By Bea Boccalandro, Boston College Center faculty

Running an employee volunteer program means facing an onslaught of questions. Does my employee volunteer program have enough staff? How can I provide my CEO requested data on whether other retail companies offer release time for volunteering? Is my employee participation rate low? Is my employee volunteering and giving program any good? Now finally, relief is here in the form of a new benchmarking tool.

The Drivers of Effectiveness Survey Benchmarking Tool (www.volunteerbenchmark.com) will answer these and many other questions.  Thanks to generous support from Bank of America, this user-friendly tool is free and open to all.

The Benchmarking Tool scores your program against the ideal, per the Boston College Center’s evidence-based Drivers of Effectiveness for Employee Volunteering and Giving Programs. This identification of your program’s strengths and weaknesses can help you develop strategic plans, garner internal support and make operational decisions. The tool also benchmarks your program to other respondent companies (more than 250 to date), allowing you to see how you compare to customary practices. Tracy King, director of community engagement at the Levi Strauss Foundation, said, “Assessing against the drivers was vital to identifying our gaps and strengths and to creating a credible strategic plan for global employee engagement.”

Get the answers you seek. Go to www.volunteerbenchmark.com, complete the strictly confidential survey (it takes roughly 30 minutes) and select the comparison reports you would like from the reports menu. Among those to choose from are reports that compare you to respondents that are Fortune 500, Fortune 100, retail or international companies and other categories. Rosemary Byrnes, deputy director at the office of global volunteer initiatives at Citi, for example, used the tool to respond to an internal request on corporate volunteer practices at other companies.

If the tool doesn’t provide you the answers you seek, let us know (use the help function on the site). We are committed to getting you the answers you need to manage your programs.

Tags: benchmark, survey, volunteer
This entry was posted by Bea Boccalandro, Boston College Center faculty on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 2:34 PM, and is filed under Center News & Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.