Creating community
With employees in over 27 countries and in a broad spectrum of roles, Australia-based Atlassian needed a way to create community for their people and inspire them to live the company’s mission to “unleash the potential of every team.”
Atlassian’s Pledge 1% contributes 1% of employee time, company equity, products and annual profits to the Atlassian Foundation. The Foundation provides funding and resources to support donations, volunteering and donations of Atlassian products to nonprofits.
Benevity’s employee engagement tool, Spark, enabled them to develop more robust giving and volunteering initiatives.
Formalizing skills-based volunteering with the launch of Engage 4 Good
While skills-based volunteering had existed for some time at Atlassian, it was mostly on an ad hoc basis. Atlassian took the opportunity to create a pilot program which invited nonprofits and social enterprises to apply for a project. The team matched the projects with Atlassian volunteers based on their skills.
These are the results over three to four months:
— Lauren Black, Social Impact Specialist
Atlassian Foundation
Volunteering pilot demonstrates impact, efficiency and effectiveness
The impact of the volunteer pilot was significant for their partner organizations. These causes reported deepening their impact on their community or environment through:
Volunteers found deeper connection with causes and Atlassian
It’s not only nonprofits who benefit when employees donate their time to a cause. Skills-based volunteering at Atlassian also had a profound impact on the volunteers themselves.
Almost 90% of employees reported feeling a deeper connection to both the causes they engaged with and Atlassian, over 80% said they gained valuable new skills along the way and close to 100% of the participants would recommend skills-based volunteering to a colleague.
8 ways to fire up skills-based volunteering
What makes for a successful skills-based volunteering program? Atlassian identified these eight key best practices.
Evolving to an employee-led volunteer program and managing the program like a product
Volunteers were interviewed to understand their experience and pain points, discovering that project-volunteer matching and finding a suitable project were the biggest barriers. As a result, their team made the decision to manage the program more like a product. Engage 4 Good is now focused on growth, maturing the program and making it more employee-led.