How NRG Made One Small Change to See 55% Volunteer Growth

Author: Katie Dunlap

NRG has had a long history of employees that are passionate about volunteering their time and money to philanthropic causes. After a few years of partnership with the YourCause platform, their philanthropy director came to the YourCause team asking for help to better track the dedicated NRG employees’ hours that seemed to be going unlogged.

Once we analyzed the original system put in place, we found an opportunity to improve the way NRG employees are incentivized to log their hours. NRG’s original program was a dollars-for-doers program where a $50 Cause Card is awarded for every 25/hours an employee volunteers. (Cause Cards are electronic charitable gift cards that allow employees to donate funds to any nonprofit in the system.) Employees were volunteering, but very few seemed to log the hours to reach the 25 hour minimum per Cause Card.

Details of the Campaign

The YourCause team collaborated with NRG to understand the challenges they were facing, methods of resolution, and finally a recommended strategy. With NRG’s program manager, we were able to revitalize the program — and get it running again in no time — with enhanced incentivization for NRG employees to track hours.

Together we decided to reduce the minimum number of volunteer hours required to a more manageable 2/hours per employee and adjusted the value of the Cause Card to $20. As a result, each hour of work donated by the NRG employees had increased to $10 instead of just $2 from the previous program. Employees were inspired by the updated program and the opportunity to provide time and donations to a cause they cared about.

Participations Increase

Since updating their incentive programs to the new Cause Card strategy in September of 2016, NRG has seen a dramatic increase in engagement.

As a result of the program changes, NRG experienced a 100% redemption rate on Cause Cards the first months after developing the new program and were more than willing to log their hours in the CSRconnect platform in order to redeem the Cause Cards.

NRG’s volunteer hours logged have increased 55% overall and Cause Card redemption rose to 31%. This remarkable feedback not only shows an engaged workforce but a company that desires to provide for its employees and the causes they care about.

Resources

Companies continue to get creative with ways to use incentives and Cause Cards in the platform to recognize employees for their contributions and support the causes they care about. Common use case for incentives and Cause Cards include:

• Issuing through a dollars for doers program
• Issuing to new employees to get them logged to make a donation for the first time
• Issuing to recognize employee resource group contributions
• Awarding the first 100 donors or first 100 volunteers for a campaign etc.