Agenda

Advancing Equity in Corporate Societal Engagement

CSR professionals are at the center of corporate responses to the growing community needs and calls for racial justice that have arisen over the past two years.  As social impact leaders, their expertise and innovation has been critical in driving impact both within and outside their organizations during these extraordinary times. This session will draw from lessons learned through CECP's daily interactions with its 220+ companies and data from CECP's Giving in Numbers report to illuminate how commitments made in 2020 translated to action in 2021. We’ll revisit the compelling peer learnings from a partner-led Racial Equity Summit in 2020 that informed 10 concrete actions for companies to move promise to action and highlight examples of companies that have enacted high impact programs and initiatives. The session will close with insights on where corporations can continue to focus resources and intention to further advance this timely and important work.

Want to learn how to use Spark to streamline your program management and onboard new employees faster? In this session, you’ll get proven strategies to help you bring more scale, automation and efficiency to your day-to-day program management. We’ll delve into the world of Spark and showcase all its innovative features available at your fingertips. Plus, we’ll walk through specific recommendations for streamlining and automating your existing CSR program so you get the most out of the platform.

Whether you’re granting locally, nationally or all over the world one challenge persists: managing your granting lifecycle! We’ll show you how the right tools and processes can boost your efficiency, so you can achieve all your goals and have peace of mind understanding the magic behind the scenes of automation. Together, we’ll determine if automation is right for your program, how to create an automation and how to leverage automation based on your existing application forms.

Despite a global pandemic, organization-wide transformation and a shift in the way we all show up at work, UPS’s BRG program has continued to thrive and provide a space for global inclusion and engagement. In this session, you’ll learn how the UPS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team helps BRGs drive growth, innovation and community impact.

Build a Culture of Goodness through your CSR Program

New to CSR or looking to deepen your understanding of how to run an industry-leading program? In this session, you’ll learn how to use your purpose program as a key business differentiator to attract, retain, and develop top talent. Join Benevity’s Aneil Rajaram and Isha Varma as they walk through the key principles of program design and ideas on how to infuse Goodness into each step of the employee journey, from onboarding new hires to creating regular engagement. Along the way, they'll share inspiring examples and tips from Benevity clients.

Show Me The Money – Growing Your CSR Budget

The pandemic accelerated business trends in tech, work, entertainment, health, and Corporate Social Responsibility. Social pressures pushed companies to figure out how to respond to a new landscape in ways that empathized, propelled the brand forward, and had real impact. Everyone knows they must take their brands in a purposeful direction, but not that many know the pitfalls or dynamics of such a thing in their own companies.

During this session, you will:

• Learn how to work with colleagues from marketing, human resources, and operational departments to grow your social impact budget

• Understand the needs of colleagues in these roles to set — and reach — everyone’s goals

• See case studies of these topics in action

With rising interest in ESG, more leaders are bringing enhanced focus, alignment and action to business aspects that used to be considered the realm of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability — but are now core to every company’s strategy. In this session, Jason will share with us the opportunity and importance of raising the bar on social impact measurement, creating better S data and addressing market demand.  He’ll be joined by Jane Moran, Benevity’s Chief Technology Officer, for a discussion on data, analytics and measuring your impact. 

When the pandemic launched us into a virtual world, LinkedIn’s Social Impact team found themselves struggling to engage new employees in their signature volunteer mentorship program: LinkedIn Coaches. Learn how they ignited internal community (and a sense of camaraderie!) while providing employee volunteers with the training needed to become valuable mentors to professionals facing barriers. Like a book club for creating impact, the refreshed community (called Coaches Crews) groups 5 to 10 employees under a Crew Leader to prepare for and take part in impactful volunteer events with colleagues from across the company.

If you have a newly hybrid workforce, Discover has all the tips and ideas to help you revamp your volunteering program and engage everyone. They were quick to redefine volunteerism at the start of the pandemic, expanding their program to reward small Acts of Goodness and offering virtual, drive-through and socially distanced events. They also used Missions to promote social causes and matched participation points with volunteer rewards. The results? Overall participation grew 12% year over year, with 86% more people participating and 115% more volunteer hours tracked.

The Power of Letting Your Employees Lead

How does one small shift in mindset lead to a 550% increase in employee donations? Just ask Twitter! For its first two years, the company’s employee giving program was seen as an extension of their corporate giving program —a way for employees to support causes that mattered to Twitter. In 2020, they flipped that approach, so what mattered to Twitter’s people was what mattered to Twitter. Employees could now donate to causes they personally cared about and, as you can see, the results were pretty incredible.

Activate Your Employees to Scale Your Impact

PagerDuty wasted no time launching a 100% virtual volunteer program in May 2020, kicking off with a full week of 20 activities over five days and engaging 17 partners focused on advancing equity in our communities — all via Zoom. And it’s still going strong. They wrapped 2021 with 87% volunteer engagement, 5,200+ volunteer hours (nearly double from 2020) and partner-centric programs that leverage technical pro bono and skills-based volunteering. Learn how they did it through a combination of engaging ERGs and social impact champions, doubling down on reporting and reducing program friction.

