September 2001 - Measuring Results to Ensure Doing Gooders Doing Good

By Rosemarie Kelly (Cargill)
On Thursday, August 23, Dr. Ellen Benjamin shared "A Look Inside Corporate Employee Volunteer Programs," based on research she conducted with the consent and cooperation of Chicago-area companies and with the help of the Chicagoland Employee Volunteer Council. During her 45-minute talk she elaborated on specific foci of her research, of which were of great interest to the 35-plus nonprofit and corporate representatives who attended the CVC program hosted by 3M at Tartan Park in Lake Elmo, MN.

Dr. Benjamin began her talk by prodding her audience with a pointed question: When you send people into a volunteer setting what do you do so that the experience is meaningful? Both corporations and nonprofit organizations should use the answer to this question to improve the design of corporate volunteer programs, implied Dr. Benjamin. Both the supply side (corporations) and the demand side (nonprofits) should work together to insure that their goals are compatible so that the outcomes of volunteer projects are meaningful to both.

Some interesting findings emerged from Dr. Benjamin"s study. First, she found that there is very little connection between the goals of volunteer programs as stated by corporate community relations or volunteer coordinators and the outcomes of these programs. While corporations talked about a focus on the customer, i.e., the community. The result of the research showed that corporate programs are aimed primarily at employees. That is corporations generally select projects based on the interest of employees. This is true whether it means organizing a big volunteer project in which a large group of employees can participate or selecting a project on where it is located (close to a facility or in a target community) or the type of task the nonprofit seeks to be accomplished.

Second, Dr. Benjamin noticed that while there is a national trend for corporate volunteer programs to support the corporate mission. In Chicago, the trend is for programs to be more philanthropic in nature. Whether this is true in Minneapolis is to be answered by another study, perhaps by research done at one of our prestigious universities.

There are implications and lessons to be learned by nonprofit organizations seeking corporate volunteers and corporations wishing to engage in community activities. Nonprofit organizations can benefit from Dr. Benjamin"s research by focusing on what motivates employers to design volunteer programs and adapt their volunteer programs to meet these needs. Second, nonprofits can strive to provide the "so what" to corporations looking for the effect of the work of their employees. To accomplish this, nonprofits must be more mindful to build in evaluations in their programs and budget for these when asking for financial support. Evaluations must focus on relevancy and effectiveness. Further, according to Dr. Benjamin, "corporations want to be loved for what they do." Therefore nonprofit volunteer coordinators should build into their programs sending thank you letters to employees and acknowledging corporations in their newsletters and annual reports.

Corporations should learn to try to better match community needs with the goals of their employees when selecting volunteer projects. Clearly, Dr. Benjamin"s research has lessons from which we all as CVC members can benefit. Some unanswered questions that linger with the writer are: Does it matter that the goals of corporate volunteer programs focus more on employees - their wishes and needs - than on community needs? What are the implications for the community when corporations care more about the needs of their employees than that of the community? Are the two mutually exclusive?

Dr. Ellen Benjamin ran two corporate foundations before joining the faculty of DePaul University where she is Assistant Professor in the School for New Learning. Dr. Benjamin can be contacted by e-mail at ebenjami@depaul.edu.

To order the journal in which Dr. Benjamin's study was published, refer to: http://www.avaintl.org/about/journal.html.

top