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10 Best Corporate Volunteering Platforms for Businesses
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As a business owner or leader, you may be thinking of expanding your corporate social responsibility or volunteer program. According to America’s Charities, 6 in 10 workplace donors say they want to work for companies with cultures that support giving and volunteering. A corporate volunteering platform is one of your most powerful tools for keeping your corporate social responsibility initiatives on track.
Employer-supported volunteering plays a significant role in helping employees feel satisfied and engaged in their work. Volunteer management software keeps your volunteer information organized, makes communicating with employee volunteers easy and helps you track volunteer hours.
In this guide, we’ll review the basics of corporate volunteering platforms as well as a few top options for your business. We’ll cover:
Let’s dive in to learn more about launching your corporate volunteering program, the benefits of an organized program and some great software options for helping you reach your goals.
Corporate Volunteering Platform FAQs
Before we dive into the features of top corporate volunteer platforms, let’s first review what a corporate volunteering program is and the benefits of starting one for your business.
What are corporate volunteering programs?
Corporate volunteering programs are employer-supported programs that encourage and inspire a company’s staff members to donate time towards community causes. In other words, they are corporate philanthropy initiatives that engage employees in volunteerism. These programs can be done either on company time or through other initiatives outside of work.
What are the benefits of starting a corporate volunteering program?
There are many benefits to starting a corporate volunteering program. A well-organized corporate volunteering program can boost employee engagement and personal development.
Why does your company need a corporate volunteering program, and how is it beneficial for you? We’ve compiled some of the top advantages of creating a corporate volunteer program:
- Better engagement with employees. The more your employees volunteer, the more likely they are to be engaged within your company. This results in greater productivity, satisfaction and higher team morale. A study by Project ROI found that offering employees a corporate responsibility program can reduce turnover by up to 50%, increase engagement by 7.5% and boost productivity by 13%. When your employees feel like the work they do matters, determination and engagement increase, resulting in higher employee retention.
- Boost your business’s charitable reputation. Having your own corporate volunteering program makes you stand out from other businesses. It shows others in the community that your company not only focuses on corporate goals but also encourages its employees to make a positive impact in the community.
- Train your employees in relevant skills. Your employees learn so much in the workplace, but corporate volunteering programs provide even more opportunities to grow. Volunteering gives employees new learning opportunities that can enhance their current skill sets and open their eyes to new perspectives, stimulating their creativity.
Starting a corporate volunteering program not only benefits your company but also makes a huge impact on nonprofit organizations and those in need!
What are corporate volunteering platforms?
A corporate volunteer platform is a type of volunteer management software that helps businesses manage their employee volunteer programs. These platforms include features such as:
- Recruitment tools, including branded sign-up forms and an online application process
- Volunteer scheduling tools to manage and update shifts
- A volunteer database to keep track of volunteer information
- A mobile check-in app to streamline the volunteer check-in process
- Reporting features to measure the impact of your corporate volunteer program
These platforms are equipped with various tools for communicating with your volunteers, helping them stay organized and tracking the success of your program. Businesses typically invest in these platforms when they’re ready to take their corporate social responsibility initiatives to a higher level and take a more formal, focused approach to running their volunteer programs.
The Top 10 Corporate Volunteer Platforms
Having the right corporate volunteer platform equipped with all the features to help your company’s volunteer initiatives thrive is essential. Here is a list of some of the best volunteer management software options that provide simple solutions for companies like yours:
1. Bloomerang
Bloomerang helps connect and empower employees with meaningful volunteer opportunities through a single corporate volunteering platform. Using Bloomerang, organizations can increase employee engagement and retention by offering their employees easy access to personalized volunteer opportunities that match each individual’s skills, location, availability and interests.
Using Bloomerang’s corporate volunteer platform, your business can:
- Offer tailored volunteer opportunities. Collect important employee information like skills and preferences to offer volunteer opportunities that match their interests to boost participation.
- Facilitate easy employee self-sign-up. Empower your employees to review and sign up for the volunteer opportunities and shifts that work best for them.
- Keep employees engaged. Easily share new volunteer opportunities, personalized impact reports, shift reminders and more through Bloomerang’s comprehensive email and communications features.
- Equip your team with a mobile app. Give your employees access to their personal volunteer schedules, shift details, two-way communications and real-time notifications right from their mobile devices.
- Track employee volunteer hours. Track volunteer hours by individual volunteer, group, program or date. Collect volunteer hours with Bloomerang’s shift check-in system or volunteer hour submission and approval process.
Bloomerang makes creating and managing a corporate volunteering program easy with its flexible framework, comprehensive features and advanced reporting functionality. For more information on how Bloomerang can help you manage your corporate volunteer program, explore the features page or reach out today.
2. Get Connected by Galaxy Digital
Get Connected is a volunteer management platform that helps build stronger communities and improve the lives of those in need by partnering passionate volunteers with charitable organizations.
Here are a few stand-out features of this corporate volunteer platform:
- Precise volunteer hour tracking with automated tools
- Group volunteer engagement through streamlined team management tools
- Event management tools such as customizable landing pages
This software is great for everyday use. The Get Connected app helps increase volunteer engagement, build long-term relationships and boost retention.
