Giving Compass' Take:

• More companies are leveraging digital platforms and other technology to strengthen corporate volunteer programs so that all participants are satisfied.

• How could your employer's CSR program improve? 

• Here are three benefits of corporate volunteering. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Read the full article about corporate volunteering by Greg Baldwin at Stanford Social Innovation Review.