream, but San Francisco-based Fuse Corps is making it happen.

Fuse Corps is dedicated to helping entrepreneurial professionals spend a year supporting governors, mayors and community leaders across the country to drive meaningful social change. The company identifies local projects that serve a national need (such as education, economic development or health care), then recruits and deploys highly-skilled professionals and entrepreneurs to help develop and implement innovative solutions.

Fuse Corps sponsors this change to the tune of $90,000 per annual stipend, allowing selected “fellows” to make a difference at the state and local level in a high impact/high profile project. While $90,000 sounds like a lot of money -- and it is -- this actually represents a pay cut for many of the people working with Fuse Corps. But these funds are sufficient to allow Fuse Corps to attract top talent, giving its fellows a year to do nothing but improve their communities.

“Ten years ago this couldn’t have happened,” says Jennifer Anastasoff, co-founder and CEO of of Fuse Corps (along with the likes of the co-founder of McKinsey’s Social Sector Practice, Lenny Mendonca, author and entrepreneur Peter Sims, and Points of Light executive, Ayesha Khanna). However, she notes, Millennials entering the workforce are demanding that their employers provide them with ways to give back to the communities where they live, making corporate community outreach a necessity for attracting top talent. Indeed, the Millennial generation has taken the baby boomers’ 60’s idealism and paired it with their 80’s entrepreneurism to find innovative, market-driven solutions to the major problems confronting humanity.

Fuse Corps chose its first five fellows in March of this year, selecting from a pool of a hundred of the most motivated and impact-oriented applicants for their program. The results stand as powerful testimony to the benefits of breaking down the walls between the private and public sector, which allows for creative problem solving and innovative solutions. “These boundaries are just not as important as they used to be,” says Anastasoff.

Some Fuse Corps fellow success stories?

Jeremy Goldberg is working closely with San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed to develop a program called the Silicon Valley Talent Initiative, which serves as the recruiting, coordinating and top-level management organization for any Silicon Valley government agency that wishes to receive no-cost cognitive problem-solving assistance from the incredible talent pool that exists in Silicon Valley. Working at a grassroots level to provide strategic support and help in implementing this program, Jeremy is seeing firsthand how local governments can begin to change the way corporations reach out and re-tool the processes by which they govern.

Lisa Gans works with the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative, which hopes to increase the number of children who complete their education from cradle to college and enter adulthood as productive participants in the 21st century economy and in the civic life of their communities. Lisa is spearheading increased collaboration between public schools, private schools and daycare infrastructure in the Beltway, with a goal of reaching every child in Ward 7, one of the most underprivileged areas of a city known for its high poverty and crime rates.

Erika Dimmler, a former CNN producer, is working to revitalize the economy of Sacramento through close consultation with the mayor and and his senior staff as a part of the Greenwise Joint Venture, which seeks to attract clean technology projects to the city while developing a workforce qualified for employment in clean energy and a community engaged in a greener future for its city. In addition to working with the mayor’s office, Dimmler also consults closely with small business leaders, green technology proponents, and community stakeholders to oversee the adoption and implementation of her projected goals for Sacramento.

What do these fellows have in common? Drawn from different backgrounds and different sectors of the economy, there is necessarily a lot of diversity among this crowd. However, Anastasoff did identify some areas where there were common threads that successful fellow applicants shared, including a history of relentlessly pursuing results; a successful track record of entrepreneurship or business management; and a sense of flexibility and humility that allows fellows to recognize themselves as serving the community and able to make compromises where needed in the name of getting things done.

Proof is the ultimate test of one’s results, and while the program is less than a year old, the last several months have indicated that Fuse Corps has a bright future. In addition to attracting top talent in the world of social engagement and entrepreneurism, the company has been able to place its fellows in situations where they can have a measurable, tangible impact while also raising enough money to keep the program going.

“While some of the fellows who take sabbaticals from full-time employment return to their jobs after the year is over,” says Anastasoff, “others will be looking for another way to give back full time once their fellowship has ended.”

More than just another blip on the corporate philanthropy map, Fuse Corps might well represent the future of community engagement. Which is why Fuse Corps is such a perfect partner for A Billion Plus Change, a national campaign to mobilize billions of dollars of pro bono and skills-based services from corporate America. Indeed, Fuse Corps is a key participant in A Billion Plus Change’s upcoming “Innovations in Corporate Service” thought leader summit in Palo Alto, which will serve as a special celebration of skills-based and pro bono volunteerism. The conference will gather A Billion + Change pledge companies to learn about emerging service trends, such as public-private collaborations, the growing role of the Millennial generation and new innovations that the technology community is introducing to the field of corporate service.

A Billion + Change has already secured nearly $1.8 billion in corporate pledges and 12 million hours of time and talent to pro bono programs. If your company would like to take the A Billion Plus Change pledge, go to www.abillionpluschange.org for more information.

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Culture of Corporate Giving Helps Darden Feed the Hungry

Ryan Scott — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:53:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

The need for proper nutrition is among the most primal. Yet in our own country, one in seven homes and one in five children in the United States are labeled as food insecure.

At the same time, food waste is also epidemic. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United States throws out 40 percent of its food every year. That’s not half-eaten sandwiches; that’s totally edible food that any hungry person would be happy to have. All told, this amounts to $165 billion in food waste every year.

Enter Darden Restaurants, which is addressing food insecurity by reducing food waste. Darden is the world's largest full-service restaurant company, owning and operating - through subsidiaries - more than 2,000 restaurants, including such brands as Red Lobster, The Capital Grille and Olive Garden. The company employs 185,000 people to serve more than 400 million meals a year, so it knows a thing or two about food waste. That’s why, through its Darden Harvest Program, Darden is tackling food insecurity by giving away instead of throwing away.

