Create a hashtag for your program that your people can use to spread a culture of Goodness across your company. It can also easily help you measure the number of impressions and mentions you receive across your social media platforms and see how your impact has amplified.
Getting Started
With CSR
A guide for powering purpose from the ground up
Sounds familiar?
Based on our 13 years of helping clients develop and launch CSR programs, we know that building a CSR program from the ground up can seem challenging, overwhelming and maybe a little intimidating.
But you’ve arrived here. And we’re here to help.
We’ve prepared this blueprint to help you design a CSR program that works for you — and your company. Along the way we’ll share examples and tips from some of the 700+ clients we’ve helped do the same. You’re welcome to borrow ideas from this community and incorporate your favorites to achieve your goals. You don’t have to be a big brand — or have a big budget— to be the good you want to see in the world.
Corporate Purpose Is a Team Sport
Since corporate purpose is becoming a strategic differentiator, and one of the very few levers for companies to drive authentic and empowered brands and cultures, for many companies it’s no longer solely the domain of CSR and HR professionals. We’ve found that we are increasingly working with clients who are seeking ways of embedding purpose to achieve both social outcomes and business value. This has required an unprecedented level of collaboration with groups that may or may not have had a stake in your strategies and activities until now.
Marketing
Goodness matters because it:
- Authentically builds your brands and deepens connections in the community through prosocial behaviors
- Unearths compelling stories with supporting data
- Generates new themes and trends across your business
Corporate Social Responsibility
Goodness matters because it:
- Increases focus on positioning your company as a CSR leader
- Provides opportunity to gather robust data toshow your organization’s impact
- Strategically aligns your programs with your people’s passions
Talent/Recruitment
Goodness matters because it:
- Drives engagement and reduces employee turnover
- Connects people across locations and business units
- Attracts purpose-driven employees and rewards prosocial behavior
Building the Team
Start With a Compelling Mission
At Benevity, we know that starting a new program is no easy feat — often starting with a few people or even one person! With this in mind, we know that each moment, action and goal must drive results and impact.
That’s where the importance of tangible, easy-to-understand and inspiring mission statements comes in.
This means ensuring that all team members feel included and empowered, while still laddering up to the collective key business objectives and goals. To do this, many Benevity clients have identified a few (3–4) key pillars of strategic focus at a collective level and use a corporate purpose program to support a larger and open-choice model.
Building the Team
Recruit Champions
Call them Ambassadors, Champions, Catalysts or something else, but we recommend building a team of employees across your locations who can help you implement, scale and grow your program. This community is a group of dedicated individuals who are passionate about making a difference in their local communities and will take on additional responsibility to ensure your program is successfully engaging more people. This team will cheerlead, rally and inspire their co-workers to get excited about prosocial activities like giving and volunteering. Many of our clients will empower them to organize and lead campaigns at their specific locations and engage their co-workers in grassroots initiatives.
You may be surprised to find there are likely people already in all your locations willing to support purpose initiatives. No one knows local communities better than the people who live and work in them! Our recommendation is to begin by finding out who’s already involved in their community, and who can speak passionately about why they support the cause(s) they do.
To find your Champions, here are a few folks you might want to reach out to:
- Passionate participants: the people you know who already participate within their communities will know more employees who are passionate about doing good, too!
- Executive admins: those with the connection to your executive team will already have a pulse on leadership cause support and commitment.
- ERG/affinity group leaders: these folks are often actively involved with causes that resonate with the specific group that they lead, and they are likely already volunteering as a group.
- All-hands coordinators/internal communications team: this team structures pertinent communications across a wider team and can quickly add you to the all-hands meeting schedule.
- HR team: with a broad knowledge across the organization, the people team will know who the high potential (HiPo) employees are within your company, and if any of them are looking for professional development opportunities. For example, being a Social Impact Community Chair provides the opportunity to gain leadership and project management skills, while also networking with leadership and gaining positive visibility.
- Additional employee groups: groups like leadership or intern programs can be powerful recruitment pools to see who might be interested in joining your team of Champions.
- Field or deskless workers: these employees may have different communication channels and ways of engaging than employees who work in your offices, so you can ensure your programs are inclusive for all of your people.
Find tips, templates and more in our guide,
Build an Ambassador Network.
Building a Volunteer Champion Program
Illumina, a biotech company with several international offices, rolled out their global volunteer program thinking they knew what all their employees would connect with, based on the preferences of their U.S.-based employees. But when their program administrator went on a two-week trip to visit their offices in China, Singapore and Japan, she discovered their global volunteer program was getting very little pickup: not only were their international offices not running any volunteer events, but there was no ownership of the program and very little guidance.
In response, Illumina’s program administrator pivoted to appointing Volunteer Champions in each region, giving them a budget to work with, setting goals and scheduling regular check-ins to discuss their progress. Linking local Champions with the larger global network also provided an additional layer of support and connection.
Illumina now holds four annual global volunteering events, and everything else is up to the Champions to create and communicate authentically and locally. Illumina’s Volunteer Champion initiative has led to impactful, local volunteer event creation, which has had a positive impact on participation and morale.
Activate Your People With Purpose
Employee Giving and Volunteering
Employees are more likely to participate in a CSR program that values their experience and passions! The employee experience should be at the center of all participation opportunities. Every aspect of the program should help answer the question: How are we making this easier for our people to have an impact?
Key elements of an easy-to-use program include:
- Open-choice giving, so employees can choose which nonprofits they want to support based on their passions and interests.
- Company incentives like matching, seeding and volunteer rewards so you can show your employees you care and actively encourage them to get involved.
