Millions of employees take part in corporate volunteering schemes each year. The potential is significant — for communities, for the voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations running the programmes, and for the companies investing the time. But that potential is routinely underdelivered. Not because people are unwilling, but because the structures around them are not good enough.
The problems tend to cluster around the same four failures:
- No clear strategy or coordination, which keeps attendance low and outcomes vague.
- Lack of a proper management system, leaving employees to find their own opportunities without any ability to plan or report at contract or programme level.
- Corporate motivation focused almost entirely on employee engagement, which sidelines the actual needs of VCSEs and their beneficiaries and defaults to low-skill, low-impact activity.
- A persistent underestimation of the value of skills-based volunteering — with the result that highly skilled people spend the day picking litter when they could be delivering something genuinely transformative.
The Ten Principles of an Effective Volunteering Programme
- Build the Programme Around a Clear Vision and Strategy
Most companies allocate one to three paid days of volunteering per employee per year. For an organisation of any size, that represents a substantial salary cost. Without a clear view of what the programme is trying to achieve, most of that investment is wasted.
Volunteering is proven to improve retention, strengthen workplace relationships, and build employee satisfaction. But those outcomes only follow from clarity — a clear message about the difference the company is trying to make, a strategy for how employees participate, and an understanding of the role each person plays in reaching the programme’s goals.
Companies do not need to obscure their motivations. If the programme is partly driven by social value commitments in public sector contracts, employees should know that — and understand their role in meeting those obligations. Transparency, combined with a compelling account of the difference the programme makes, builds commitment rather than eroding it.
- Always Have Coordination in Place
There is no volunteering platform, however sophisticated, that removes the need for human coordination. A dedicated coordination function — whether internal or contracted externally — is not optional. It is the difference between a programme that delivers and one that exists only on paper.
Coordination covers building and managing VCSE partnerships, communicating with employees, planning volunteering commitments against social value and CSR targets, operating the technology, and monitoring and reporting on data.
Given the salary cost of even a single volunteering day across a large workforce, the return on a small additional investment in coordination is straightforward to justify. Get the coordination right and the programme pays for itself many times over.
- Invest in Employee Engagement and Education
Most employees are willing to volunteer. The gap is usually not motivation but direction. Without guidance, highly skilled people default to the most visible and easiest opportunities — which tend to be the least impactful. This is not their fault. It is a failure of programme design.
When companies communicate clearly about the outcome targets behind the programme, explain why specific opportunities have been selected, and help employees understand the difference their contribution makes in the bigger picture, engagement levels rise and the quality of volunteering improves significantly. Education is not bureaucracy — it is what makes the difference between a volunteering day that feels good and one that actually does good.
- Build Strategic, Long-Term Partnerships with VCSEs
The most effective volunteering programmes are built on established relationships with a carefully selected group of VCSE partners, not on open marketplaces where any opportunity can be claimed at any time.
Depending on the company’s workforce size, skills mix, geographic spread, and the outcomes it is contracted to deliver, partnerships should be structured at an annual level — covering the full range of skills-based and non-skilled, individual and group, in-person and online opportunities. The VCSE partner should be actively involved in planning the collaboration, agreeing on coordination responsibilities, promoting opportunities to employees, and defining what data will be collected and how.
Strategic partnerships produce better outcomes. They also produce better evidence.
- Implement the Right Technology
Technology is not optional at scale. Coordinating hundreds — or tens of thousands — of volunteers through spreadsheets and email threads is not viable, and the data loss alone is commercially significant.
That said, not all volunteering platforms are built for the same purpose. A platform that promises meaningful volunteering for large numbers without coordination, with opportunities available to anyone at any time without prior commitment, cannot be relied upon to deliver the structured outcomes that serious programmes require. Platforms designed for open engagement are not the same as platforms designed for contractual social value delivery.
whatimpact.com is built specifically for the latter — the only volunteering management system in the UK designed around contractual social value commitments, with the framework mapping, outcome reporting, and audit-ready data that contract delivery requires. Technology must capture beneficiary data, case studies, and testimonials — not just hours and locations — and must be capable of supporting both corporate tax relief claims and public sector procurement KPI reporting.
- Offer a Genuine Variety of Opportunities
Research on individual giving and volunteering consistently shows that engagement preferences vary widely. Some people want direct, face-to-face contact with beneficiaries. Others prefer structured, task-based work they can do remotely. Some will only volunteer as part of a group; others want to act independently. Some are drawn to outdoor, physical activities; others offer their professional skills in an advisory or delivery capacity.
A programme built around a single type of opportunity will leave a significant portion of the workforce uninvolved. Meeting strategic targets requires a range of pre-agreed opportunities — designed in partnership with your VCSEs — that gives employees genuine choice while keeping the programme anchored to its goals.
- Establish Clear Guidelines and Practical Support
A volunteering policy does not need to be lengthy, but it does need to exist. Employees should have clear answers to the practical questions: what activities does the company support, who covers travel and subsistence costs, what are the health and safety expectations, and what reporting is required to evidence the day.
Clear guidelines reduce friction, increase take-up, and ensure the data collected is consistent enough to be useful.
- Consider Funded as Well as Unfunded Volunteering
Most volunteering opportunities require no financial contribution beyond the employee’s time. Some VCSEs, however, offer structured volunteering programmes that carry a cost — covering VCSE coordination, equipment, and sometimes technology — that would otherwise need to be funded from other sources.
Funded volunteering is worth considering. Well-designed paid programmes often reduce the company’s own coordination burden, provide significantly more structured reporting, and include annual engagement events that strengthen the relationship between the company and its VCSE partners. The cost is often justified by the quality of the outcome and the evidence it produces.
- Mandating Participation is Acceptable
Companies paying employee salaries during volunteering hours have a legitimate interest in how those hours are used. Particularly where volunteering commitments are tied to contractual social value obligations, a degree of direction — including mandating participation in pre-agreed activities — is not only acceptable but necessary.
It is equally reasonable to require employees to record their volunteering in the agreed system as a condition of being paid for the day. The data this produces is not bureaucracy — it is the audit trail that makes the programme defensible and the evidence that makes it valuable.
- Take Volunteering Data Seriously
The value of a volunteering programme cannot be understood without data, and the right data goes well beyond hours logged and locations recorded.
Effective volunteering data operates at two levels. At the individual level, it captures each volunteer’s commitment, the VCSE they worked with, who the beneficiaries were, where the activity took place, and how the volunteer experienced it. At the partnership level, it captures the aggregated impact of the company’s relationship with each VCSE — the outcomes the cohort produced, the difference made for beneficiaries, and the case studies and testimonials that bring that evidence to life.
Both views are necessary. The individual record builds accountability and personal engagement. The partnership view builds the narrative that matters for stakeholder reporting, procurement KPIs, and any proxy value claims the company wishes to make. Proxy values require audit-ready evidence to be defensible — and audit-ready evidence requires a system designed to produce it.
It is also worth keeping the investment in mind. Each volunteering day represents the salary cost of that individual — a figure worth hundreds of pounds per person, multiplied across potentially thousands of volunteers. Organisations spending tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds on volunteering without the data to understand what it delivered are making a significant investment with no return they can demonstrate.