Launched in 2004, the Darden Harvest Program partners with local food banks to provide immediate hunger relief. This exercise in corporate philanthropy has tangible results for less fortunate families, with Darden donating 10.4 million pounds of food valued at $105 million in 2011 alone, and giving more than 60 million pounds of food to hunger relief agencies since the program’s inception. The program has met with acclaim, with former first daughter Chelsea Clinton reporting on the program this year for NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

The program helps not just the bellies of food recipients, but also their sense of self worth. Angela Woods, Director of Darden Foundation and Community Affairs, notes, “When you’re at a local food bank you expect that what you get is what you get,” she says. “You don’t expect well-prepared hot meals from the Olive Garden. You don’t expect lobsters and steak.” Woods has clearly been moved by the experience: “It is humbling.”

The Darden Harvest Program stands as a profound testament to the power of corporate giving to make a measurable impact in people’s lives. While donating to education and the arts are important, none of that much matters if someone isn’t getting enough food to eat. Darden Harvest is making sure that families have enough food in their bellies to make their other engagement programs matter.

Food banks need more than just food, however, as the best meal in the world is decidedly lacking if a person has nothing to eat it off of. When Darden revamped menus across nearly 700 Red Lobster locations, they also changed out the plateware used to serve those menus. Rather than just throwing them in the garbage, they found different ways for their trash to become treasure for an entire community; over 330,000 pieces were donated to hunger relief agencies in need of new dishes or Habitat Restore Resale Outlets, allowing the latter to raise money to help build new homes in the community. More than just providing a more pleasant dining experience for people receiving food assistance, this is a significant chunk of money that hunger relief organizations will not have to spend on replacing old plates. Where Darden had plates it didn’t need, local nonprofits were in need of plates (or at least the funds they could raise from selling plates), making this a win-win all around for everyone.

That said, Darden Harvest is only one example of Darden’s community impact. While hunger is the top concern for Darden Harvest, the Darden Foundation also targets education and preservation of natural resources, and local affiliates that drive community service ideas provide a diverse array of ways for Darden to get involved in the areas its restaurant serves. For example, employees in the greater Washington, D.C. area work with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to clean up the bay. And in Atlanta, 24 out of the 40 Darden restaurants in the city came together to help the local Boys and Girls Clubs improve graduation rates and college attendance through efforts like college fairs and help filling out student aid and college applications.

Darden’s commitment to engaging the people and communities where they do business all leads to more engaged employees. “Service is innate to who we are as a company,” says Woods. And a more engaged employee base has a number of benefits that are essential in the restaurant industry. “Our community outreach helps employees improve their effectiveness at work. They feel better about being at work and in turn, improve their interactions with our guests. It’s an essential morale booster that consistently improves engagement across the board.”

Indeed, when reaching out to local communities, the Darden Foundation relies on employee engagement for maximum results. For example, Red Lobster and Longhorn Steakhouse worked together in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to donate $8,000 for local food banks, mobilizing hundreds of employees to help package canned goods at local food banks to ensure that hungry locals would get fed.

Engaged employees also act as a motivator for Woods. “The fact that employees contact me asking how we can help makes my job so meaningful,” she notes, remembering a time that an employee reached out to her about another surplus at a Longhorn Steakhouse location. “She called saying that they had excess steak knives and wondered what we could do with them.” This is in keeping not just with the corporate values, but also Woods’ own personal ethics. “If we have a surplus of something, we need to provide for those in need.”

Still, while employee engagement is important for any company, it’s not the primary motivator for Darden. “There’s an obligation to the communities where we live and work,” notes Woods, “both personally and as a company.”

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Hasbro Engages Its Youngest Customers in Corporate Philanthropy

Ryan Scott — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:27:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

What were you doing when you were 9 years old? If you were anything like me, cartoons, bike riding and pickup games of baseball were the order of the day. But for Will Lourcey of Fort Worth, Texas, community impact is a top priority. One of Hasbro’s Community Action Heroes, the enterprising young Lourcey was so moved by a hungry man on a street corner that he volunteered at a food bank with friends. The plucky gang managed to pack 6,000 backpacks with food for hungry kids. This was the start of his community service project FROGs: Friends Reaching Our Goals. Up next for Lourcey: Hits and Kicks Against Hunger, a sports-based program that collected money for Tarrant Area Food Bank.

Lourcey isn’t alone. The younger generation has even more community service ideas than Gen Y. While schools often highlight excellence in academics, athletics and the arts, recognition for volunteer services hasn’t caught on in quite the same way yet. Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based Hasbro believes that these kids are making a real impact. To that end, they are a founding partner of generationOn, the youth wing of the Points of Light Institute. Indeed, the global-branded play and entertainment company has invested $5 million into its partnership with generationOn, a clear case of a company putting its corporate social responsibility money where its public relations mouth is. Karen Davis, Vice President of Community Relations at Hasbro, calls the company’s partnership with generationOn, “our largest commitment next to the Hasbro Children’s Hospital.”

GenerationOn includes a Youth Advisory Council of 14 young people between the ages of 13 and 17 with a demonstrated track record of excellence in community engagement. Tiffani Alexander, 14, of Covington, Georgia, connected the care and nurturing of insects to how we treat our fellow man. Tyler Bleul, 14, from Stamford, Connecticut, is taking the lead in presenting positive role models and mentoring. His project, A Few Good MENtors, works with kids living in battered women’s and children’s shelters throughout New York City’s five boroughs. Links of Love 2 Chains of Hope, the project of 16-year-old Zachary Odegard of Dallas, Oregon, organizes young people for community service. The volunteer community currently includes 140 participants -- approximately one percent of the city’s total population. Tharon Trujillo, 16, of Plumas Lake, California, invented a new helicopter design at the age of 10 to help people in disaster areas. His group, Whooz Solutions, helps to deploy this innovative technology. These are just four members of the board, all of whom are contributing to their communities in ways that would be outstanding for people twice their age.