3. Benevity
Benevity empowers companies to create a purpose-driven culture and encourage their employees to make a meaningful volunteer impact through a straightforward, engaging technology platform.
Here are the top three features that their software provides:
- An employee volunteering platform that offers personalized volunteer opportunity recommendations to participants
- Tools to manage donations and matching gifts
- Automatically-generated reports that help assess volunteer impact easily and quickly
Benevity’s software helps companies measure their actions and impact with instant reports to see how many people are taking part and how many hours are contributed.
4. Millie
Millie helps organizations craft simple and flexible social impact programs. They are dedicated to helping companies create sustainable matching gift programs that don’t break the budget. They offer features such as hour tracking to allow your organization to gain insights into your volunteer impact.
A few stand-out features of this corporate volunteer platform include:
- Employee donation matching
- Management tools for remote or in-person company volunteer events
- Employee recognition through gifting charitable donations
Millie helps bring teams together to create a purposeful, engaged company culture with both in-person and virtual volunteer opportunities.
5. GivePulse
GivePulse offers a seamless application process and communication features to enhance the volunteer experience. They also help administrators keep track of volunteer attendance and impact.
Here are the top three features that their software provides:
- Tools for tracking, sharing and measuring impact
- Event pages that allow you to manage community events and assess their success
- A relationship management database that allows you to track and connect with employee volunteers
This software is great for allowing volunteers to oversee their own accounts and manage their own schedules and sign-ups.
6. Volunteers for Salesforce
Volunteers for Salesforce provides tools for volunteer managers to efficiently organize their corporate volunteer programs. They make it easy to track volunteer hours, shifts and jobs.
With this platform, volunteer managers can:
- Identify volunteer availability and match volunteer skills to open shifts
- Track volunteer hours and measure success using volunteer reports and dashboards
- Leverage engagement tools that offer personalized reminders, confirmations and volunteer appreciation
This is a great option if your company uses Salesforce for its customer relationship management system since you can easily integrate your corporate volunteering system into your other operations.
7. isolved Giving & Volunteering
isolved Giving & Volunteering helps businesses appeal to accomplished candidates who want to engage with their communities through charitable donations and volunteerism. They offer software for corporate giving, providing employees and employers with seamless methods for managing donation programs, filtering charitable gifts and reporting their social impact.
Here are the top three features that their software provides:
- Talent acquisition features to help attract and manage purpose-driven employees
- Payroll integration tools that allow you to easily process employee donations
- Recognition tools that allow you to commend employee volunteer milestones
isolved Giving & Volunteering allows administrators to streamline hiring and employee engagement processes with customizable solutions.
8. YourCause from Blackbaud
YourCause from Blackbaud is focused on connecting corporations and their employees with worthy causes. With their CSRconnect platform, they strive to help businesses create a company culture that infuses volunteerism and charitable giving into their organization’s DNA.
Check out the top features of this corporate volunteering platform:
- Track and record collective impact within a centralized platform
- Global connection capabilities that help you make a much larger impact
- Empower employees with multiple ways to give
CSRconnect helps organizations and companies manage volunteer events, global volunteer campaigns or skills-based volunteer initiatives, all within one platform.
9. Submittable
Submittable is a user-friendly social impact platform that offers a full range of corporate social responsibility tools for businesses. The platform provides the solutions needed to help create, manage and measure the impact of your corporate volunteer program.
Here are the top three features that their software provides:
- An employee volunteer platform with a personal impact dashboard that shows information such as how much volunteer time off an employee has remaining and their upcoming volunteer opportunities
- Grant and community investment management tools that make it simple to run a corporate grant program
- Employee giving and matching gift tools that help employees maximize their charitable giving
Submittable’s reporting tools make it simple to assess what’s going well with your program and what needs improvement so you can make impactful changes to your strategies.
10. Selflessly
Selflessly helps businesses build a more socially-conscious brand with a simple platform for finding local volunteer opportunities and tracking volunteer time off. This is a great platform for businesses looking to move away from tracking volunteer information in spreadsheets or Google Forms.
Selflessly offers effective features such as:
- The ability to create volunteer events that are open to your full team
- A centralized volunteer history dashboard that makes it easy to see the top organizations and causes that employees care about
- Access to local and national volunteer opportunities, along with virtual experiences for remote teams
This platform also offers features for businesses looking to get more involved in employee giving and matching gifts, saving companies time and effort.
Wrapping up
There are many benefits of starting a corporate volunteering program for your employees since their support and contributions make a positive impact on your community and employer brand. Use your corporate volunteering platform to schedule team-wide volunteer opportunities, track employee volunteer hours and impact and stay in touch with employee volunteers.
If you’re looking for more information on how to engage with volunteers more effectively, review these additional resources:
- How to Create a Volunteer Recruitment Plan: 5 Strategies. Want to recruit more employee volunteers to participate in your team-wide opportunities? This guide offers simple volunteer recruitment strategies to try.
- 15+ Volunteer Appreciation Ideas to Build Relationships. Showing appreciation for employee volunteers can boost their engagement and satisfaction. Use these ideas to express gratitude for their involvement.
- How to Host an Effective, Engaging Volunteer Orientation. An organized volunteer orientation helps prepare employee volunteers to fulfill their roles effectively. Review this post for tips on planning a successful orientation.
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