Is it ethical to refuse a child tutoring services in order to produce a report on the effectiveness of such services? Should you divert resources from programming to measurement when there are more children to serve, families to help, problems to solve and an otherwise overwhelming number of unmet needs?

If actions speak for themselves, then corporate citizenship professionals have answered a resounding “NO!” We have long refused to invest in social sector impact measurement, which measures whether a program generates the ultimate community change it purports to generate, because it means fewer resources for service delivery.

“We can’t measure whether our program truly makes a difference without cutting services,” corporate citizenship professionals often say, “so we just can’t afford to prove impact.” Faced with zero-sum funding decisions, we overwhelmingly choose more people served over more knowledge gained. We consider it heartless to favor an evaluation report over a child. Virtually every corporate citizenship program supports services. Precious few know whether such services make an impact.

Yet, how ethical is it to enroll an underprivileged child in a program we do not know to be effective? How respectful is it to not even bother to determine if the program is helping them? Services extended to victims of domestic violence for decades proved to be ineffective when they were eventually assessed. How can that delay in assessing those services – while thousands of women and children (mostly) suffered – be considered acceptable?

We expect our doctors to give us the probability of success of treatment options but we don’t give this information to those we serve. Paradoxically, by reacting compassionately to the needs around us we might be responding unethically.

The cost-effectiveness of our decision is also suspect. Based on the body of impact evaluations done in the past five years, it appears no more than half of nonprofit services generate the purported change – be it reducing high school dropouts, improving mental health or reducing crime – to a meaningful degree. By eschewing impact evaluation, we tacitly accept that half of our social sector investments are unproductive and that it’s acceptable to remain in the dark as to which half. Forgoing impact evaluation in favor of delivering services is shortsighted. It’s a commitment to activity, not to change.

We don’t pit activity against efficacy in other endeavors. We don’t build power plants before being assured that they will produce power. We don’t put MRI machines in every hospital before being reasonably certain that they will work. We don’t mass produce brooms that haven’t been shown to sweep dust. R&D departments, pilot studies and beta tests are testaments to our willingness to invest the bulk of our resources in testing of effectiveness.

Yet, when it comes to corporate citizenship, we are hesitant to spend a meaningful proportion of a project’s budget on evaluation – even if it’s the only way to obtain evidence of its effectiveness. As a result, we support programs, toolkits, services and other “solutions” without knowing if they solve anything. Ensuring that our corporate citizenship actually works should be our first order of business even if – for a period of time, at least – it swallows a considerable amount of our corporate citizenship resources.

I do not advocate that we allow the homeless man to go hungry and unsheltered on a cold night while we perfect a job-training curriculum. It is a human instinct and a moral obligation to respond to suffering, independent of long-term impact. However, we should be clear about the purpose of our corporate citizenship and hold ourselves accountable accordingly. If we aim to bring someone in from the cold, there is no need to measure whether they are employed a year later. We only need to know that they are sheltered and warm. If, on the other hand, we design a program to employ the homeless, it is our managerial and moral obligation to know that it increases the chances of employment before we offer it to thousands of individuals.

If we are generous with impact evaluation investments, most technical constraints melt away. Longitudinal studies are possible. Control groups to determine causality can often be arranged. Measuring long-term meaningful change is within reach.

Once impact evaluation identifies what works, the need for continued impact evaluation is minimal, allowing us to invest heavily in those services that are known to work. Society has invested resources to prove that interventions such as vaccinations, reading to children and exercise work. We no longer need to track whether an immunized child will be disease-free, whether a student who is read to early in life will perform better in school, or whether a person who exercises will improve their health. A corporate citizenship effort that focuses on any of these areas need not spend resources on impact evaluation. It can dedicate itself to serving as many people as possible, knowing that the bulk of them will truly be helped. Unfortunately, these are exceptions. Most corporate citizenship programs have little to no assurance of their effectiveness.

Some pioneering companies have already made evaluation of their social sector impact an integral part of their corporate citizenship program. The Best Buy Children’s Foundation, for example, produced a research report, “Teen Voice 2009: The Untapped Strengths of 15-Year-Olds” that is used to help ensure Best Buy’s @15 TM corporate citizenship program makes a difference in the lives of teenagers. Furthermore, IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program, an international community service assignment for high-potential IBM employees, commissioned an independent evaluation in its launch year that showed, among other things, that most recipient nonprofit and government organizations reported improved leadership and strategic direction due to Corporate Service Corps.

Other corporate citizenship programs might want to follow the lead of Best Buy and IBM. For in failing to properly invest in impact evaluation, we are likely squandering our corporate citizenship investments, the hopes of those we mean to help and the opportunity to maximize social sector benefits.

Impact evaluation is not a luxury. It is a neglected necessity that can elevate corporate citizenship to unprecedented efficacy and higher moral grounding.

Having environmental activists on the sales floor supports Patagonia’s counter-culture, outdoors-oriented brand. It also ensures that those selling Patagonia products have an intimate connection to the place where those products are used – the outdoors.

