Beyond the Basics: Volunteerism
We’re back with another installment of our Beyond the Basics blog series where we dive into features from the YourCause solutions that help level-up customer programs through unique and powerful functionality. Today’s spotlight – volunteering!
Curious about other features we offer that help you go Beyond the Basics? Check out previous posts from this series, spotlights on Disaster Relief, Engagement Elements, and Segmentation.
Creating the Volunteer program of your dreams with YourCause:
Did you know that workplace volunteers are twice as likely to recommend their organization to jobseekers. Additionally, when considering overall job satisfaction, nearly eight in 10 employees who volunteer through their organization (79%) say that they are satisfied in contrast to 55% of non-volunteers. Offering an employee volunteering program can be a powerful tool to make an impact on your employees, nonprofits, and members of the community.
Through YourCause’s CSRconnect solution, you can design a volunteering program that reflects the rich diversity of your employees. From in-person to virtual events, individual activity tracking to group skills-based projects, our Volunteer module gives you a powerful set of features to create an inclusive volunteer experience for all of your employees.
In our latest Industry Report, there were more than 8 million volunteer hours recorded, 87 percent of which were in-person, with each volunteer averaging 13 hours in the year.
As a client administrator, you’ll benefit from a wide range of tools for event creation, including the ability to manage waitlists and shifts, deliver communications, create custom event questions and tags, and leverage robust reporting capabilities.
Many years of working with clients on product feedback and innovation has helped us create a level of depth behind our volunteering functionality that you won’t find anywhere else. Get down to the details you need with custom questions like t-shirt size, dietary restrictions, event disclaimer acknowledgements, and leverage numerous standard reports or build your own custom reports to analyze your impact.
Beyond relying on your CSR team to manage event creation, you can utilize several other avenues to populate your instance of CSRconnect with volunteer events:
- Employee Created Events: Employees can create events for their colleagues, with controls in place for reviewing events before they go live. Employees can also log individual activities and track board service.
- Nonprofit Created Events: Our free nonprofit portal, NPOconnect, allows you to partner with nonprofit organizations. You can import nonprofit-created events or collaborate with nonprofits to create events specifically for your employees.
- Volunteer APIs: Our system integrates with Goodera and VolunteerMatch through APIs to provide a robust event feed for employees to find volunteer opportunities. These integrations are optional add-ons.
“We’re excited to partner with YourCause to make volunteering accessible, engaging and impactful. The API integration enables automation of manual tasks like event booking and creation, volunteer communication, attendance tracking, and reporting, thereby saving a lot of time and effort while ensuring data privacy and security. These offerings will further strengthen global volunteer programs and act as a helpful resource for social impact teams,”
Product Management Spotlight
Chris Mathew
About Chris: Chris Mathew has been with Blackbaud for 4 years and is based outside of Dallas, Texas. Chris has experience working previously in the non-profit space and corporate social responsibility is near and dear to his heart. Causes that Chris has a passion for are related to youth development, health and wellness, and child and family services.
What are some of the key things you consider when evaluating new features to build into CSRconnect volunteering functionality?
When evaluating new features for volunteering, we focus on key areas such as identifying major customer pain points and promoting social good. The product team reviews and considers ideas from the CSRconnect ideas portal to understand customer requests and gauge interest based on votes from other users. These suggestions offer valuable insights into customer experiences and help us identify necessary enhancements to their workflow. Additionally, we aim to boost volunteerism by providing tools that better equip volunteer coordinators and volunteers to increase engagement.
What’s your favorite piece of volunteering functionality?
My favorite piece of volunteering functionality that we offer is our skills-based volunteering functionality. There are so many great volunteering opportunities out there and sometimes it can be overwhelming for a volunteer. Using the skills functionality, an employee can select skills for their profile that match their expertise – we have over 130 skills for them to select from. Using these skills, they can then go search and filter for opportunities that match those specific skills. This just makes the process simpler for our volunteers and that makes it a powerful functionality for our customers by removing a potential barrier for engagement.
What are you most excited for in the near term for Volunteering product updates?
I am excited to continue to expand on what we started in 2024. We’re working to make our volunteer coordinators’ jobs even easier by having volunteers help recruit more employees to events. We’re also bringing attention to our in-person volunteering efforts where a lot of the ownership is on those volunteer coordinators- how can we make their jobs easier when it comes to in-person events that require a lot of coordination? We as a product team are excited to optimize and modernize volunteering to drive social good across the world.