Found404 Studio

When I led corporate philanthropy for PIMCO, there was this dog-eared booklet that basically lived on my desk: IAVE's first-of-its-kind report, "Global Companies Volunteering Globally.” It was like a treasure map -- full of diverse strategies, metrics, and plans about volunteerism from companies across the globe. It became my go-to resource, offering insight and giving me inspiration for the many ways we could approach employee volunteering as a vehicle for connection. Fast forward nine years later: I got a call from Lorrie Foster, who oversees corporate strategy at IAVE. Lorrie and colleagues were interested in assembling an updated report, cataloguing new global corporate volunteering trends over the past decade.  I was in the middle of my work on the 2020 Census at the time. But, when Lorrie asked if I could serve as the North American consultant and interview global companies (like Salesforce, Apple, Bank of America, Microsoft, S&P Global, Medtronic and many more) on their volunteering programs, I was obviously all-in! I knew this would be the coolest of cool projects. Lorrie assembled an incredible global group of consultants (from Venezuela, Spain, India, Lebanon…) and we met in DC in February 2020 to go over the plan and timeline. Of course, everything shut down a month later because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But you know what? I think it was the BEST time to do this project because we captured the changing trends and approaches to volunteerism in real-time. When employees couldn’t volunteer in person or even see each other face-to-face in the office, volunteerism became an even more critical part of building connectedness.  After hundreds of interviews and data analysis, our team of consultants identified four major opportunities for global companies: ✔ Emerging into a post-pandemic world and reimagining the future ✔ Coming to scale: doing more for greater impact ✔ Creating a volunteer-friendly environment in the company ✔ Becoming global leaders for volunteering Lorrie, Kenn Allen, Monika Krol, MSc and the team published the final report in the summer of 2023. Want a copy? Send me a message and I’ll shoot it over to you! #corporatephilanthropy #employeevolunteerism #globalvolunteering #connection #globalcompanies