What were you doing in high school? What are you doing now?

These kids are an inspiration to their communities, but also an inspiration internally at Hasbro. “Helping kids find their voice through service is a very big part of Hasbro’s philanthropy," says Davis. "Employee volunteerism is in our DNA.”

To that end, it’s not uncommon to see Hasbro employees using their four hours of community service time per month to also expose their kids to the value of lending a helping hand. More than just providing for basic needs, Hasbro believes in improving the quality of life for those most in need through its employee volunteer programs. Employees visit local shelters once a month to throw birthday parties for kids and distribute toys to needy children over the the holiday season. It’s impossible to overstate the social impact of such an undertaking; kids who are used to wondering if they’re going to have a roof over their head and a hot meal in their stomach at night get treated to something that they might have only dreamt about before.

At Hasbro, employee engagement goes far beyond the four walls of the workplace. One way that Hasbro’s community outreach goes beyond simple corporate philanthropy is through match parties for kids waiting for adoption. “It’s a chance for kids to get to know prospective parents in a casual, non-threatening sort of way. There’s a lot of game play and food. Sometimes it’s the only chance kids get to see their siblings who have been adopted.” Such a party can change the face of a child’s entire life, giving them a chance for the caring love and affection of a forever home that they’ve either forgotten about or never known. “We do this during the holiday season when everyone is tired and busy, but we wouldn’t give that party up for anything in the world. It means so much to so many people,” Davis says.

So what’s the connection between Hasbro’s broader CSR programs and the Hasbro Community Action Heroes, other than the obvious answer -- kids?

Kids engaged in service act as an inspiration to Hasbro’s employees engaged in community service. Davis met a young man through Hasbro’s outreach whose father was an abusive alcoholic. “The young man slept on a couch,” she says, “It made me really sad.” But this young man used volunteerism as a coping mechanism, as a way to escape his dysfunctional family life. He later went on to graduate from Vanderbilt University. “I was so inspired by this kid and the difference that service made in his life and the lives of others,” she says. In this case, good corporate citizenship helped create good personal citizenship.

“If you can catch those kids and help them find that good feeling that comes from giving back, it can be incredibly transformative.”

Crowdfunding + Corporate Philanthropy = New Fundraising Software

Ryan Scott — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:37:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

Crowdfunding is generally defined as an internet-based collective effort between people who pool money to help fund an activity or an entrepreneurial endeavor. Also called crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is used to underwrite a variety of activities, including new products, artistic efforts, political campaigns or scientific research, just to name a few. In return, if a product or project actually gets developed and produced, investors often either receive the final product, a portion of the profits or small shares of equity.

In their May 2012 Crowdfunding Industry Report, Crowdsourcing.org reports that about $1.5 billion dollars was raised via crowdfunding in 2011. Crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) like Kickstarter and global site Indiegogo facilitate crowdfunding efforts with big number successes; since 2009, Kickstarter has raised over $250 million in pledges while Indiegogo has funded over 100,000 projects from more than 196 countries. Given the rising popularity of crowdfunding, it’s not surprising that the number of CFPs is expected to increase to 530 by December 2012, up from the last count of 452 in April 2012.

Beginning in 2013, the federal Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, (JOBS Act) will start permitting companies to trade equity in exchange of products and services for crowdfunding investments. The hope is that crowdfunding will open up more opportunities for financial resources to jumpstart startups that in turn, will help grow new businesses and ultimately, create new jobs.

Crowdfunding can also be also used for non-profit fundraising as supporters increase awareness and promotion for their cause by using their social networks to encourage others to donate and make a significant community impact. A recent, highly publicized example of crowdfunding is the outpouring of public support for bus monitor and bullying victim Karen Klein. After viewing the online video of students verbally abusing Klein, good Samaritan Max Sidorov created a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise $5,000 with the intent to give Klein a nice vacation; the campaign ultimately raised $703,000.

That is one really nice vacation.

Crowdfunding for good

This example is proof of the power of crowdfunding and how it can be used to do good on a massive scale. Which is why non-profits are getting into the act and fundraising for specific projects or campaigns using CFPs. Acting as a catalyst for giving, what these CFPs all have in common is that they give web users an easy way to contribute to specific philanthropic projects without having to donate large amounts of money. Donors simply choose their cause and give what they can. A variety of crowdfunding platforms such as Causecast’s Community Impact Platform, Start Some Good, and Kiva have been created to specifically service non-profit fundraising, disaster relief and/or social change causes. Through group effort, these platforms enable teams of people to collectively contribute to a cause.

What does crowdfunding for a cause look like in action?

Last year, Los Angeles non-profit Do Good Bus used Start Some Good to help reach its ambitious fundraising goal of $100,000. Do Good Bus organizes volunteers and transports them by bus to go into various communities and help local non-profits. Because of their successful Start Some Good campaign, the bus was able to travel to 22 cities and recruit thousands of people who were interested in giving back by doing volunteer work in their local communities.

Kiva is a micro-credit crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to make charitable, interest-free micro-loans to entrepreneurs (social and otherwise) around the world. Kiva partly distinguishes itself by providing lenders an international opportunity to help better the lives of people in need. Take the case of Frenchman Javier Irastorza Mediavilla, who used Kiva to contribute to a loan for a group of Peruvians in the small village of Ccorao. A small group of residents needed money to buy farming supplies and finance businesses to attract tourism for their economically challenged town. When Javier visited Peru in 2009, he went to Ccorao and saw firsthand the results of his loan. Local merchant Marciano Choque Raya, who was one of the loan recipients, took Javier on a tour of the town to see the thriving handicraft and restaurant businesses that the Kiva loan funded, which ultimately helped to empower the locals to work toward achieving economic sustainability.

