Skills-Based Volunteering

There are numerous ways for companies to promote volunteering across their employee base. We’ve written at length about the benefits of corporate volunteering, from direct impact to team engagement, there is no better way to spend time as a team. Volunteering can take many different forms, but we’re diving deeper into one that is becoming increasingly important - skills-based volunteering.

Your team has a wealth of specialized skills that enable your company to deliver high-quality work across your industry. Now, how can you leverage those skills through corporate volunteer projects to maximize your team’s overall social impact?

When done in the right way, focusing on employees’ specialized skills to support people and places in need is the best way to deliver the highest possible impact. Strong corporate skills-based volunteer programs have three major benefits: nonprofits get the help they need, companies can invest more deeply in their communities, and employees have the professional opportunities they want. Since we started building customized skills-based volunteering programs, we’ve found them to be some of the most rewarding programs we run. Our approach to building these programs typically follows a standard process:

1. What are the specialized skills and expertise that the employee group has? What is the overall time available to support?
2. What causes does the company want to support? Need inspiration? We’re happy to help brainstorm and can even survey your company to determine the best causes.
3. WeHero will present multiple customized volunteer options and coordinate with the right non-profit so that all your team has to do is volunteer!

Need a bit of inspiration? Here are a few examples of work we’ve done in the past:

• Supported a bank with financial literacy training for local school districts.
• Provided art-based internships for underprivileged students looking to gain career skills.
• Leveraged software engineers to rebuild websites and donor databases for nonprofits.
• Reworked non-profit media and public relations strategies.

We continue to believe one of the best ways for companies to give back is by donating employee time so that they can leverage their skills for the greater good. Let us work together to customize skills-based volunteer programs for your team or take your current skills-based volunteer program to the next level.