Recruit, Engage and Retain Employees in 2021
Each person in our country benefits from the work of more than 1.5 million registered nonprofit organizations. Some ensure our towns and cities’ safety and well-being, while others enhance our lives through their support of the arts, education, and environment.
Did you know that in 2016, these organizations contributed 5.6% of the United States gross domestic product (GDP)? Their employees comprise 10% of the workforce. Meanwhile, Americans contributed volunteer time valued at $195 billion in 2017 to these nonprofit organizations, as reported in The Urban Institute: The Nonprofit Sector in Brief report.
All of this Critical Work Requires Funding
A lot of the monetary giving is coming from corporations. In 2017, corporate giving was $20.77 billion. Employees contribute another half a billion through workplace giving. According to the Nonprofit Source, 60% of companies now have Skills-Based Volunteering (SBV) programs in place.
Volunteerism has changed with the times. Busy schedules, dual-income families, and virtual working have shifted much public service to the workplace. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions are now an integral part of most large companies worldwide.
Customers and employees both expect businesses to support the causes important to them. Business leaders recognize the value to both their brand reputation and employee engagement, and data proves good corporate citizenship leads to a healthy bottom-line. Brands perceived to have high social impact saw a 175% increase in value over twelve years, according to the Benevity report Global Giving on the Rise: CSR 2021.
CEOs and Business Executives Feel an Obligation to Act
They believe their companies can help solve problems, and they know that purpose matters to their stakeholders and the public. Seventy-five percent of CSR leaders report that since COVID-19, they are getting increased support from the C-Suite.
The 2018 Nonprofit Sector Survey showed that 86% of nonprofits report an increase in demand for their services.
So, we see employees want to volunteer through their employers, CEOs believe their companies can help, and customers support corporations that contribute to the social good. It even benefits the company’s profits. What’s the bottleneck?
You Need Essential Data, Yet it is Hard to Collect
Business must seamlessly integrate pro bono programs into the overall mission and strategy to implement the expanded role of CSR, and SBV, specifically.
Research establishes that the top challenges for CSR professionals include how to:
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Measure the impact of the skills-based volunteering work.
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Innovate effective CSR practices that appeal to employees.
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Respond to corporate, volunteer, and nonprofit partner requirements.
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Manage the expectations of senior leadership.
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Provide benchmarking to inform internal stakeholders.
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Work within budget constraints.
Companies need to establish measurement criteria to set CSR-related goals and find practical tools to measure the value and progress of their efforts to allocate resources effectively. The financial benefits of skills-based volunteering and other CSR activities are often indirect and take time to be realized, making them hard to measure.
The solution to accessing relevant data so necessary to influence CEOs and Boards of Directors is a software program to simplify reporting, assessing, and quantifying overall social impact with hard numbers. SBV no longer requires self-reporting, thanks to Revere. Our feature-rich platform is easy to set up and manage and can be scaled to match almost any organization’s needs.
We work with you to build and launch personalized sites, which tie smoothly into your branded image. Employee-nonprofit partner engagement data can be collected and pulled from clients’ administrative consoles through Revere’s API (application programming interface). You may choose to ask your IT team to pull your data from Revere into a software program you’re using for employee giving and volunteer management, including Salesforce, Benevity, YourCause+Blackbaud, CyberGrants, Deed, et al.
Partnerships Between Nonprofits and Companies Will Increase in Relevance and Value
We all acknowledge nonprofits’ undisputed value in meeting societal needs as companies work to attract and retain a diverse workforce. The importance of SBV will continue to grow as consumers reward good corporate citizenship, as evidenced by strong CSR policies.
However, to function smoothly and provide the benchmarking data the C-Suite requires, businesses need to integrate these programs into existing departments.
These are the reasons I built Revere Software. Are you ready to get started or increase the impact of your skills-based-volunteering programs? Connect with us today.