Learning Series | Important CSR Metrics to Track in 2022

Summary:

Want to know what metrics your Corporate Social Responsibility group should be tracking in 2022? We talk about hours of volunteering, impact tracking and other ways to ensure that your organization is measuring what matters!

‍

Transcript:

Andy - WeHero (00:04): Nancy, Ben, thank you so muchfor joining the we hero. Learn. I am thrilled to have both of you on here. Justas a quick introduction for those who don't know Nancy Ben Ben is the CEO of wehero leads this mighty band of pirates and really spends a lot of his timeworking with companies and nonprofits to build the optimal solution and programfor their giving and volunteering. Nancy. we had a full we hero learn last weekwith Nancy. And if you're interested in her full bio, you can go to that video.But I think most relevant is Nancy has worked with nonprofits, worked in CSRdepartments, and now we are lucky enough to have her here working with ourgreat clients and helping nonprofits and companies give back. So excited tohave you both here today.

Ben - WeHero (00:53): Yeah. Excited to talk aboutthese topics and I'm more excited that that Nancy's here than, than me beinghere. So

Nancy - WeHero (01:00): I'm excited to talk to both ofyou. So

Andy - WeHero (01:03): Yeah, well, the, the topictoday is, you know, at start of the year for a lot of people and we're gettingmillions of questions talking about, you know, what are the important metrics,you know, we're trying to set up goals, what should we be tracking? And I guessI'd ask both of you to start out, you know, when you think about giving andvolunteer programs for companies, you know, what are the top three or fourmetrics that you would want to be tracking? And I guess why,

Ben - WeHero (01:30): Right. Nancy, do you wanna givea first pass of this?

Nancy - WeHero (01:33): Sure. you know, when it comesto volunteerism, the traditional go to is all about volunteer hours and howmany, right? How many volunteers did you have? How many, which I think aregreat. And I think those would definitely be some of the go-tos. I thinkthere's more of a trend now to look for the actual impact that the work thevolunteers are doing is really having on the nonprofit, the community, thingslike that. So I'm, I would personally put impact number one, one and then itcan be measured in a variety of different ways. And then forgiving, I thinkamounts obviously are measured, right? Who you give to, but I see more ofwhat's the alignment, what's the alignment with your business mission. What'sthe alignment with your strategy for corporate social responsibility? How arethese dollars really, again, driving impact and, and how are you tying those toyour volunteer efforts?

Andy - WeHero (02:39): Yeah. Can I jump in just onequestion I have is, you know, we are obviously an impact first organizationpush that forward, but not every nonprofit can give you specific impact. And sowhat do of these companies do when they wanna deliver impact reporting? Do theykind of do a blend of impact in hours? What does that look like right now?

Nancy - WeHero (03:00): Yeah, that's a really goodquestion, cuz you're right. It is tough, tough to track in impact for sure. Butthere are ways to do it. So, you know, on our last learn series, I talked abouthow to tap for humanity. So here's an example. If you have volunteers that aregoing out to build habitat home, that's really easy to track, right. You know,how many volunteers showed up, you know, how many hours they were there, butthen dive a little deeper and maybe not just volunteer in the act of building,but offer to volunteer in helping those homeowners, whether that be, you know,teaching them some skills they're gonna need as a homeowner, serving as anadvocate for them and helping them through the process. And also put yourexecutives out there, have them join a board, have them learn all aspects ofthe nonprofit, because if you are involved in all those different specs, youcan see the impact that maybe the nonprofit could not provide to you. If thatmakes sense, there could be storytelling involved there where you have seen acertain family in this situation, get a house and how it changed the trajectoryof the kids' education. For example, they moved to a, a different neighborhood,but had better schools, things like, so you may not be able to get it directlyfrom the nonprofit, but I think the more engaged you are from the companyperspective, the more impact you can track kind of on your own

Andy - WeHero (04:31): Anecdotal impact and trackthat.

Ben - WeHero (04:35): Yeah. So Nancy's point likeimpacts the goal and goose, right? Like measuring that's like reallychallenging. And to your point, Andy, like there's some nonprofits that arereally good at measuring that impact. And we love working with thoseorganizations cuz that makes our life easier. And they're just frankly, good nonprofits,cuz they're doing that. There's other nonprofits though that you can work withto get to those measurements. So like when you're having those discovery callswith a nonprofit organization, putting together that volunteer, giving experiefor your employees, dig deeper in those conversations. Okay. So if we did thesehours and we tackled these projects for you, what's the kind of impact you canexpect to be created from this. Can we report on that? And, and you know, youcan help the nonprofit get there so that you can get there with your metrics.And so it is the goal and goose, it is tough to get, but if, if you put alittle time and energy into it, you can cool wrap those metrics.

