Your Matchable Guide To Employee Volunteering With Limited Time
Employee Volunteering is a great way to give back, but that doesn’t make it easy to fit into your schedule. Enter Matchable!
We all know that there are benefits to volunteering. For example, in one study, 90% of people reported that volunteering gave them a sense of personal achievement, and in another, volunteering was found to have an equivalent wellbeing value of £911 per volunteer per year.
So there’s definitely lots of reasons to get involved, whether this be through an individual project or group volunteering opportunities!
In a world of remote possibilities, finding the time to volunteer has never been easier, as you can now make a difference from the comfort of your own home, without wasting precious volunteering time on travel.
“90% of respondents reported that volunteering gave them a sense of personal achievement.”
Matchable is a platform that exists to make the process of corporate employee volunteering as easy and efficient as possible, so that volunteers can spend their time doing what they love most: giving back.
At Matchable, we Match employees at forward-thinking companies with innovative, high impact projects, thereby supporting a range of non-profits, charities and impact startups. More info on the impact organisations in our network can be found here.
Research has shown that while traditional, hands-on volunteering is great, it’s skills-based employee volunteering that makes the most impact – more than 6x the impact to be exact! We have an incredible community of impact organisations with skilled volunteering opportunities on our platform, just waiting to find their perfect Match!
What makes timings on Matchable employee volunteering projects different from the rest?
We understand that our volunteers are busy people. After all, they’re working full-time jobs at some of the most forward-thinking companies out there!
That’s why at Matchable, we specialise in short-term, high-impact volunteering opportunities. Whether that’s providing some tech insight into what’s feasible in an app development to tackle domestic abuse, reviewing and suggesting improvements on a marketing strategy to support as many refugees as possible, or creating blog articles to educate and empower those experiencing homelessness, what remains consistent is our commitment to our volunteers’ capacity, and empowering them to make a real difference in the world.
Each of our projects have guidelines on timings to help employees plan their time, ranging from short and sweet (a few hours), medium (up to a day), to max impact (a few days+). When volunteers sign up to our platform, they select however many of these brackets they have capacity for, and are only shown projects that adhere to their timing requirements. There’s also the option to update these preferences at any time, or shortlist projects for later when employees have more capacity.
Our guidelines on timings are also super flexible! For example, if we estimate a project might take a day to complete, this could be split into 8 one-hour sessions across 8 weeks if that’s what works best for people’s schedules – the beauty of remote volunteering! Equally, if volunteers would rather take a full day out and complete a project all at once, they have the option to do this too. There’s no one size fits all with employee volunteering at work, and at Matchable, we pride ourselves on accommodating even the busiest of schedules.
For more guidance on our project timings, click here.
But don’t just take our word for it!
Our Volunteers, and the causes that matter to them, are at the heart of everything we do here at Matchable. And we love to celebrate their successes! Hear from one of our lovely volunteers below, a Client Director at Dentsu who Matched with Ila.
Ila is a social enterprise on a mission to create safe spaces for survivors of domestic abuse to seek necessary support for their difficult circumstances. They provide help on two fronts: auditing and training companies on diversity and inclusion, and developing a tech for good app that upskills retail staff to be effective allies against domestic abuse.
“Through Ila, I found an outlet to do something active and would do it again in a heartbeat.”
“I was matched with Ila via Matchable, and found the experience so rewarding. It was so nice to have a day free from work distractions to dedicate to a cause I feel so passionately about – ending gender-based violence. I had been feeling simultaneously really disturbed by recent examples of gender-based violence around the world, yet powerless to know where to begin in helping contribute to the fight to end it. Through Ila, I found an outlet to do something active and would do it again in a heartbeat.”
Your Dedicated Volunteer Matchmaker
Matchable is also unique in the corporate volunteering scene in that volunteers have access to their own personal Volunteer Matchmaker. Lindsay is there to support employees throughout their volunteering journey, whether that’s helping them find their perfect Match, liaising with impact organisations on volunteers’ behalf, or just generally checking in throughout the process to make sure volunteers have everything they need to succeed. This support helps to remove the admin hassle around finding and organising volunteering opportunities, and ensures that volunteers’ time is best utilised to give back to the causes that matter most to them.
ABOUT MATCHABLE
At Matchable we work with companies and their employees to match them with high impact and innovative skilled volunteering projects at non-profits and impact startups.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how your employees can upskill through our social impact projects, get in touch here.