The John Deere Foundation launched its Bold Commitments in March 2021, with plans to invest $200 million over the next 10 years to ensure all their stakeholders prosper. The funds will support their home communities, farmers and their greatest asset — their employees — through equitable access to resources and education, improved sustainability and employee volunteerism. Their vision for these integrated programs is to unlock economic, social and environmental value for everyone John Deere serves.

Prior to 2021, only U.S. employees had access to the Intel Foundation donation matching program, creating a sense of inequity among employees. Using inclusion as their North Star, Intel’s small team embarked on a journey to model a global program that delivered maximum impact with minimal administrative burden — and they did it! Within a year, they launched donation matching in every country where they have employees. Hear all about their wins, challenges and lessons learned along the road to success.

With service as a core value, AAA was proud to have benchmark-surpassing volunteer rates, but even they weren’t spared by the pandemic-induced engagement drop. Like all of us, they had to rethink everything. Enter ERGs + Missions. AAA leveraged ERG communities to share their passions with their coworkers and get them involved in easy, integrated ways — from Missions challenges to virtual volunteering events to customized giving opportunities. Learn how it led to increased participation across the board, with Missions participation up 116% and volunteering up 42% year over year.

Within four months of launching their program in September 2021, Hootsuite was blowing Benevity benchmarks out of the water! Learn the tactics they used to accelerate their success — including increasing their matching limit by 10x during their first-ever HootMatch event. Plus, they’ll share tips on how they launched the program to their people in a way that got them excited and ready to participate.

While advancing opportunity and building thriving communities are values that drive many CSR programs, corporate philanthropy can sometimes work counter to these values by imposing restrictive, compliance-oriented practices on nonprofits. Trust-based philanthropy flips the script so that nonprofits have the agency and support they need to innovate, grow, and achieve impact. In this session we’ll explore what it looks like to embody trust-based philanthropy, and the benefits when grantmaking practitioners invest the time and energy to fully embrace this approach.  

The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization 

How do you feel about those who vote differently than you do? Surveys show that Americans have become more fearful and hateful of supporters of the opposing political party, and imagine that they hold much more extreme views than they actually do. In this session, Dr. Coleman explores the partisan divide in the U.S. and how conflict resolution and complexity science can provide guidance for dealing with seemingly intractable political differences.

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are employee-led groups driving positive action and some of the world’s most successful companies rely on them to create a community of culture and belonging. Vital to DEI initiatives, ERGs often work hand in hand with CSR teams. In this session, we will introduce Benevity’s new ERG product and explain how it will empower your teams to come together in support of the issues that matter most to them. You’ll leave the session understanding the power of ERGs and how expanding your ERG program can boost your overall impact.

In 2021, Excellus launched their Health Equity Awards to use their privilege and resources to create change. More than 150 nonprofits applied through Benevity for awards up to $30,000 each. And, since inclusivity was the goal, they shifted their application review to bring in their ERGs and clinical team. They gathered more inclusive feedback and selected 18 recipients, investing more than $388,000 in total. Excellus is now partnering with award recipients to engage employees in aligned volunteer opportunities and using PR to educate their communities on health disparities, the investment and its impact so far.

With two years of crises still negatively affecting nonprofits globally, RBC stepped up their skills-based volunteering program to help employees and communities work together to find actionable solutions for long-term change. Partnering with their Leadership Development team and Taproot Foundation, they created a 12-week virtual program and four-day hackathon focused on BIPOC communities leveraging Benevity as their home base. The initiative brought together 275 global employee volunteers to provide $3.9 million in services to their charitable partners. Learn why and how they’re now exploring expanding the program even more.

How did Jacobs go from sporadic pockets of employee giving to major global activism? By upping their global game in a big way, expanding their program to include 55,000 employees in 39 countries and coming out of the gates with special matching, payroll giving, Missions, user-created content, exec support and the secret sauce — their worldwide Ambassador Network. Now, 18 months in, they have three grants workstreams, paid time off to volunteer, open matching and volunteer rewards, too. And it’s paying off. Learn how all of this led to three periods of participation growth and a best-in-class ambassador program.

Liberty Torchbearers:  Moving from Programs to a Culture

Five years ago, Liberty Mutual Insurance ran two highly successful episodic employee engagement programs— Give with Liberty, an employee giving match program— and Serve with Liberty, corporate service days with curated projects around the globe. These programs were executed as separate efforts on two different platforms.  However, they did not reflect the broader cultural statement that Liberty was looking to make about its support of employees giving back to the communities they called home. With a commitment to building a best-in-class employee volunteering and giving program, Liberty Torchbearers was launched adding another program Volunteer with Liberty and three years ago moved the programs to a single platform. The Torchbearers’ identity offered a broader meaning linking the company’s values with a synergistic integrated employee engagement program that embodies Liberty Mutual values. Sylvia Stevens-Edouard will share this story and how Liberty Mutual continues to drive connection and inclusion as integral to culture and brand.

Web3 101 and the Future of Good: The Blockchain’s Effect on Social Impact

Wondering what is web3? What’s the deal with NFTs? What do tokens and blockchain actually do? This session provides an overview of web3's various elements including tokens, NFTs, decentralized finance, DAOs, blockchain and more. Then we dig into how these new technologies and digital assets can influence social impact now and into the future. Whether you already have a wallet with crypto, or you’re new to the space and ready to learn, you’ll walk away with some new nuggets of information!