Some CFPs are committed to supporting a specific group, such as Sprigster, which focuses on raising resources exclusively or military veterans. One of the latest crowdfunding platforms to enter the field is HelpersUnite which links commercial ventures with charitable causes, requiring project creators to donate at least 5% of funds raised to a cause of their choice. And sometimes the CFPs get into the corporate philanthropy game themselves to make the world a better place. For example, Causecast employees used team building and a little friendly competition to create a competitive crowdfunding effort, all of which increased donor activity towards local animal rescues, as documented in their case study When Corporate Competitive Crowdfunding Goes to the Dogs.

Although crowdfunding is clearly one of many important philanthropy fundraising ideas, fundraising experts warn that non-profits should view crowdfunding as nothing more than an added source of financial support and not the answer to all of an organization’s fundraising prayers. How CFPs can best help a charity is by providing additional funds once a campaign has already gained traction from a non-profit’s existing group of supporters. Many sites will also allow donors to set up fundraising pages on behalf of charities they want to support or allow donors to set up tangential pages attached to a non-profit’s master page that they can use to recruit support from their social networks.

Ordinary people can do great things when they act collectively, so crowd psychology can play a big part in the success of non-profit crowdfunding efforts. Meanwhile, I’m still wondering where retired bus monitor Karen Klein went on that $703,000 vacation.

Related articles:

When is Corporate Philanthropy Like a Great Game?

Consolidate Your Corporate Good Efforts

How Volunteer Grants Double The Impact of Employee Volunteer Programs

Ideas for Consolidating Corporate Philanthropy

Ryan Scott — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:09:00 GMT

These days people consolidate everything: The phone bill with the cable bill. The water bill with the gas bill. Car insurance with homeowner’s insurance. Anyway you slice it, it just makes more sense to combine like things. Still, many companies have failed to have an “a-ha!” moment about consolidating corporate philanthropy and employee volunteerism into one streamlined, seamless package.

Many companies may be reticent to consolidate, thinking that it’s going to require more work. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Consumers often consolidate due to lower prices. Companies, in turn, offer lower prices because there is less hassle and headache involved when bills are consolidated. Similarly, when you put all your corporate giving and volunteer tracking into a single place, you no longer have to worry about chasing around invoices from different vendors, consolidating these reports the old-fashioned way and then reformatting the data to fit your current system.

Consolidating saves money on your end through significantly reduced man-hours, to say nothing of the diminished frustration. You can put that time and money back into whatever pillar of your company’s triple bottom line you like. Indeed, one way to look at the time, money and effort you spend on tracking giving and volunteer programs is waste. One way or another, all that data is getting consolidated. Why not do it right the first time instead of chasing after it ex post facto? A company that’s serious about corporate social responsibility shouldn’t be wasting its time doing things the long way.

Want to improve employee engagement in your company’s philanthropy efforts? Consolidating your CSR efforts will help dramatically. Complex multi-step processes act as a deterrent to employee involvement. Conversely, when the process is streamlined, employees want to participate; they see it as easy, available and hassle-free.

Sometimes companies look for community service and philanthropy consolidation in all the wrong places. The trick when consolidating all your tracking into one place is to work with a software as a service (SAAS) provider that is an authority on corporate giving and volunteering, such as Causecast. Rather than a mere service provider, Causecast sees itself as a partner in its clients’ success with employee volunteering and corporate giving. Further, Causecast can provide all the services that a company needs when integrating and consolidating its volunteering and donations into a single place, including:

Live reporting
Complete tracking of all volunteer hours and donation dollars
Comparing just about any metric under the sun to another
Mobile applications
Social media integration
Automatic logging of all volunteer hours
Processing and vetting done in real time
Branding customization
A seamless and easy to use interface

Volunteer and Fundraising Concierge Service - You Are Not On Your Own!

For the company looking to consolidate, Causecast’s platform is a no-brainer. Our Community Impact Platform provides everything that a CSR manager would ever need to manage even the most complex corporate giving and volunteering programs, and our crack customer service team will work tirelessly to help you make the most out of our platform’s robust and user-friendly interface.

Don’t waste another day with scattershot tracking of your company’s giving and volunteering efforts. Call Causecast and get consolidated.

Related articles:

Corporate Fundraising Ideas

When is Corporate Philanthropy Like a Great Game?

‘Tis the Season to Budget for Corporate Social Responsibility Success

Causecast Partners with White House Campaign to Inspire Girls in STEM

Ryan Scott — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Women have gained so much ground over the past fifty years that it can often seem that they’ve arrived at a place of equal opportunity.

They haven’t.

Today, less than five percent of the world’s heads of state are women, and women make up just nineteen percent of representatives in parliaments worldwide. Despite producing more than forty percent of the world’s food, women own less than one percent of the world’s farmland.

At a speech before the U.N. last year, President Obama challenged heads of state to break down the economic and political barriers to women’s equality. Responding to this call, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the Equal Futures Partnership, a coalition of countries committed to removing barriers to political participation and economic advancement of women in their respective countries. The U.S. announced a number of commitments to further the goals of the partnership, and key among them was advancing women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

A handful of private sector organizations whose work highlights how the U.S. is advancing its commitment to this mission were asked by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to participate in the Equal Futures Partnership. Amongst these select organizations, Causecast was invited to join the Partnership because of its ability to quickly launch cause campaigns and make it easy for corporations to engage their employees around cause. At the New York launch of the Partnership on September 24th, Causecast was honored to be one of approximately 10 private sector partners invited to the standing-room only event, which drew together founding members and distinguished diplomats from 12 other countries.