Andy - WeHero (05:24): So it seems like, you know,there's there on the volunteer side there's hours and impact and then giving isobviously dollars and then impact, you know, do you see a lot of companiessegmenting these across different employee groups across different locations?How, how do you think about splicing all, all of this, these metrics and thesedatas to make it most useful for the companies?

Ben - WeHero (05:48): Yeah, I can, I can take a firstpass and maybe I'm gonna give an answer to your very first question, Andy,around what metrics we should be tackling. I think there's, you know, obviouslya huge amount of benefit tracking metrics around geography, like where thesevolunteer hours and giving dollars coming from, if we're an multinationalcompany you know, coming from different divisions of the company, obviouslylike we wanna understand which divisions of the company are performing reallywell when it comes to giving and volunteering, which ones, Aren, which onesneed a little more attention to increase those engagement rates. I think thatbecomes really interesting, but something that I find really fascinating iswhen we see companies measuring their impact and their hours and their donordollars around the 17 SDGs from the United nations, I think that's reallyinteresting because all of a sudden you have the micro, which is your companyis growing in the same direction, supporting very similar causes, maybe two orthree OSDs.

Ben - WeHero (06:42): And then you have the macrowhere your company along with thousands of other companies are supporting verysimilar SDGs and you can see that data all of a sudden. And that becomes reallyfascinating. And I think that creates a pretty powerful message internally foryour employee and gives them a focus area in regards to what kind ofsustainable development goals are we really focused on as a company and macro,like what are companies really focused on and where are we actually pushing theneedle? Like we're not doing this out here by ourself on this island, like ourvolunteer hours are donor dollars. They're actually doing something for thisbigger goal, this bigger initiative that thousands of companies cross the globeare involved with.

Andy - WeHero (07:22): Yeah.

Nancy - WeHero (07:24): And you know what you mentionedlike maybe doing some comparison between different departments or, or differentregions of the company. I think that is great because you can see wheresomebody may be strong and that's great for best practice sharing, you know,find out, well, what's your region doing and how are you getting these results?And it just makes it such a better package for the whole company when theyshare that type of information.

Andy - WeHero (07:51): Yeah. I mean, I could see thatfrom an employee perspective, you, you know, our company, you know, was 10% ofthe impact for all the us on this SDG, whatever it may be. I think that's areally good way to connect the employee to just something bigger. And we allknow that's what employees want right now. The other question is, you know,obviously I think us and the CSR leaders, we're super passionate about theimpact in tracking this because we really wanna give back. And, and I think we,we sometimes live in this I don't wanna call it a fantasy world, but a fantasyworld of CSR profess where everyone prioritizes giving back, you know, I'd becurious in the best ways that you, you know, professionals in this industry canleverage the metrics and leverage the connection of metrics to employeeengagement through attention, just to advocate for themselves within thebroader organization. And Nancy, I don't know if you have any experience inthis from your, your role or, and what you've seen to be most efficient here.

Nancy - WeHero (08:48): Yeah. I had the opportunity toactually kind of revamp our corporate social responsibility focused areas in,in this former position. So you're kind of starting from the ground up. You hadall these metrics from your prior focus and that type thing, but when youchange everything, that's when you can really see where the differences lie andlike tracking your volunteer hours and your volunteer. No. Right. You canobviously see, did that go up, did that go down? We changed what we werefocusing on. Is it tied to that getting employee feedback you know, just kindof, you know, sharing those opportunities, giving the employees opportunities,share their stories and also focus groups, talk to the employees, find out whatgives them the most satisfaction from volunteering and, and where do theirpassions lie and that type of thing. So you can kinda measure obviously fromyear to year where your changes are.

Nancy - WeHero (09:52): But like for employeeretention, for example, I mean, there's so many stats out there that prove thata company that is engaged in their community and giving back has higherretention, but how do you measure that? Well, you look at your volunteerefforts, you look at your turnover, right? And see, are there any patternshere? Did things change at a certain time? What were the environmentalinfluences, social influences, things like that. So it, it is a tricky way to,to kind of get it all measured, but you can see patterns and, and trendshappening and then tie them back, but definitely engage employees and youremployee resource groups, as well as you're trying to make those kinds ofchange and, and setting your overall goals, cuz you wanna have different levelsof goals. I think, you know, the, the grand goal for the entire company andthen how do you get to that? Right? Like if you're wanting to reduce yourcarbon footprint, okay, well how are we gonna get there and all these differentsteps along the way.

