Giving Thoughts

Skills-Based Corporate Volunteering in Asia

By Dr Rob John, Visiting Senior Fellow, National University of Singapore Business School, and Advisory Board Member, The Conference Board Initiative on Corporate Philanthropy

President Obama’s “United We Serve” campaign, a nationwide service initiative that helps meet the growing social needs resulting from the economic downturn, has boosted an already popular practice—volunteering. According to the latest Bureau of Labor report, nearly a quarter of Americans, 62.8 million people, volunteered for a nonprofit at least once during 2015. Much of this donation of time and skills takes place within the context of the workplace, with businesses increasingly organizing volunteer activities for their employees. Academic studies in the U.S., looking at why people volunteer, what impact it has on them, nonprofits and companies are burgeoning, but much less is known about corporate volunteering across Asia.

There are some very interesting developments beginning to emerge in the region. For example, corporate volunteering is being given a big push in India through the “India@75” campaign of the Confederation of Indian Industry. The initiative imagines an “inclusive, sustainable and developed India by 2022” (the 75^th year of independence) and places volunteerism at the heart of its strategy.

In Singapore, the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre’s 2014 annual giving survey found that a third of individuals who engaged in volunteering did so through their employers, and in larger corporations, 53 percent were active volunteers.

High-skill versus low-skill volunteering

In our forthcoming study of corporate philanthropy in Asia we wanted to better understand the role of volunteer programs. The advent of more “strategic” approaches to philanthropy recognizes that the giving of skills and time is as important as cash donations. All the businesses we spoke to during the study have employee volunteering programs of one sort or another, and the majority are moving towards models of volunteerism that intentionally utilize the core business skills of staff to strengthen the strategic and operational capacity of nonprofit organizations. Our study focused on such “high-skill” volunteering while still acknowledging that “low-skill” activities such as reading or playing sports with children, decorating or litter picking had a valid role in the spectrum of volunteer engagement. We interviewed businesses and volunteer programs in five Asian countries and developed a simple typology of high-skill volunteering, illustrated in the table below.

Table 1. High-Skill Volunteering Typology

Source: National University of Singapore, 2016.

We found volunteer programs were either managed in-house by corporate CSR or Human Resources departments, or by independent intermediary organizations. This post draws on some of the cases in our study, in particular focusing on the intermediated management approach.

Edelweiss Group and ToolBox India

Edelweiss Group is one of India’s fastest-growing financial services companies. Even before its IPO in 2007, its giving was modelled on the “venture philanthropy” approach that values the synergy of grants plus business advice to high-potential nonprofits. Vidya Shah, the firm’s founding CFO, who now runs the company’s foundation, EdelGive, believes it was necessary to leverage employee talent to assist the nonprofits being supported by grants. She also believes volunteering would help embed a culture of philanthropy throughout the rapidly growing business.

Volunteering became a high-profile exercise for all staff. Human Resources, including people responsible for senior recruitment and leadership development, worked with the Foundation to help staff at all levels to take advantage of skills-based volunteering opportunities. And as employees engaged in community activity, it became clear there was a business case for a volunteering.

“When staff worked with constrained resources, with people from very different backgrounds and utilized their core skills to fit a new situation, volunteering led to more creative thinking by employees, which benefited the business,” says Shah. The company has now extended the program to mobilize “C-Suite” executives from around the company to mentor nonprofit CEOs facing challenges with strategy or governance.

Skill-based volunteering became so popular at Edelweiss that more volunteers enrolled than could be accommodated by the Foundation’s portfolio of charities, so the company partnered with Mumbai-based ToolBox India, a nonprofit volunteering intermediary. ToolBox India deploys more than 60 volunteers from dozens of blue-chip companies in India’s financial capital. In most cases the volunteers are not sent by their employers but act in a personal capacity—although increasingly ToolBox is forging partnerships with corporations to help organize volunteer resources.

The arrangement with EdelGive meant ToolBox could place volunteers from its roster with EdelGive’s portfolio of grantees, while also offering Edelweiss employees volunteering posts with social organizations selected by ToolBox.

Asian Charity Services

David Sutherland relocated to Hong Kong in the 1990s to be Morgan Stanley’s CFO for Asia Pacific. Nancy Yang is a technology entrepreneur with a long career consulting at A.T. Kearney. Together, they established Asian Charity Services (ACS) in 2007 to provide pro bono business training to Hong Kong’s small- and medium-sized charities by leveraging the resources of the island’s corporate sector.

ACS’s signature training program consists of three intensive half-day workshops over five weeks. The group hosts eight rounds of workshops annually, enabling 32 nonprofits to benefit every year. Typically, five or six volunteers provided by corporate partners and trained by ACS, lead the workshops. Unlike other training programs offered in Hong Kong, ACS’s programs are focused on developing nonprofits’ senior leadership to help them address strategic and operational priorities.

The talent needed to run a comprehensive round of workshops is drawn from the substantial corporate sector in Hong Kong. “We approach a lot of companies, many in financial services, who then market the drive for volunteers on company intranets,” says Gary Morris, who manages the training program. ACS selects fewer than half those who volunteer, because, Morris says, the commitment to attend all workshops over the five weeks “is a tough call for individuals in demanding corporate jobs.” Corporate partners include UBS, Goldman Sachs, State Street, PwC, Credit Suisse and Macquarie. Volunteers are typically senior staff with at least 10 years’ work experience. They include bankers, business consultants, accountants, lawyers, HR managers and coaches, and communications and IT executives.

The scale of aggregated talent in the business districts of Asia is immense. At the same time, under resourced nonprofits address complex social and environmental problems with energy, enthusiasm and innovation, but often without the kind of skills and tools the private sector takes for granted. Skills-based volunteering can bridge that divide through programs managed by companies or by nonprofit intermediaries.

In the next posting I’ll explore how giving circles can engage corporate employees in charitable work in their communities.

About the author:

Rob John is a visiting senior fellow at the Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship & Philanthropy, NUS Business School, Singapore. From 2004 – 11 he helped build the European Venture Philanthropy Association and the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network. Philanthropy is his third career, having started out as a research chemist before moving to international aid and development. Rob splits his time between UK and Singapore.