3 Tips in 3 Minutes: Aligning Corporate Volunteering with Business and Community Goals

Welcome, I’m Brian Kurth, founder of Revere Skills-based Volunteering Software, and welcome to 3 Tips in 3 Minutes for CSR Leaders. With me today is Jerome Tennille, Director of Social Impact and ESG at The Uplift Agency. Let’s hear your 3 Tips in 3 Minutes.

Thank you, it’s good to be here today.

# 1. First and foremost, engage in conversation with your internal business partners to align volunteering with enterprise goals.

This means talking to corporate leaders and employees so both parties understand their priorities, business functions, challenges, and perceived opportunities. Through these conversations, you can align your efforts with their strategic objectives.

You’ll be able to bridge the gaps between your volunteer program and your business’s strengths. You can begin to identify the challenges of your volunteer program that can be leveraged as a business solution with those you work with.

I’ll give you one example: We know that there is a clear connection between skills-based volunteering and talent recruitment. So, when you volunteer with workforce development programs, you can support the community while also developing a pipeline for the HR team. This approach begins to connect the dots between your volunteer and traditional functions within your company.

I’m pretty partial to that idea.

#2. Tip number two is participating in listening sessions with the community to understand their challenges.

By taking a stakeholder-centric approach, you can more effectively adopt a community-centric approach when talking to nonprofits, local community leaders, and those most affected by your company’s operations. Doing this helps you identify their most pressing social issues and discover how your efforts can make a meaningful difference as you work collaboratively within the community to co-create initiatives.

There’s a saying I love: No conversation about us, without us. This approach embraces that idea—when you talk about true agency in your company and the community you serve.

Folks, I’ve got to put it out there. This next tip, number three, is close to my heart because it’s not done often enough. Jerome, what is your last tip?

#3. Tip number three, again, talking about a stakeholder. Gain insights from customers and understand their priorities.

Through surveys and other mechanisms, you can gather rich customer feedback to better understand what they most care about. Because they are members of the community and stakeholders in the company.

Ask about the different initiatives they would like to see your company participate in and how they’d like to take part when applicable and appropriate. This knowledge allows you to focus your volunteer program efforts in a direction that can be consumer-facing and engaging in volunteer activation while addressing consumer’s needs.

So, you can do two things—engage them with your corporate values and better understand how to communicate your volunteer program through compelling storytelling.

Thanks. I love it. You know many of Revere’s clients are enterprise-level, and the consumer-facing side of things can be overlooked. So, you’ve added a critical point—communicating to the customer what your company’s doing. Some clients have even tapped into customer expertise to benefit their SBV program. 

How can people reach out to you, Jerome? 

Connect on LinkedIn.

Thanks so much for being a part of 3 Tips today, Jerome.

Jerome leads social impact work for Uplift’s wide range of corporate clients.

Connect with Jerome on LinkedIn.