How New Technologies and Alliances Are Transforming Corporate Volunteering

(Photo by iStock/LoveTheWind)

Since Michael Porter and Mark Kramer’s ground-breaking 2002 article, The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy, a generation of business leaders have been shaped by the idea that companies can and should, “systematically apply their distinctive strengths to maximize the social and economic value created by their philanthropy.” And as companies move past asking whether they should align their strengths with the needs of the community, asking how to do so effectively, affordably, and at scale, it’s clear that they need better tools and systems to effectively put the time and talent of millions of volunteers to good use in the community. As a result, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) technology space is crowded and competitive: existing players like Benevity, Blackbaud, CyberGrants, Bright Funds, and America’s Charities are investing tens of millions of dollars to serve the corporate market and the pace is quickening.

However, as corporate volunteering has become more and more de rigeur, companies have approached it like a business challenge: they set a goal to help understand what doing good looks like in their specific environment, and then set about building a program to deliver that metric. At many companies, the focus of employee volunteerism has evolved from wrangling widely decentralized, well-intended, but often “pure passion” projects, to include a more formal, policy-driven approach that encourages employees to link their individual and team efforts to strategic cause areas, whether unique company pillars or aligned with an external call to action like the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Volunteers are often heavily encouraged to perform volunteering that can be tied easily back to skills and capabilities, and measured in hours that can be tracked and reported at the end of the year for the benefit of both internal and external stakeholders.

To make organizing and administering these activities easier, CSR technology platforms have continued to evolve, building suites of administrative and reporting tools that corporate volunteering program managers can use to manage events and garner program support. These platforms have also evolved to feature much more highly interactive and interesting interfaces than the first-generation platforms, and must now compete to meet ever more sophisticated company and employee technology demands. Out of this has grown a corporate volunteering landscape that is heavily administrative and features thousands of private volunteer events organized ad hoc behind the scenes and then made available to employees on a company’s CSR platform of choice.

These administrative tools are a huge step in advancing a culture of active corporate community engagement, but there is a catch.

The Closed Network Dilemma: Limits of the Status Quo

That catch—as anyone who has ever worked in CSR might privately admit—is that nobody is particularly well-served by the status quo. Companies still complain there aren’t enough high-quality, high-impact opportunities available for their talented employees; employees still complain that volunteer activities aren’t aligned with their skills or passions; and nonprofits still complain that corporate volunteer events are often more trouble than they are worth.

Behind these complaints we see an unsolved problem. In the prevailing technology ecosystem, companies are all working independently to populate private calendars of volunteer activities, and while the proliferation of these curated closed networks has become a signature feature of a healthy culture of corporate engagement, it has also created invisible barriers. Competition among the closed networks and the need for every company to organize their own portfolio of volunteer opportunities have created a fragmented and disjointed digital landscape for nonprofits, and this fragmentation restricts access to the collective pool of untapped corporate volunteer talent, making it harder to collaborate effectively across sectors.

In short, closed networks are holding up and holding back the potential of corporate volunteering. They are playing an important cultural role within companies, but they are not helping more employees find inspiring opportunities aligned with their skills and passions; or more corporate leaders scale their company’s social impact; or more nonprofits find the volunteers they need to make a difference. Unlocking the promise of connecting the talent of the private sector with the needs of the social sector at scale can’t happen without better digital solutions to bring them together.

Exploring Solutions: VolunteerMatch and the Closed Network Game

This isn’t a story about the problem, it’s a story about how the leading competitors in the CSR space have been opening up their platforms to solve it.

This unlikely development in a highly competitive environment is a timely case study in how the nonprofit sector can intervene in commercial marketplaces with solutions that unlock efficiencies, better serve stakeholders, and advance the public good in ways otherwise constrained by competition.

In 2015, the nonprofit I lead, VolunteerMatch, was wrestling with the uncomfortable conclusion that our own “closed network” and mission-related earned revenue model were acting as a wedge in the corporate volunteering market, preventing thousands of companies—using other CSR platforms—from accessing the volunteer needs of the 100,000+ nonprofits we serve. We were actively selling a stand-alone corporate volunteering platform, YourMatch, a customized version of the public service available at www.volunteermatch.org that combined the administrative tools companies wanted with integrated access to VolunteerMatch’s network of opportunities, the largest and most active network of available opportunities in the market.

That network was our key point of differentiation in the corporate space, our defensible advantage, as the MBAs like to say, with more than 100,000 registered nonprofits and reflecting the social sector’s real-time demand for millions of volunteers. The YourMatch platform anchored VolunteerMatch’s nonprofit earned-revenue strategy and for nearly a decade supported the organization and our capacity to offer free services to tens of thousands of nonprofits. We viewed YourMatch as a service that allowed companies to have the best of both worlds: a closed network where they could organize their own signature events and an open network where employees could seek out meaningful local opportunities and put their time and talent to good use. But because the network was our core asset, we held onto it tightly, only making it available to companies using the YourMatch platform.

