This is the third in a three-part series on the “3 Ms of Skills-Based Volunteering.” In this series, A Billion + Change experts will address the aspects of pro bono engagements that businesses are least ready to grapple with: matching employees to nonprofit partners, managing SBV projects, and measuring impact. This post was submitted by Caroline Barlerin, who is the Director of Global Community Engagement, HP Sustainability and Social Innovation at HP.
The first installment of this series, by Alexander Shermansong, covered effective matchmaking for pro bono projects and the second installment, by Katy Elder and Yvonne Siu, covered planning and managing a pro bono engagement. With their excellent advice, you are well on your way to designing and conducting a great pro bono project.
But will you have anything to show for your well-designed and well-executed program? When it’s over, will you know if the world is actually a better place? Will you be able to identify a detectable contribution to your company? Would you know how to redesign for greater impact?
That’s what this final installment focuses on: Helping you get the data that shows the social and business impact of your pro bono / skills-based volunteer program and that helps you improve the program. Specifically, this blog shares the five key lessons for measuring pro bono and skills-based employee volunteering we’ve learned at HP:
1) Secure the expertise you need. Measuring the impact of your pro bono program is not rocket science, but it does require specialized skills in research methods. Do individuals lacking graphic design expertise do the graphic design of our webpages? Of course not! Why, then, would we have individuals lacking measurement expertise provide the numbers?
I realize the “hire it out” advice might sound like a cop-out. After all, who has the budget to hire a metrics consultant? There are, however, cost effective ways to get the technical expertise you need. For example:
- Use pro bono volunteers for the pro bono volunteer program. At HP, we have employee volunteers who contribute to the employee volunteer program. These Social Impact Fellows are assigned to support the employee volunteer program a few hours a month for 6-12 months on one or more specific projects. They have goals, report on their progress, attend weekly staff calls and are part of the employee volunteer program team. Just as many community fire departments augment the work of their pro firefighters with the services of skilled volunteers, so can your employee volunteer program team rely on skilled in-house measurement experts.
- Fold metrics expertise into an existing position description. Another way to obtain research methods expertise is to include them in an existing employee volunteer program job description when hiring.
- Issue a capacity building grant in measurement for your partner nonprofits. One way to capture social impact is to support your nonprofits with a grant that develops their capacity to measure and report the social impact of your pro bono services.
- Delegate to business units. When it comes to measuring business impact, methods likely already exist within your company. HR knows how to measure employee retention, marketing knows how to measure brand awareness, sales knows how to measure customer loyalty, etc. They might be willing, even eager, to measure whether and to what extent your pro bono program can help them succeed with the outcomes with which they are charged. (See related tip #2 below).
- Get even more creative. There are likely many other ways to obtain measurement expertise – college interns, creative grants and retiree volunteering, for example.
2) Empower a single lead. Once you find the individual or team with the proper expertise, I suggest giving them a very clear picture of the specific data and findings you expect them to ultimately produce, and conferring on them the authority to manage the measurement efforts. They should seek input -- including that from those who run the programs being measured, of course. But they should also have the authority to disregard input. Survey design by consensus is like driving a car by consensus – ineffective and reckless.
3) Involve the business unit that measures the desired business impact. Again, whatever key business outcomes your pro bono program aims to achieve – employee engagement, employee skills, brand awareness, sales or other – someone at your company already measures them. In fact, if that’s not happening, your pro bono program might be trying to produce a business outcome that your company is not interested in. At the very least, keep the respective business unit informed of your measurement efforts and invite their feedback. At HP, this outreach has systematically increased HR’s engagement to the point where they now measure the impact of our pro bono / skills-based program on all key HR outcomes, including employee morale and engagement.
4) Have your people call my people – and other people. Whomever you select to manage the metrics for your pro bono program, make sure they learn from prior efforts. A Billion + Change, the Taproot Foundation, Points of Light and the companies in these networks can provide great guidance. And, of course, my metrics team would be happy talk to yours and share our surveys and other materials.
5) Prepare for surprises. At HP we’ve made mistakes in impact measurement of pro bono / skills-based volunteering and I suspect we will continue to occasionally falter. These bumps in the road are inherent on the path to impact measurement. I know from the enthusiastic external response to our existing measures that capturing the social and business impact of pro bono service is largely uncharted territory. Unknown terrain, by definition, is full of surprises. If you are measuring impact on social causes and business, prepare to be thrown off course and plan to become comfortable making course corrections.
If measuring the social and business impact of your pro bono program sounds like a formidable charge, it is. Nevertheless, it’s an excellent place in which to invest resources. Metrics have continually helped us improve our pro bono / skills-based volunteering. We learned that pro bono / skills-based volunteering within the company’s focus cause areas was more helpful to our nonprofit partners than service that fell outside our focus areas.
Metrics have also helped us justify the existence of a robust pro bono / skills- based program. Our metrics indicate that 89% of our pro bono / skills-based volunteer program nonprofit partners experienced increased capacity to serve more people, offer higher quality services, be more innovative or increase their scope of service. We’ve also obtained evidence of business impact. Metrics revealed that pro bono and skills-based employee volunteers are 59% more likely to have high morale than non-volunteers and 13% more likely than hands-on volunteers.
In summary, metrics will help your pro bono program accomplish what are arguably the program’s three most critical goals: continually improve, confirm that it helps solve or assuage serious societal issues, and ensure it supports the business.
HP’s corporate tagline is “Make it Matter.” I believe that a pro bono program can’t matter until it measures.