Causecast’s goal with its involvement with the Equal Futures Partnership is to make it easy for clients to support girls and STEM-related organizations through their employee giving and volunteering programs.

How does Causecast do this?

When it comes to girls and STEM, or any cause for that matter, the interest and willingness to help are in abundance. In short supply are the time and resources needed to set up, manage, and track meaningful opportunities to get involved.

This is where Causecast provides its secret sauce. The company’s technology and services offering removes, to the greatest extent possible, the transaction costs associated with these efforts. Our platform makes it easy to provide information about meaningful ways to get involved - be it through volunteer events, donations (monetary or in-kind) or fundraising. We have both a mobile and desktop offering so that employees may access the platform in the way that works best for them, and our concierge service works to find innovative nonprofits with sterling reputations for employee efforts to support. CTEq’s STEMWorks database serves as an ideal source of information for these efforts, and has helped Causecast to launch a ready-made campaign for the Partnership called GIT Inspired!, supporting girls in technology and STEM fields. The campaign is available to any company that uses the Community Impact Platform, and Causecast will be working with its clients to adopt or develop initiatives that make the most sense for their organizations.

Causecast’s VP of Product, Kate Stahnke, chairs the Employee Engagement committee for CTEq, and is also the point person for Causecast’s involvement with White House’s Equal Futures Partnership. “I’m excited on a number of levels that Causecast is committed to girls and STEM,” notes Kate. “As a senior technology executive, I’m keenly aware of how the shortage of girls in STEM affects the shortage of technical talent as a whole in this country. As a STEMinist, I strongly believe that STEM skills afford women an opportunity to create rich professional lives. As an American, I believe that advancing economic opportunity and political participation of women is among the most efficient ways to ensure our long term peace and prosperity. And as a Causecast employee, I’m proud to work for a company willing to commit significant resources to this cause - by way of its involvement with Change The Equation and now with the Equal Futures Partnership. That sense of excitement and pride is exactly what our platform works to foster in the employees of our clients.”

At the launch of the Equal Futures Partnership, a general theme of the event - echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - was that the efforts of the founding countries weren’t just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. This thinking perfectly summarizes why Causecast’s involvement with the partnership benefits all of its constituents: the girls it hopes to support in STEM learning; the companies it hopes to galvanize towards unique corporate philanthropy and employee engagement efforts; and the employees of these companies whom it hopes to rally around the issue of STEM education.

Get Your Employees Engaged in Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief

Ryan Scott — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:44:00 GMT

“Unthinkable.”

“Unprecedented.”

“Devastating.”

The worst superstorm in 100 years has left the Northeast, Cuba and Haiti reeling from historic damage. Deaths, floods, power outages and wreckage comprise the plight of communities across the East Coast.

Now is no time to sit on the sidelines; millions of people need your help. Companies can - and should - step up and demonstrate their leadership by engaging their employees in disaster relief for communities affected by Hurricane Sandy.

To that end, Causecast has created a disaster response and recovery campaign which is available right now within its Community Impact Platform. If you need any help launching a disaster relief campaign, please do not hesitate to contact us immediately. We will get you up and running right away.

Whether you’re using Causecast's platform or not, the most effective step your company can take is to encourage workplace giving donations to relief agencies like Operation USA and AmeriCares. But volunteers are also needed as a part of the massive clean-up effort across the Northeast; and it’s not just physical labor that’s needed - skills-based volunteers are in demand as well. After disasters like this, legal advice, accounting help, translation skills, and even real estate help will be needed in the days and weeks ahead.

Here are some organizations that have indicated a need for volunteers:

New York Cares is accepting volunteer applications through their website, especially if you've attended a New York Care orientation sometime in the recent past. Updates about where to volunteer will be updated throughout the day but for now potential volunteers should create an account so they can be contacted if they are needed.

John Jay High School in Park Slope, which was set up as an evacuation shelter, is looking for volunteers to work six to eight hour shifts helping out. They are also seeking belts and clothing for men and children.

The Red Cross is looking for volunteers to assist in shelters throughout the region. Shifts are 12-hours and volunteers work over multiple days. Training will be afforded to those without experience. Sign up by filling out an online application here.

This Google crisis map shows area Red Cross shelters and NYC evacuation centers. Borough President Marty Markowitz Tweeted this information earlier urging people to help.

Lower East Side: Lower East Side Recovers is an effort to match volunteers and givers with people who have needs in the Lower East Side, coordinated by the folks at Occupy NYC and community organizations on the ground.

Astoria: Astoria Recovers is connecting volunteers and givers in the Queens neighborhood.

Red Hook: Red Hook Recovers is connecting volunteers and givers in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

Brooklyn Shelters: Councilman Brad Lander says volunteers are needed at both the Park Slope Armory (8th Avenue between 14th and 15th streets) and John Jay High School (7th Avenue between 4th and 5th streets). He says you should be willing to put in a 6-8 hour shift. Kids cannot volunteer and should stay at home.

Queens Shelters: The office of Queens Borough President Helen Marshall says city shelters in Queens are in need of volunteers. They recommend checking nyc.gov for shelter locations.

Staten Island: Staten Island Recovers is connecting volunteers and givers in the borough and@SIrecovers

Far Rockaway: So far minimal information available for the Queens neighborhood, but the Far Rockaway Facebook page has been collating questions and needs.

New Jersey: Newark Mayor Cory Booker says that volunteers can check Jersey Cares for volunteering opportunities near them.

A volunteer emergency response hotline can be reached at 1-800-JERSEY-7 (1-800-537-7397) - they're looking for trained volunteers who are affiliated with an emergency response organization to volunteer their services. Gov. Chris Christie's office says the hotline is getting an overwhelming response, so another number to try is 609-218-0460.

