You don’t have to be the chairperson of a multibillion-rand company with millions invested in a foundation or trust to get involved in corporate social investment (CSI). Employees earning a weekly wage can make as important a contribution as their bosses.
CSI is no longer just about grantmaking — increasingly, it speaks more to partnerships and stake-holders than to philanthropy and good causes.
One such group of stakeholders is employees. More and more companies are recognising that their staff can play an important role in the community in a variety of ways, such as sharing skills through volunteering or mentoring programmes, using local knowledge of the community to assist with the disbursement of funds, fund-raising for a cause, and using business networks to leverage additional funds or resources.
‘Employee volunteering is becoming increasingly popular, assisted by many of the international companies with local offices in South Africa that imported the idea here,” says Laura Maxwell Stuart, corporate services manager at the Charities Aid Foundation’s (CAF) Southern Africa office.
The CAF is an international network that seeks to increase the flow of funds and resources to the non-profit sector. It works with local and international companies to encourage them to implement employee community involvement programmes.
The CAF helped BHP Billiton launch its Matched Giving Programme in three countries, including South Africa, last year. Staff at the aluminium smelter in Richard’s Bay can claim up to R5 000 from BHP Billiton for the community organisations where they make donations, fund-raise or volunteer. The CAF advised on the design and launch of the programme and is administering the scheme locally.
‘Today many companies are involved in a range of staff involvement projects, including mentoring programmes, staff volunteer teams, employees participating in choosing projects and payroll and matched giving schemes,” says Maxwell Stuart.
‘In some companies, the idea for corporate investment is brought by an employee who is passionate about community involvement. In the past they were often told that their projects fell outside the company’s CSI focus area. But now more and more companies are channelling small amounts of money into projects where their employees are involved.
‘We have also gone to companies and asked if they have ever thought of employee volunteering as a way of contributing to communities.”
Maxwell Stuart says the key factor required for successful volunteering is to get staff to buy into the idea — it has to be employee-driven.
‘Don’t tell them, consult them. One easy way of doing this is to send out a questionnaire asking staff what causes they are already involved in and which they think the company should support,” she says.
‘After the information is compiled from the questionnaire, a committee of ‘staff champions’ could be elected. These are people who are already committed to the cause, who can approach their colleagues and recruit them for the project.”
Maxwell Stuart says a problem with employee volunteering is that it requires a fair amount of organi- sation, and the ‘champions” can help the CSI department organise the staff.
Volunteering usually works well as a team event — for instance, building houses with Habitat for Humanity or painting and cleaning a school.
‘Most people in South Africa realise there is massive poverty and inequalities in the country and often would like to help, but don’t know how and jump at the opportunity when it is offered to them,” Maxwell Stuart says.
Some companies have a volunteer day where people spend time in a community or at an organisation.
‘This is not sustainable and usually involves once-off projects like painting or taking disadvantaged children to the zoo. However, they do expose staff to a different environment and help build their understanding of the need for development,” she says.
Maxwell Stuart believes employee volunteering doesn’t need to cost a company anything in real terms, other than people having time off. This is best suited to smaller com-panies that don’t have big budgets for CSI but want to invest in communities. In larger companies, a grant can be set aside to cover the cost of employee volunteering.
‘At the moment it is very ad hoc in South Africa and it is difficult to quantify how many people and how many hours are invested in volunteering. Companies have to begin seeing it as a business imperative and track it.
‘Employee volunteering is on the increase and is beneficial to companies, staff and communities. It appears that a fair amount is going to Aids organisations, but children’s organisations get a lot of support as well.”
The CAF encourages employee volunteering and has initiated a Give As You Earn programme, where people donate a percentage of their salary to a project and the company matches that donation. The CAF offers to administer this for a company, as payroll departments are often reluctant to take on the extra work.
‘We can also advise businesses on how to put Give As You Earn programmes in place in a way that the company benefits as well,” says Maxwell Stuart.