Ben - WeHero (10:56): Yeah. I think there's to inNancy's point you can find those correlations pretty easily. There's also somereally tactical things you can do. Like so when you have a volunteer, forexample, you have an employee that's engaged with you in those efforts. It'sthe perfect time to like survey them right there. And then not just about CSR,but like the meeting of volunteering to them and their career. So for example,we have done surveys and events where, you know, how important is volunteering,you know, to you for your career and we'll get great responses. And a goodexample is we worked with a large pharmaceutical company on their volunteer experience.We surveyed the employees immediately after the event, we had like 363responses around questions around how important is volunteering to you for yourcareer? How many times do you want to volunteer? And we gave that to the CSRteam and they were like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be so immensely useful forus to get more budget for these programs. And so there's some tactical thingsyou can do as well to advocate for yourself. Cuz of course we want more, likeyou said, Andy, we're biased. We think this is the great thing in the world. Wealways want to get more budget so we can do more incredible things to makeimpact.

Andy - WeHero (12:01): Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I thinkBen, the last point you bring up is really interesting because you know,there's part of it, which is just, you know, at these 50 a hundred thousandemployee companies, it's super hard to get a read on these entire organization.You know, there's not, it's not as simple as sending a small survey in slackand asking. And so understanding that and, and figuring out where you can getthe sample size that you need through your activities, I think is a reallygreat exercise, I guess, you know, one thing we think about cause our clientswork across all the different platforms. You, you know, Nancy, I know youinteract with a lot of clients this way. What advice do you give them aroundthe platform space? Like which technologies to be using, should they stick withExcel? Should they use all the other platforms? Kinda what, what suggestions doyou have when, when people ask you that?

Nancy - WeHero (12:50): Yes, that is a great question.Because the platform that you use is, is pretty critical to helping youmeasure, right? So everyone has different budgets, they have different goals,different things that they wanna measure, different ways, different ways ofreporting, for example. So I would say, you know, take a look at several and,you know, maybe get a demo of different ones and talk to others in the CSRspace. That's similar to yours, similar industry, whatever, and just getfeedback from users because that, that will help you a lot before you make aninvestment, but really you gotta do what's best for you and find a platformthat is going to offer the type of functionality you're looking for, the typeof reporting that you want and service. I think service is very important. Ilearned that in a prior role as two or prior role, I learned that service waskind of an assumption, but didn't necessarily always happen.

Nancy - WeHero (13:56): And that made a hugedifference. So if we were in the middle of a big program or fundraiser orsomething like that, and we weren't getting answers from the vendor or weren'tgetting the support that we needed system wise, and you don't have that service,it's, it's a huge, huge thing. And you don't think of it until you need it,right? Like, you know, how quickly are we gonna get responses and, and can theymake changes and you know, how flexible is it? So I would say check out thosethings as well. I wouldn't just jump in, do some research and investigation anddemos are good. And like I said, talk to others who use the system, ask themquestions and you know, see what their pain points were. What's going well,what's not going well.

Ben - WeHero (14:46): Yeah, those are good points,Nancy. I think the other thing we, we look at a lot right now is that we livein such a dynamic environment where the metrics we need to track the programswe need to run are changing so quickly. So one thing we've been advocating forour clients and partners is flexibility in the platform that you choose theability to add additional fields, to be able to be really agile with yourimplementations. I think that's so critical right now. And I think we're seeingout more and more companies go have a standard base platform, a large platformand then having add-ons to that where they can be more flexible, measure, moredata points and bring that into their final end of year impact reporting thatthey actually do. And so that's another key message to give folks is look forflexibility right now, cuz it just continues to change faster and faster. Everydates you like.

Nancy - WeHero (15:32): Yes. Good point.

Andy - WeHero (15:33): Yeah. And Nancy, on your pointof connect with people, if anyone watching this video needs to be connectedwith someone as they're analyzing a platform, we're happy to provideintroductions to our clients who use that specific platform. Yeah. Wanna behelpful in any way that we can and getting these set up correctly for you. WellI appreciate your have any final things you would wanna add on metrics andthings we should be thinking about from a data perspective in this space, Ben,it looks like you have something.

Ben - WeHero (16:00): I have a question for you andNancy. And I think it's around the notion of volunteer hours and number ofvolunteers. And I think, you know, I have gone back and forth with a number ofcompanies around are people becoming numb to volunteer hours and volunteerheadcount and our impact reports are people seeing that as fluff now, ratherthan us reporting directly on impact. And I just wanted to get your thoughts,like how important is volunteer hours today. And is that changing and howshould we think about prioritizing that in our measurements? I think it's aquestion that's come up before and would love both of your, your thoughts onthat.

