Corporate Volunteering in Australia: A Snapshot (2019)
11/10/2019
Authors: LBG managed by Corporate Citizenship & Volunteering Australia
Published by: LBG managed by Corporate Citizenship & Volunteering Australia
This research tracked corporate community participation and value in Australia since 2006. The report highlights the many benefits of corporate volunteering for the employee, the company, and the community involved. For example, for the employee, there are opportunities to meet new people and explore new situations and challenges. For the company, there is increased company pride and loyalty from staff. For the community, there is increased public awareness of community issues.
Many companies have a corporate volunteering program in place and intend to grow participation. Over half of the participants surveyed aimed to increase skilled volunteering.
Employee participation has grown steadily since 2006. Australian companies spend more as a percentage of their social investment budgets on corporate volunteering compared to global figures.
While corporate volunteers contributed over 1 million hours to the community in 2018, there is still plenty of corporate volunteering capacity available that could be utilised every year.
The report acknowledges that balancing workloads, managing skilled and non-skilled volunteering, gaining broader uptake amongst employees, and aligning volunteering programs with business strategies can present a challenge to companies.
The report offered suggestions for increasing participation and benefits including:
- Presenting volunteering opportunities as training and development opportunities
- Volunteer 'banks’ through which interested employees can access unused volunteer hours
- Turning unused volunteer time into donations
The report indicates that corporate volunteering is growing, but that more needs to be done to ensure the full benefit for all stakeholders are realised.
The full report is available here.