The Food Bank For New York City has different ways for you to get involved: you can donate by texting FBNYC to 50555—or you can see if your local pantry or kitchen can use volunteers by going to the locator.

You can also look into the following opportunities across several states:

New York

Long Island Volunteer Center

The Volunteer Center

New Jersey

State of New Jersey Volunteers press release

Jersey Cares

Pennsylvania

American Red Cross Spontaneous Volunteers

Rhode Island

Serve Rhode Island

And nationally, you can contact the following organizations about volunteer opportunities no matter where you are:

American Red Cross

The Salvation Army

Red Star Rescue - part of the American Humane Association

‘Tis the Season to Budget for Corporate Philanthropy Success

Ryan Scott — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:57:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

Sidewalks strewn with autumn leaves. Pumpkins dotting doorsteps. Christmas decor making an early debut. It’s that wonderful time of year again.

Q4 budgeting season.

For Corporate America, 2012 has already faded in the rearview mirror. The focus now is all about figuring out how budgets will be allocated to increase market share and maintain (or gain) a competitive edge in 2013. Often lost in this bottom-line frenzy is financial consideration for how workplace giving and corporate volunteering programs will be implemented or improved next year. But if you’re mindful of how these programs are increasingly important to employees and consumers alike, it’s time to think about strengthening your corporate philanthropy muscle now, before your company’s 2013 dollars are all spoken for.

Need a refresher on why you should care? Let’s start with the magic trifecta of increased employee engagement, employee retention and employee recruitment. Corporate volunteering and workplace giving programs are assuming an ever more important role in helping staff feel connected to their companies and broader communities and in helping organizations behave in socially responsible ways that resonate positively with the public.

As Kenn Allen notes in The Big Tent: Corporate Volunteering in the Global Age, a book based on the Global Corporate Volunteering Council research project by the International Association for Volunteer Effort, companies that invest in employee volunteering respond to workers’ concerns about the quality of life in their working and living environments; increase and reinforce workers’ skills, particularly in leadership and participatory decision-making; respond affirmatively to the public’s expectations of its involvement in community problem-solving; and demonstrate moral leadership, “doing the right thing,” which redounds to the ultimate benefit of the company.

The jury is in: everyone wins when workplace giving and volunteer programs are put in place and operate efficiently. So why, then, does Allen ultimately conclude that “despite the growing importance of employee volunteer programs, most are not given serious attention or the necessary resources for success”?

It’s not enough to pay lip service to your volunteer program. You don’t treat other parts of your company as an afterthought, so if you believe in the triple bottom line power of giving and volunteering programs (as you should), why starve them of the modest budget they need to function well? If you want your giving and volunteer program to deliver maximum social and business returns - if you want it to operate with the same high-performing quality that you expect from the rest of your business - you need to invest in modern online tools to ensure its success.

It doesn’t take much to properly equip your volunteer program with a robust platform that makes it easy to generate compelling fundraising ideas (like corporate competitive crowdfunding), a snap for administrators to manage your company’s efforts, and inviting for employees to participate. A variety of providers offer online tools to manage giving and volunteer programs, so when looking around (or assessing your current solution) make sure that your platform includes at least the following few features and benefits:

One-stop central platform that enables both donation processing and volunteer sign-ups
Ability to handle in-kind donations
Ability to handle dollars for doers programs
Ability to handle dollars for matching gift programs
Real-time, automatic tracking and reporting for volunteering and giving
Ability to create your own campaigns or select from a constantly updated library of seasonal/ topical campaigns
Ability to customize the platform to match your company’s brand
High quality relationships with a wide range of nonprofits that your employees can connect with directly to find carefully vetted volunteer and giving opportunities
Mobile application so that employees can access the system in the field
Social media capabilities so that employees can easily recruit their networks to support your company campaigns
International capabilities for global reach
Single sign-on to create easy access that operates like a company intranet

Above all, do your homework. Stellar references, an impeccable record of customer service and an active development cycle with new features constantly in the pipeline are a must. Your new employee cause engagement platform should be as nimble as your company, always looking forward, not backwards toward the last century.

As you immerse yourself in 2013 planning, plan for a high return on the investment of time and human resources associated with your giving and volunteer program by allocating appropriate dollars to fuel these efforts. If you want these programs to serve a smart, strategic business function, you need to give them the tools to function at peak efficiency.

Related articles:

Is Your Company Doubling Down on its Employee Volunteers?

Is it Time to Divorce JK Group?

Leading Corporate Philanthropy Impact from the Bottom Up

Divorcing JK Group and EasyMatch

Ryan Scott — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:06:00 GMT

You had the best of intentions and highest of hopes. It was a classic company-meets-volunteer management-provider story, and when you joined forces you thought it would be forever.

Your company and JK Group...together you’d conquer the world (or at least make it a little better through awesomely efficient workplace volunteering and giving.)

But then little things got in the way of your love story.

Things like primitive software.

Which on its own wouldn’t be terrible if the customer service was up to snuff.

And while you fell hard for JK’s donation processing abilities, a philanthropic program must be comprehensive to make sense. You wanted more, you needed more....and JK just couldn’t deliver. Oh sure, after that strained “talk” you had, JK tried to pretend that volunteer sign-ups and tracking came naturally. But you both knew better. The reality is that everything beyond donation processing was a nightmare in this relationship...and then even their donation processing muscles turned flabby.

I could go on, but why make you re-live the nightmare?

Pretty soon the honeymoon wasn’t just over, it was hard to even remember anymore.

So here you are...one foot out the door, dreaming of how much better your life would be with a partner who understood you and your needs. But making a change feels daunting.

