Members of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge team visit a site in Tshwane, South Africa. (Photograph courtesy of IBM Corp.)
Elizabeth Transier remembers arriving in Mumbai, India, and being swept up in “a tidal wave of sights, sounds, and experiences.” She saw cows wandering in the streets, right alongside auto-rickshaws, cars, and throngs of people. “There’s this vibrancy that is incredible,” she says. Transier wasn’t on vacation. She was on assignment with the Corporate Service Corps (CSC), a program in which teams of volunteers from IBM Corp. travel around the world to work with nonprofit and government partners. CSC participants apply their skills in technology, marketing, finance, and business development to projects that involve everything from logistics systems to social media strategies.
Transier, who works on commercializing IBM technologies from the company’s research laboratory in Austin, Texas, spent a month in India in early 2015 as part of an IBM team that worked with the Kherwadi Social Welfare Association (KSWA), an Indian nonprofit that offers vocational training to underprivileged young people in 18 states. The team’s mission was to develop a growth plan to help KSWA meet its goal of training one million young people per year. The biggest impediment to that goal, as it turned out, was structural: Most KSWA executives reported to the organization’s CEO—an inefficient arrangement for such a large nonprofit. “My main responsibility was the organizational piece,” says Transier.
There was a time when a company that sought to contribute voluntary services to an organization like KSWA might have sent employees to paint walls or provide training. Today, however, companies are recognizing that the business skills and strategic insights of their people are far more valuable. “If you ladle soup in a soup kitchen, that would be important and generous,” says Stanley Litow, vice president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs at IBM. “But if [leaders of a nonprofit] say they need a strategic plan and you deliver it and it produces significant benefit to the organization, then ladling soup pales in comparison.”
Skills-based volunteering is on the rise. The CECP, a membership organization that promotes corporate philanthropy, found that of the companies it tracks, 51 percent were offering pro bono services in 2014, up from 40 percent in 2012. And Big Blue (as IBM has long been known) has been blazing this trail for several years. In 2003, it launched the On Demand Community, an online hub where employees and retirees can find and sign up for volunteer projects. That program provides support kits—which include presentations and educational modules in many languages—for volunteer opportunities in fields that range from technology strategy to science and math education. Later, in 2008, the company launched CSC. And in 2010, it initiated the Smarter Cities Challenge, a global competitive grant program that sends teams of IBM professionals to help city leaders develop initiatives in areas such as service delivery, environmental sustainability, and information technology infrastructure.
Companies often use the term “giving back” to describe their employee volunteer programs. But IBM emphasizes the value that the company gets from its volunteer initiatives— value that comes in the form of business growth, leadership development, and competiveness. Indeed, Litow argues that the only way to ensure that volunteer programs will be robust and sustainable is to integrate them into corporate strategy. Otherwise, he says, “When things develop that are higher priorities, [volunteering] runs the risk of being pushed aside.”
Business Value
Transier, on her trip to India, was able to do more than just contribute to a worthy cause. During her time there, she made a point of leading discussions and presenting the results of her team’s work to KSWA executives. “Although I do a lot of sales, I don’t do a whole lot of presenting,” she says. “That was a skill that I wanted to work on.” When she returned to Austin, Transier found that the CSC assignment brought additional benefits. “I work with teams in India and all over the world,” she says. “And it’s nice to be able to say you’ve been to someone’s country. It makes you feel more connected to the global community.”
Such comments validate the strategy of companies like IBM, which treat volunteering as a way to promote skills development and to build internal networks. “It’s a nobrainer,” says David Jones, associate professor of business administration at the University of Vermont, who has studied the benefits of corporate volunteering. “There are a lot of reasons why this is an ideal way [for employees] to learn new skills.” Corporate volunteers, he says, benefit from operating in a “safe environment” where they are free of constraints such as the need to meet earnings targets.
Working with nonprofit partners, moreover, gives corporate employees a chance to test themselves in unfamiliar situations. Litow sees that dynamic at work among On Demand Community volunteers. “They’re learning to operate in difficult circumstances with resource constraints, cultural differences, personal issues,” he says. If employees can succeed in that kind of environment, he suggests, they will be better equipped to deliver results when they return to their regular jobs.
