Presentation

Notes

Employer Supported Volunteering

A new approach

Draft v1

July 2011

Mike Elliott

National Volunteering Manager

Plant Network Conference

I was pleased to be asked to come and talk about Employer Supported Volunteering as this is a hot topic for us at the moment. This is because we are currently reviewing our approach, thinking about how we should take this forward. With that in mind I am going to share with you this morning where we are at the moment and it would be really good to find out about you own experiences and thoughts about this aspect of volunteering.

To start with, is everybody familiar with what we mean by Employer Supported Volunteering?

→ Get a show of hands

For the benefit of those that are not I will give you a brief explanation. Many companies allow their staff time off (in work time) to volunteer. Sometimes this will be to support particular organisations or causes but more often than not it is completely up to the individuals how they use this time.

The amount of time can vary from company to company but as an example as a member of National Trust Staff I am entitled to 5 days per year to volunteer outside the organisation. When I take this time has to be agreed with my line manager but it my choice as to how and where I volunteer. This is quite a common (if sometimes hidden) entitlement of many employers.

Some companies also allow their staff to go out on secondment for greater length of time, typically 3 to 6 months but I will talk about that in a bit more detail later.
 

It also enables us to deepen our relationship with a corporate partner which is not just financially based as in a traditional sponsorship arrangement. A great example of this is our recent partnership with Yorkshire Bank. As many of you have been aware Yorkshire Bank sponsored our outdoors programme including the Greener Gardens initiative. Creating opportunities of Yorkshire Bank’s employees to volunteer for the Trust was a key part of that partnership.
 

We have found that a lot of groups are unwilling to travel too far from their base and that therefore limits out opportunities. Where we have been most successful is where our properties are located close to areas of large employment (for example London and the South East and the urban fringe environments of the North West. Our offer has always relied on volunteers coming to us.

As I mentioned earlier it is great opportunity to promote existing opportunities to a new audience and we have definitely benefitted from this but on a national level it is impossible to measure the impact of this as we do not have the monitoring systems to record the motivations and backgrounds of everybody who volunteers for us.

Due to scale it is easier for us map the impact that individual secondees can have the organisation. We have benefitted from the contributions of secondees form several different organisations including the BT, John Lewis Partnership, the BBC and the Home Office. It is important to note that whilst we may often refer to and focus our attentions on corporates a lot of government departments also allow their staff time to volunteer in some way shape and form. In fact whilst chatting to Mike Calnan (our head of Gardens) in preparation for today I discovered that Dr David Slawson, the Chief Plant Health Scientist from DEFRA had spent time with us on secondment.

Organisations allow their staff out on secondment for a variety of reasons. Often this can help with career and / or personal development and will be looking for opportunities that can provide this development. For others it can be a reward after a period of time with and organisation – a chance to do something different that the individual find rewarding on a kind of sabbitacal arrangement. Interestingly BT allow their staff to go out externally on secondment as a way of keeping people busy between major projects. For them this not only broadens their teams experience and knowledge but ensures that can manage changes in resource requirements without resorting to job cuts and redundancies.
 

As well offering the opportunity to volunteer as a benefit to staff often volunteering programmes will fall under its corporate social responsibility umbrella. It is therefore sometimes quite easy to be cynical about their motivations and it is important to pick partners carefully. However in my experience employers are normally very genuine in their motivations for allowing their staff to volunteer. This is sometimes about brand alignment and creation of good press stories but this often underpinned by a genuine desire to support a specific cause or reach a particular audience or community, particularly local communities.

Often employers see volunteering as means to creating valuable development opportunities for their staff. Sometimes this is explicit as in the type of secondments I mentioned before but sometime this maybe just a broader life experience or work within another environment.
 

Our current approach to Employer Supported Volunteering has focussed (with a few notable exceptions) on offering locally organised ‘team challenges’ with mixed success. Where this has worked well we have developed lasting partnerships between companies and individual properties that have been mutually beneficial. However in a lot of instances relationships have been less successful with frustrations being felt by both properties and partners alike. This has particularly been the case with national partners.

Feedback from some companies is that they have been interested in working with us but we did not seem to value the offer they were making to us. This is not because we did not value what they were offering but successful outcomesare reliant quite a lot brokering between the employer and our properties. A good insight for us was that one company noted that we have had a team who are focussed on Corporate Partnerships where the primary intention is about gaining sponsorship (i.e. gifts of money) but we are not set up in a similar way to maximise the offers of gifts of time.