I’m here to tell you - that perfect partner is out there, so don’t settle for second (or 20th) best. Your dream match is a software as a service (SAAS) provider who not only gets your workplace volunteering and giving needs, but also gets your need for state of the art technology that’s as sophisticated as you are. A partner with an all-in-one solution that delivers everything your efficiency-loving heart could ever want in a centralized, cloud-based and easily customized platform.

What do I mean by “everything”? How about automatic volunteer hour-logging, real-time vetting and processing, customized branding and a seamless and seemingly limitless user interface that makes it a snap for administrators to manage and a joy for employees to participate? Or live reporting and complete tracking capabilities, providing constant insight into your efforts and making it a no-brainer to splice and dice your data according to any metric imaginable? Or features you probably never even dared to hope for, like a mobile application and social media integration that dramatically magnifies the reach of your CSR efforts?

Causecast’s Community Impact Platform is waiting in the wings, ready to make the leap effortless by migrating all of your data so that you don’t even need to think about it.

So what are you waiting for? It’s pointless to stay stuck in a bad relationship that’s going nowhere. Change your company-meets-volunteer management-provider story and find out how the right relationship can send your volunteer and giving program to the moon and beyond.

Related articles:

What's Hot in Corporate Volunteering: Employee Integration

Is Your Company Barking up the Right Fundraising Tree?

In a Tough Economy, Pro-Bono Volunteering Takes on New Importance

When is Corporate Philanthropy Like a Great Game?

Ryan Scott — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 19:49:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

Crowdfunding is a term generally reserved for raising money to support the next new startup, but it can also be used to define a new kind of employee giving program. This growing trend combines gamification and social media to boost employee engagement and increase community impact. Mix these elements together and you get corporate competitive crowdfunding.

Corporate competitive crowdfunding is the hot new buzzword helping to define one aspect of corporate giving, a charitable category that has been on the rise. In fact, according to a 2011 report by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, 65% of corporations increased their corporate giving from 2009 to 2010, and 53% gave more in 2010 than they did before the economic downturn in 2007. With so many companies jumping on the corporate philanthropy bandwagon, it’s important to not be left behind. Crowdfunding is an excellent tool to lead the way.

One type of crowdfunding is crowdsourcing, where ideas rather than dollars are collected. For example, the Toyota 100 Cars for Good program uses crowdsourcing to engage its consumers. Every day for 100 consecutive days, five nonprofit organizations are featured on the Toyota Facebook page and fans are encouraged to vote for their favorite charity; the winner receives a new Toyota vehicle and each of the four runners-up receive a $1,000 grant.

Or take the example of Fido, a mobile company based in Canada that partnered with environmental nonprofit Evergreen in 2011 to create the “Share Your Care” challenge. Members of the public shared ideas on different sustainability projects, and the idea with the most votes won $27,000 (which was directed to a reforestation nonprofit).

Bringing Fun to the workplace with Crowdfunding

Although these ideas engage members of the community, this same concept of crowdfunding and competition can be used to engage employees in your company.

So what’s the benefit of getting your employees involved in your corporate fundraising efforts? Well, for starters it helps workers feel connected to the best part of your organization’s ethos - its corporate social responsibility values. All of which helps to improve employee engagement, a bottom-line benefit that can’t be underestimated. These days, employee disengagement is rampant, and when workers don’t feel that their company is inspiring them to do their best, productivity losses follow. In fact, the Corporate Leadership Council reports that companies which enjoy high engagement rates have 87 percent lower staff turnover rates and 20 percent better performance.

With so much at stake, could adding corporate competitive crowdfunding to your workplace help nudge employee engagement in the right direction?

For pro-social technology leader Causecast, the answer was yes. In fact, employee engagement was top of mind when they organized their own competitive crowdfunder. Using its Community Impact Platform to create a fundraising challenge for two local animal rescues, Causecast leveraged social media, real-time reporting, peer recognition, instant donation processing, automatic tracking, micro and macro funding abilities, and good old competition with incentives to fire up the team and get them engaged in giving back. Causecast discovered an electric effect when they put the fun in fundraising, yielding company-wide engagement and plenty of friendly inter-office smack talk about who would win, which egged everyone to crowdraise more intensely. In the end, the biggest winners were the dogs at the rescues that Causecast raised a heap of cash to help.

In 2011, corporate giving totaled $14.55 billion and accounted for five percent of all charitable giving. With some added games and incentives, a mix of social media and the right online tool to make it all easy and fun, competitive crowdfunding raises the stakes and creates company-wide engagement around corporate giving. And if the employees at a small company like Causecast could make a big difference for their community while strengthening engagement at their own organization, think of how effective competitive crowdfunding could be on a larger scale.

Want to try out your own corporate competitive crowdfunder? Download Causecast’s Corporate Crowdfunding case study and find out how.

Related articles:

Remember the 3 Fs of Workplace Giving

Corporate Volunteerism and Fundraising for Incurable Cynics

Gamifying Employee Engagement

How Free Beer Leads to Sustainable Employee Engagement

Ryan Scott — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:03:00 GMT

This post was featured in Forbes.com.

A single work week might not seem like the kind of timeframe required to make a huge impact. But that’s all it took for Integrate PR to run an electronics recycling drive that responsibly recycled 2,617 pounds of electronic waste. So how did a tiny Houston-based PR firm manage to recycle over a ton of electronics responsibly using only 40 man-hours?

First and foremost, Integrate’s success highlights the importance of employee engagement. A new employee was amazed that Integrate didn’t recycle and quickly took matters into her own hands, raising a hue and a cry, inspiring Integrate PR to exercise greater responsibility when it comes to curtailing waste. When the time came to give back to the community, it was a no brainer. Electronics recycling “seemed like a great service to offer the companies in the building, but also the surrounding community,” said Allie Herzog Danziger of Integrate PR.