Corporate-sponsored volunteering also binds employees more closely to their company by engendering pride in their association with a socially responsible organization. The impact of that pride goes beyond producing a warm glow in employees. According to Litow, 8 out of 10 participants in CSC say that the program significantly increased the likelihood that they will complete their career at IBM. So an effective volunteering program can lower attrition rates. And lowering attrition in turn decreases recruitment and retention costs.
CSC assignments benefit IBM in one other area: business development. “To take advantage of a growth market, you have to understand the culture, the business structures, and the role of government and civil society,” says Litow. People can’t develop that kind understanding “on a two-day business trip,” he notes. And the traditional approach to building international experience among IBM’s workforce—sending people on overseas assignments that last several years— costs up to $1.5 million per person per year. A month-long CSC assignment, by contrast, costs just $12,000 to $15,000. Thanks to the CSC program, IBM now has “hundreds or thousands” of people with experience in growth-market regions, instead of just dozens, Litow says. “And [we’ve] done it at a fraction of the cost, in a targeted way.”
Social Value
In the Mexican state of Yucatán, packages delivered by a food bank in Mérida—part of the Global FoodBanking Network—provide a lifeline to about 8,000 low-income people. But a few years ago, leaders of the food bank realized that the organization needed to deliver those packages more efficiently and to source food from a wider range of donors. Meeting those goals would require the food bank to improve its storage capacity and its logistics operations.
With the help of CSC volunteers, the food bank designed a new warehouse coding and classification system. This improvement cut the time that families must wait for their packages, and it enabled the organization to deliver 8 percent more food than before. In addition, the food bank was able to increase the number of food donors from 107 to 260. “The warehouse and logistics operations have opened the door to receiving larger quantities and more diverse types of products,” says Christopher Rebstock, cofounder and senior vice president of network development at the Global FoodBanking Network.
As the Mérida food bank’s experience suggests, tapping into the skills of corporate volunteers can yield tangible results. Yet not all nonprofits are effective at accessing this resource. Technology can play a matchmaking role. IBM, for example, enables nonprofits to post projects to the On Demand Community portal. The company has also taken steps to help nonprofit partners optimize their use of the site. “One of the biggest challenges for nonprofits is to articulate what they need,” says Diane Melley, vice president of global citizenship initiatives at IBM. “So we built a whole taxonomy for the way you describe a project, the way different skills are articulated, and where the project is located.”
Even after a nonprofit succeeds in matching volunteers with a project, working with those volunteers can be a drain on its time and resources. “It remains a problem that the market is trying to figure out,” says Jenny Lawson, executive director of the Corporate Institute at Points of Light, an organization that helps companies build and expand their employee volunteer programs. (IBM is a Points of Light “leadership partner.”) Points of Light is now piloting an effort called Coach2Action, which helps nonprofits acquire project management skills and other capabilities needed to accommodate volunteers. Promoting “nonprofit readiness,” Lawson says, is the critical next step in boosting the impact of corporate volunteering.
Data on IBM’s volunteer initiatives indicate the scale of the resources that are potentially available to nonprofits. To date, according to a company estimate, the Smarter Cities Challenge has provided pro bono services worth more than $50 million. Each year, meanwhile, nearly 270,000 employees and retirees use the On Demand Community site to find volunteer opportunities. And by the end of 2015, about 2,800 IBM employees had completed a CSC assignment. At that point, according to IBM, the program had delivered about $70 million worth of service. (The company values each team’s consulting activities at $400,000.)
Given the high appetite for volunteering among employees, skills-based programs are likely to increase in popularity. That’s good news for nonprofits, because skills-based volunteering has the potential to fill the budget gaps that emerge when philanthropic donors shy away from paying overhead costs. Through efforts like CSC, companies can provide nonprofits with services that are otherwise hard to fund—from marketing and communications support to technology consulting. “Those aren’t things that the nonprofit sector needs to buy,” says Lawson. “That’s where pro bono comes in.”
Read more stories by Sarah Murray.