At least 11 million employees have the option to volunteer during work hours, according to estimates. This is a massive investment to social and environmental good by companies. However, there are also internal motivations for these investments such as employee engagement, retention and team building in the workplace.
Social value (an umbrella concept for social, environmental and economic value) delivery is mandatory in every government contract. To use their volunteering schemes in social value plans when bidding for government tenders, a company has to consider how they arrange the scheme. Traditional, ‘voluntary volunteering’ where employees choose their activities cannot be used in social value plans for tenders. Random days used by employees to support a range of very different kinds of initiatives, some of which are not aligned with social value frameworks, do not deliver measurable outcomes or impact.
Social value plans in bids need to meet the requirements of tangible, explicit and locally relevant social value. This goes way beyond listing how many volunteers or volunteering days will be used. It is essential to build a plan where initiatives being supported are clear with outcome goals – not only outputs. Those organisations who run these initiatives need to be recognised beforehand as only they have the information on their beneficiaries and results of their work.
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Types of Volunteering
There are two different kinds of volunteering – unskilled and skilled volunteering. Unskilled volunteering provides manpower to make initiatives happen from fundraising to giving extra hands to set up an event. Skilled volunteering on the other hand consists of harnessing individuals’ capabilities and professional expertise to support causes. It is obvious that skilled volunteering can be more impactful than non-skilled volunteering as it can help VCSE organisations to grow. When a company wishes to harness skills to make a real difference, it is most powerful to ‘bundle’ skills. This means, putting together teams to do a meaningful task within a charity, social enterprise or other community initiative. These skills can be used to help the organisation in their management and operations e.g. by building websites. Or, harnessing the skills for the actual beneficiary work, e.g. through training, mentoring, career support, or designing accessible buildings.
The key to presenting a volunteering initiative in a tender bid is to highlight the location of impact and beneficiaries. When planning meaningful, PPN 06/20 eligible volunteering activities, it is essential that companies find partners who need the resources they have to offer when the contract work takes place. This is not a simple task.
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Finding opportunities for your organisation
Finding volunteering opportunities is time consuming and expensive if a company does not harness technology, like whatimpact.com, for local matching. You can also use technology to understand the outcomes and actively ‘bundle’ skills into meaningful initiatives. It is also very important that there is proper reporting on the results of these volunteering schemes. Too often companies try to evaluate these results themselves. Firstly they are not experts at and secondly, they do not actually have access to the data they need. Charitable organization know about the proven difference made, not just the hours used, when reporting.. Therefore, reporting should come from the grass-root level, from the charitable initiative and the beneficiaries.
This is how whatimpact.com is built – saving companies time, money and giving them access to outcome driven impact reporting. We enable companies to harness volunteering schemes for impactful social value.
If you wish to learn more on harnessing your volunteering schemes to government contract work and helping your company to win tenders and make a meaningful difference, contact us here. Also, you can check how whatimpact.com platform works and especially, how our Volunteering Hub functionality helps your company to align your volunteering scheme with your tender work, check a short demo here.
whatimpact.com is the only platform in the UK which is built to help you plan, deliver and report on social value, aligned with government social value requirements.