- Payroll giving to make it easy for employees to donate directly from their paychecks.
- User-generated giving and volunteer opportunities to enable your people to co-create your program from the ground up.
- Geographically specific giving and volunteering opportunities to engage employees in their local communities.
- Flexible volunteering options — including skills-based and virtual — so people can participate in small and big ways.
- Quick and efficient nonprofit vetting and funds disbursement to ensure every donation gets to the intended organization that needs it (no more manual checks).
Employee engagement levels in our Commitment to Communities program increased from 39% to 49% since moving to open-choice giving.
Lauren Fitzgerald,
Community Investment Specialist,
Meridian
Activate Your People With Purpose
Opening the Door to Participation
Want to get as many employees as possible engaged in your program? Leverage elements like gamification, open-choice giving, and volunteer rewards that incentivize them and give them a stake in its success.
Volunteer Rewards
Volunteer rewards, sometimes referred to as dollars for doers, provide additional funds to employees based on volunteer hours and are gaining in popularity. For example, if an employee participates in a day-long corporate-sponsored volunteer program of a house build, that employee would be rewarded for their eight hours of time, with funds going into a giving account (often at $20/hour times 8 hours = $160). The employee can then direct those dollars to the nonprofit of their choice.
You’ve amplified their impact by enabling both volunteerism and giving. Volunteer rewards are most powerful when they’re open choice too, empowering your employees to then donate the funds to the causes most important to them.
Missions
Encouraging small positive actions by your people is another inclusive way to do good and create major social, personal and business impacts. For example, Benevity clients can use our Missions module to empower and motivate their employees to do more good through gamified and easy-to-complete activities. Whether it’s taking shorter showers, educating themselves on racial inequity or registering to vote, Missions activities can promote awareness, develop empathy and encourage socially conscious behavior. Regardless of time, money, location or job type, anyone can participate in Missions, so it’s the great engagement equalizer. And a great team builder too!
Open-Choice Giving
The most successful programs feature nonprofits and campaigns that align with company-level CSR goals and empower employees to engage with organizations that are important to them personally. It’s all about finding a balance between company pillars and employee passions. In open-choice programs, employees are five times more likely to participate!
To understand which causes employees are most passionate about, we suggest Conducting an internal survey. You might be suprised with what you find! By identifying employess' passions, you may find that there are additional cause categories to include in the company pillars!
Success Story:
Vancouver International Airport
2016: Only 4 causes available for employee giving
2017: Added an additional 100+ charities for their annual campaign
Goal: 40% participation
Incentive: $75K matching budget and the unveiling of the contents of a mystery briefcase ...
The Results: Their employees gave $67,491.50 to 60 causes and went above and beyond 40% participation! The YVR Comms team opened the briefcase and gave a custom pair of YVR socks to everyone who participated. Here’s a YouTube video posted to wrap up the campaign: Employee Giving Finale: Briefcase Revealed.
Activate Your People With Purpose
Shout It From the Rooftops
Your program can have the best incentives and program design, but if employees don’t know about it, they can’t participate.
These communication tweaks are easy to do and can quickly build awareness and trust among your people:
- Scale your communications. Request five minutes from management to have Champions (or leadership) speak at team meetings.
- Raise awareness gradually. Start with small campaigns (like Denim Fridays!) and promote recurring payroll donations in support.
- Visually demonstrate progress toward a team goal. Set a giving goal and visually track its progress in a common area. The total donations thermometer is very powerful!
- Celebrate milestones. Create buzz about your program by acknowledging employee participation. Start from day one! Include CSR training and do micro-volunteering during new-hire orientation.
- Go social. Encourage employees to post on their feeds and mention your CSR hashtag.
- Leverage global events/days. Be strategic with budget and create a “wow” effect at critical calendar moments or crises by running special matching campaigns. Many of our clients offer 2:1 or 3:1 matching on special dates like GivingTuesday, and one even offered 5:1 in response to COVID-19.
Assess Your Impact
Demonstrate value to your company, colleagues, customers and communities
#Pro Tip
| Type of Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Transactional Metrics |
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| Engagement Metrics |
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Choose a Technology Partner
An extension of your team to help you bring it all together
We’ve given you lots of ideas and a lot to think about! All of these things, paired with the right technology platform, can help you bring everything together and scale across multiple locations, time zones and functions if required. We know we’re (a little) biased! But it’s true — enabling purpose, engaging employees and creating social and business impact along the way can be a lot easier if you have technology to help streamline, automate, organize and manage it for you.
But there’s a lot to think about when choosing a CSR software partner. Whether you’re looking to build your program from the ground up or investing in software for the first time, having a partner that can grow with you will set you up for success — now and in the future.
At Benevity, we have worked with our clients to develop the Guide for Choosing an Employee Engagement Partner and outline a structure to help you find the best one for your program needs! This is a great guide to help you get started!
Good luck building your program!
And we’re always here for you if you need help.
Benevity, a certified B Corporation, is a leader in global corporate purpose software, providing the only integrated suite of community investment and employee, customer and nonprofit engagement solutions. A finalist in Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards, Benevity’s cloud solutions power purpose for many iconic brands in ways that better attract, retain and engage today’s diverse workforce, embed social action into their customer experiences and positively impact their communities. With software that is available in 22 languages, Benevity has processed nearly $8 billion in donations and 43 million hours of volunteering time to support 326,000 nonprofits worldwide. The company’s solutions also facilitated 530,000 positive actions and awarded 1.2 million grants worth $12 billion. For more information, visit benevity.com.