It is important to note that we are not alone in this and some recent research completed by nfpSynergy found that “employee volunteering fills charities with dread” as the gift of time can be difficult to deal with whereas is the donation of money is “so wonderfully flexible”.

Whilst we have clearly found employee volunteering difficult in the past, and in some instances felt that ‘dread’, we believe this offers us an opportunity. By rethinking our offer and approach we can not only deliver key strategic outcomes by potentially reaching people who would not normally support us in any way, least of all volunteer, but also deepen our relationship with new and existing corporate partners.

There continues to be a pull from companies looking for us to provide ‘team challenges’ but we are trying to move away from this being seen as our main offer. There is a great opportunity to engage with highly motivated and skilled volunteers from corporate partners so we are developing a range of opportunities that we can promote to these individuals through their companies employee volunteering programme.

These opportunities can include –

Secondment Opportunities – As I mentioned we have benefited greatly from long term secondments however these have been very ad-hoc and inconsistently shared across the organisation. We aim to create and promote roles to partners that allow their employees to go out on secondment opportunities that help us deliver key initiatives and pieces of work. We will benefit from not only the extra capacity and skills that the secondee brings but also the challenge that a different perspective can have on the organisation.

Mentoring / coaching – A lot of employers struggle to release their staff for more than a couple of days per year but it is possible to develop longer term relationships by ensuring our opportunities are flexible. One such opportunity is the provision of mentoring or coaching by a Employee Volunteer to a member of our staff or volunteer. An example of this a financial advisor from Nationwide Building Society who is volunteering as a ‘finance’ mentor supporting a relatively inexperienced Property Manager through our budget planning period.

This type of support can be in the form regular phone call, once a week or a more ad hoc arrangement. They can volunteer for us at times that suit them from their own home or place of work and maybe never meet their mentee or even step on National Trust property.

Masterclasses – Some partner organisations who may be ‘experts’ in their field run master classes for our own specialists. This would be a great benefit in its own right but could also lead to a deeper partnership based upon a relationship of sharing where our own ‘experts’ reciprocate. We are currently discussing with the advertising company JC Decaux how this kind of arrangement can support our marketing teams.

Team challenges – There will clearly still be a need to provide Team Challenges but where we do this we should be consistent in our offer. Some partners are look for specific activity that includes an element of structured Team Building whereas others simply want a task that enables teams to work together. We have traditionally offered the latter whatever the expectations of the partners. Where we are asked to provide specific ‘Team Building’ activity we need to be clear on what we can and cannot provide and ensure we have the expertise to provide this.

We are also looking beyond the traditional conservation task as the only ‘Team Challenge’ we can offer. Many companies (particularly those with graduate schemes) will offer us the time of a team of individuals to work on task and finish style problems / projects.

Community Fundraising – There is a great opportunity to involve corporate groups in Community Fundraising. Whether this is large scale national partnerships (for example the Boots and Macmillan) or a small business (maybe an NT supplier) organising a raffle or community fete at their local property again the potential is huge.

Pro-bono Professional Services – The Trust as has many charities benefitted from professional skills / services free of charge. We need to find a way to enable individuals to offer us their time. At present it is unclear how you would do this and the development of some kind of offers log / skills bank could help broker opportunities to offers and vice versa.
 

Our response to Employer Supporter Volunteering in the past has been exactly that, a response. We have reacted to enquiries from individuals or employers rather than being proactive and having a clearly defined offer that delivers what we want as an organisation.

Sustainable, long term deeper partnerships with corporate organisations can benefit every part of the National Trust including gardens and help us deliver our organisational priorities.

From the simple provision of extra hands (or funds) to deliver our backlog of conservation work, the delivery of professional development workshops to our staff or one to one mentoring of our managers there are lots of ways that we can reach new volunteers through the development of these new offers.

As well as reaching those who choose to come and volunteer with us we also reach a wider audience, enabling all employees of our partners to have heard of us and to know what we do.
 

We are currently working with a selection of national partners to test these ideas and get their feedback. This is in work in progress and I am sure we have not completely right but hopefully it gives you a flavour of the National Trust’s approach to this aspect of volunteering that we feel is only going to grow in the future.

Thank you and any questions?