In the short-term, this decision gave us leverage in the market, but in the long-term it forced our competitors to respond, and compete. By 2015, there were at least a half dozen platforms—including YourCause, Benevity, CyberGrants, Causecast, Bright Funds & Good Done Great—all soliciting nonprofits to join their proprietary corporate volunteering platforms. As the competition grew, it sparked a race for nonprofit adoption that added friction, fragmentation, and overhead to an already underdeveloped marketplace. At the time it seemed like the only way to resolve the problem was for somebody to win, and everybody—including us—was playing to win.

APIs and Interoperability

Two things changed: 1) the growing use of APIs as a tool for system interoperability, and 2) insights from Birth of the Chaordic Age, a book about the unusual history of VISA by its founder Dee Hock.

By 2015 APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, were becoming mainstream technology tools used to “mash-up” systems and functionality to create new user experiences online. The Google Maps API, one of the most popular, was being used to pull mapping functionality into real estate sites, travel apps and ride-share services. At VolunteerMatch, we were using it to locate and display volunteer opportunities.

At their core, APIs are just a set of definitions and protocols developed to allow applications to interact with each other. Having an API means that you can build an application to do one thing but hook it up to another application to create something totally new. A high-flying API business like Twillio, for instance, offered a full suite of communications APIs that allowed App developers to add voice, chat, and SMS services to their user experience without having to code those systems from scratch. At VolunteerMatch, we had just enough experience with APIs to recognize that these services were changing the technology landscape, disrupting old institutional boundaries, and creating new possibilities for integrations and partnerships.

Shared Infrastructure in Competitive Markets

The widespread adoption of APIs created new technical possibility and Dee Hock’s autobiographical account of the founding of VISA opened up a different way to think about the competitive problem to create better outcomes for everyone.

In the late sixties, Dee Hock was working at the credit card division at Bank of America at a time when dozens of banks were advancing private credit card systems that each required retailers to support different and incompatible services. But Dee and a small group of leaders believed that the friction and fragmentation were stunting the potential growth of the overall market. They formed VISA to eliminate competition on the retailer side of the credit market, inviting the competing banks to cooperate on a set of standards that would enable retailers to plug into a single shared infrastructure to transact with the competing systems. This cooperation among the competitors unlocked a marketplace now worth trillions of dollars.

If you imagine all the competing CSR solutions as the banks in this analogy, and the nonprofits as the retailers you see a similar problem and a similar possibility. The platform competition for nonprofit adoption is preventing the two sides of the corporate volunteer engagement marketplace (nonprofits and employees) from coming together and going to scale. Bank of America’s willingness to give up control of its own closed network to find a better solution to the overall problem was a powerful example of how VolunteerMatch could think differently.

Creating New Possibilities: The Rise of Unusual Collaborations

In 2016, after considerable debate about the growing conflict between our mission and our earned-revenue model, the VolunteerMatch leadership team took a leap of faith, saying goodbye to its own closed network strategy. The organization would no longer use its Network of available volunteer opportunities as an exclusive advantage for its YourMatch product; instead, VolunteerMatch would commit to a new Open Network API strategy that would allow its former competitors in the CSR technology space to make integrated access to the VolunteerMatch Network available to their corporate clients as a subscription service.

At first, this move did nothing to move the needle. Competition does not tend to nurture trust and inviting our competitors to collaborate with us was met with a good deal of suspicion. But demand for access to the VolunteerMatch Network, combined with the growing costs of competition, slowly led one platform after another to accept our invitation and make the VolunteerMatch Open Network accessible to their customers as an add-on subscription service from their platform. APIs make these integrations possible so employees can access millions of volunteer opportunities seamlessly from their company’s CSR platform of choice. From a business perspective the arrangement is similar to the experience of adding a premium content subscription, like HBO, to an existing cable package.

The decision to open up the VolunteerMatch Network to create better digital infrastructure is part of a shared vision for bringing the talent of the private sector and the needs of the social sector together at scale to better serve our communities. And that momentum is, perhaps most encouragingly, cross-sector in nature: the commitment of these platforms and funders to move away from competing with us to collaborating with us is extraordinary and a reflection of their own commitments to serving customers and the community, in new and bold ways, in a changing world.

The Future of Corporate Community Engagement in the Digital Age

The VolunteerMatch Open Network strategy creates new possibilities for volunteers to put their time and talent to good use in the community. With more than a million open positions for volunteers and opportunities in every zip code in the US, the real proof of success is that corporate leaders are adopting the service as vital digital infrastructure to better serve their commitment to their employees, communities and stakeholders

By working together to create new possibilities, we can unlock enormous growth and expand the positive impact of corporate volunteering on the causes and communities they care about most. This will be good for everyone: the platforms, the companies, the employees, the customers, and the community. Businesses are getting smarter about the role purpose plays in their culture, employees are demanding more meaningful opportunities to put their interests and skills to good use, nonprofits are adopting new technologies to engage with volunteers more effectively, and tech-savvy funders are picking up the mantle to ensure that digital solutions are serving the public good by encouraging greater cross-platform and cross-sector alignment and collaboration. Now it is up to the marketplace to decide whether the future of corporate volunteer engagement will be built on open or closed digital platforms.

Read more stories by Greg Baldwin.