One problem the company immediately encountered was that its people don't always know what counts as a “recyclable electronic device.” Sure, people know about computers, MP3s players, tablets and cellphones. But rarely do they think about less exotic devices like hair dryers. “We needed to to explain that basically everything with a wire needs to be recycled,” said Danziger. No small task to communicate to the public. So how did they do it?

Social media helped but came with its own challenges. After all, it’s hard to list everything that can be recycled in 160 characters. Rather than limiting itself to Twitter, Integrate PR partnered with local green electronics recycling business Compucycle to get the message out via longer blog posts, and they connected with other local businesses looking to recycle their own electronics responsibly and engage the broader Houston community in doing so. Operating on the principle that “a picture speaks 1,000 words,” the joint effort used photographs to communicate the myriad items that need to be recycled responsibly.

In 2012, many firms might ignore traditional media in favor of social media. Not Integrate PR and not for its recycling drive; the company worked with local media outlets. No stories were run, but the company did get on event calendars. This hit a key demographic that would have been missed by social media, a demo that is probably not aware it needs to recycle electronic waste responsibly in the first place: seniors. Employees even went above and beyond most corporate volunteer programs programs and pounded pavement to get the word out on college campuses, another perfect place for finding recyclable electronics. In a mix of old and new, Integrate PR reached out to renters by acquiring email addresses from landlords and property managers and conducting a direct email marketing campaign.

Brewskis help save the planet

One interesting and unique way that Integrate PR connected with its community was by partnering with a local brewery. The incentive? For every piece of recyclable electronics someone brought down on the day of the drive, the donor received a free beer. At a cost of nothing to Integrate PR, the community was engaged with an incentive that just about anyone can enjoy. And never doubt the marketing potential of free beer in getting the word out.

Of course none of this would have been possible without engaged employees. At least one employee has a passion for recycling. What of the other seven? This helps: Integrate PR permits every employee who works past 6 p.m. to arrive half an hour later for every hour worked past six - and time spent on company-approved volunteerism counts in the same way as time spent on regular work.

That 40 dedicated hours for this effort was divided over a team of eight. This means that each employee only had to pitch in five hours of their time to net the results of over a ton of electronic waste. Integrate PR was able to do a lot in a little bit of time using time-tested techniques (direct mailing and flyering), educating the public about the benefits of recycling and the usual social media blitz, all in the service of effective corporate philanthropy.

And, of course, as Danziger says “free beer doesn’t hurt.”

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Ryan Scott — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:27:00 GMT

This post was featured in The Huffington Post.

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), over 1.5 million non-profits are registered in the U.S. While many of them receive assistance through corporate philanthropy and employee volunteer programs, in general all of them compete for a limited giving pool. So how can nonprofits stand out among all the noise, especially if you’re a small, grassroots organization championing an underserved and mainly unnoticed population like foster children?

“One person, one volunteer, one company at a time,” says Zaid Gayle, Executive Director of Peace4Kids (P4K), a South Los Angeles non-profit that provides programs and services for foster and at-risk youth from ages 5-18, and after they transition to adulthood until age 24. Because foster kids rarely have a permanent home or family, Peace4Kids is dedicated to empowering foster and at-risk youth by providing its own community as family. The P4K creed is that no matter where their foster kids are moved or what challenges are thrown their way, P4K wants them to feel that they will always have a family at P4K.

Small steps, big impact

Since funds remain a never-ending need for this grassroots non-profit, the small P4K staff is constantly brainstorming charity fundraising ideas. Due to cuts in government funding, P4K's financial livelihood relies heavily on the personal networks of its volunteers and supporters. These jolts of support usually start with one person who is so passionate about P4K’s work that he encourages and recruits his friends and co-workers to get involved.

For example, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a Los Angeles-based coffee franchise, began its relationship with P4K in 2006 by simply donating coffee and pastries to P4K events at the request of one of the company's employees, Joe Ponciano, a P4K volunteer and board member. Coffee Bean is proud of its longstanding prioritization of bold corporate social responsibility programs, such as building schools in the overseas countries where they buy coffee beans and launching employee engagement activities where team members take non-paid days to do community impact volunteer work. No surprise, then, that when Joe introduced the Southern California district of Coffee Bean to P4K, the company welcomed the opportunity to support kids in need.

As P4K grew, Coffee Bean’s involvement with P4K evolved accordingly. One of Coffee Bean’s corporate fundraising campaigns involved donating school supplies to P4K, where the company provided new backpacks and encouraged various stores to set up donation centers for customers to drop off school supplies. Employees later filled the backpacks with donated supplies and presented them to the P4K kids, enabling the kids to meet the new school year fully prepared.

In another corporate volunteering effort, Coffee Bean managers participated in several workshops to teach P4K teens such real-world skills as interviewing, presentation and job-seeking strategies. The managers role-played with the teens, gave them feedback and professional advice and taught them how to fill out Coffee Bean’s online application. And when employment opportunities opened up at local Coffee Bean stores, some P4K teens even found themselves with new jobs. For many foster kid youths, this was their first job, and for those transitioning out of foster care to life on their own it was a vital step towards financial stability.

Coffee Bean is P4K’s longest contributing corporate sponsor, and over the years individual employees have also donated time and money. As Joe puts it, “Zaid just has to ask and if we can do it, we will.” As the Executive Director of a small non-profit with a big mission, Zaid is more than appreciative. “We are so proud of our relationship with the Coffee Bean. They have impacted hundreds of our youth and have been the greatest support in giving our older foster youth work opportunities, which has literally prevented many of our kids from being homeless. Joe and the Coffee Bean have been shining examples of what I think corporate social responsibility should look like in communities.”

The relationship between P4K and Coffee Bean proves that sometimes it takes the infectious enthusiasm and passion of just one company employee to make a profound difference in the cause of a non-profit, no matter how large or small.

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