Nancy - WeHero (16:38): Yeah. I would say in the pastwas huge, right? Volunteer hours, number of volunteers. I think it's stillimportant, but to your point, Ben, about the fluff, I think more people may seeit that because what goes into those hours, what's really happening during thattime, is there really action happening all four hours if you're doing a fourhour event, that type of thing. So I think it's good to show, but there's somany factors that go into that size of the company. Do they have a volunteerpay time off policy, whereas an their company may not. So there's so many otherfactors. That's why I think impact is so big right now. Because you could havea company with 20 volunteers and a hundred volunteer hours making more impactthan a company with a hundred volunteers. Right. So I think it's stillimportant. Just not as critical. Yeah.

Andy - WeHero (17:40): Yeah. I think I agree witheverything Nancy said. I think we obviously believe the beacon of impact is, iswhat's aimed for, I do think with leadership who may not be familiar with ourindustry, it's very easy to, to perceive hours where, you know, they canquickly look, it's a simple metric and I think it's useful to be measuringthat. I think I personally believe an hour of volunteering can deliver X impactor a hundred X impact. And so I, I believe, but I also believe in tracking, youknow, the, you know, like one volunteer is very different from anothervolunteer. And so I would rather have 10 hours of a highly engaged volunteerthan a hundred hours of people who don't care about volunteering because thelong term, you know, impact, if you will, of that 10, that 10 engaged volunteerwill be far larger and I'd want that at my company. That would be the onlything I'd add, but I agree with everything Nancy said,

Nancy - WeHero (18:36): Yeah. You know what? You justmade me think of something. Another thing to track may be how many of yourvolunteers are volunteering repeatedly that they want, or like you're talkingabout these 10 really engaged volunteers, do they keep coming back? So that'sanother thing to, to look at as well.

Andy - WeHero (18:58): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Anyother good questions for us? Ben Nancy, do you have any questions for Ben and Ion this topic?

Nancy - WeHero (19:08): Wow. The opportunity to ask youguys question. Okay. So all the clients that you've spoken with recently, whatare you hearing as their biggest question for what they should do in 2022? Whatare they asking

Ben - WeHero (19:25): In regards to like metrics totrack or just broadly speaking? I think that kind of what we've been discussinghere, like how to actually measure impact at scale is, is a really tough one.And you know, the other, you know, we get so many questions on what actuallyshould be measured. There's so many things you can measure in this day and age.Like what should we really focus our time and energy on? And, and it's sodifferent company to company, it's, what's gonna be meaningful to your internalstakeholders and what's gonna be meaningful to your employees and your externalaudience. And that that's different for every single company. And so I think ustaking a customized approach to what metrics to measure and how we actually getthat measurement done in a scalable fashion is the things we're really tryingto tackle right now for companies. And it takes time. And it's a verycustomized process every single time.

Nancy - WeHero (20:14): Yep.

Andy - WeHero (20:15): Yeah. I'd agree. I think somany people think about metrics and reporting without actually thinking aboutwhy they're doing it. Like there's so many people just like, Hey, I need tohave metrics. I need to have reporting. I'm like, well, what are the goals ofthat reporting? And, and it actually, you know, it's a frustrating question toask, I assume, or receive because it forces them to slow down when they'retrying to get the metrics and everything launched as quickly as possible, butwe ultimately believe if you know why you're measuring it, you you're going to,you know, come up with a better system and better results. And so that's Ithink the question we're spending most of the time on,

Nancy - WeHero (20:46): Yeah. It's one thing I likeabout we hero is the fact that you ask those questions because it does makepeople think and they, they stop just with the what's right in front of me,goal to go way beyond that. So yeah. I like the fact can do that.

Andy - WeHero (21:05): It's a hard, it's a hard lifebeing a CSR manager of these massive companies. Right. I mean, it's, they haveso much stuff to do under resourced. And so anything we can do to be helpful.

Nancy - WeHero (21:15): Yeah, absolutely.

Andy - WeHero (21:17): Yeah. Well, I appreciate thetime you guys. I think it was a great discussion. If anyone wants to chat moreabout our views on metrics, what we would recommend for your company, justplease reach out or a always happy and enjoy to have these conversations. Soappreciate the time and look forward to chatting again soon.

Ben - WeHero (21:35): Thanks everybody.

‍