When Aetna recruiters visit college campuses to find new hires, employee volunteers come along and hold blood drives. Students gain insight into working at Aetna by witnessing the beyond-the-job commitment to a strong health care system embodied by regular, everyday employees.

Patagonia and Aetna’s use of employee volunteering to support sales and recruitment are certainly novel. Yet, they are also a continuation of a decades-old trend of integrating volunteering into mainstream business functions that started with marketing and continued with morale and skill development. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies participating in recent Center for Corporate Citizenship research use volunteering to support reputation, morale or skill-development goals. “Service sabbaticals” and “team-building volunteering” are becoming common ways businesses serve communities and themselves.

The infiltration of employee volunteering into corporate departments is largely due to its ability to provide an increasingly valuable management benefit: meaningful connections. You might not consider creating meaning as a vital component to a successful business endeavor. But several recent books, including Daniel Pink’s Whole New Mind and Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care make compelling cases that business success in the 21^st century will hinge largely on the ability of companies to create higher meaning and deeper connections with customers and other stakeholders. Businesses such as Apple, IBM, Target and Intel are recognizing that more activities that foster what Patnaik calls empathy and Pink calls meaning are key to the company’s ability to develop effective products, stay globally competitive and overcome everyday business challenges.

Employee volunteering can go a long way toward meeting businesses’ urgent need for meaningful connections. What could be more meaningful than assuaging humanity’s most pressing problems? What could be a stronger basis for connecting with stakeholders than through cherished causes?

In the 20^th century the discipline of management defined several functions as vital for business endeavors, including information technology management, operations management and human resources management. It’s time to add “community involvement management” as a key management function.

What would our companies would be like if every department, from catering to auditing to grounds, had a budget for employee volunteering and an assigned Community Involvement Department representative? What would our communities be like?

The prospect of measuring to what degree product is “responsibly” produced or “ethically” traded, for example, can throw many into despair.

There is no need to suffer over the impossibility of measuring corporate citizenship. Sure, ethics and responsibility cannot be measured with a physical gadget the way temperature can with a thermometer. But this does not mean lofty abstract goals cannot be measured. They can. The corporate sector successfully measures thousands of intangible items everyday with great care and precision including one of the most abstract concepts of all: individual happiness or “well-being.” Do we really think that measuring corporate citizenship is beyond our ability? Of course not.

The linchpin to measuring abstract outcomes is the “indicator,” defined as a measurable gauge of something not directly measurable. The way Gallup, a research organization, and Healthway Inc., a health care company, track “well-being” is through a survey. If using self-reported questions as indicators of happiness sounds too simple to be a genuine solution, you might be expecting measurement to be harder than it needs to be. Gallup’s measure has been hailed for its precision and validity by Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University Nobel laureate economist, and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of course, survey questions are still just one type of indicator. Mercedes Benz measures the joy of driving different car models by tracking miniscule movements in facial muscles, for example.

We might think we are uncomfortable having indicators reflect the state of progress on a cherished ideal but we live quite happily awash in indicators. We take “the stock market dropped below 900″ to mean that the financial markets are weaker, yet we are referring to the stock price of a small percentage of companies: the S&P 500. Our medical education system counts on straight-A students being the best qualified to become physicians. Yet A’s are mere indicators of material learned. We tax ourselves according to indicators of the worth of our homes. Our lives would be hard to manage without indicators. Corporate citizenship is hard to manage without indicators.

My answer to “how do I start to measure my corporate citizenship program?” is “meet the indicator.” The indicator opens up great possibilities in the world of measurement. Suddenly measuring the “responsibility” of our products and “ethics” of our trading, for example, is no longer daunting. It is a matter of finding the right indicators, as Starbucks did with its Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices.

Next month, I will say to participants in my Measuring and Managing Corporate Citizenship Performance course “whatever you fear can’t be measured, bring it up. We will find a way.” Now, that’s an indicator of my faith in the indicator.

Learn more about Measuring and Managing Corporate Citizenship Performance.

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.

Recent research indicates a more productive theory might be that good employee participation requires a good program, and not much recruitment.  Of course, any employee program requires strong and clear communications. However, if a lot of effort is going into convincing employees to participate, it might be time to redirect this energy.

Think along the lines of “If you build it, they will come.” To attract employees, don’t focus on strengthening recruitment but on strengthening four other R’s that attract employees:

• Relevance of the program to employee work life and culture
• Relationships with internal and external stakeholders
• Results-focused design
• Renewal of programming

This four-R approach to employee volunteering emerged out of Atlanta, home of exemplary employee volunteering. Over the past four years, Atlanta has won more Awards for Excellence in Workplace Volunteer Programs, the premier national award conferred by the Points of Light & HandsOn Network, than any other metro area. These achievements helped Georgia tie California for the state with the most wins. Also, Atlanta companies outperform comparable companies in the Drivers of Effectiveness for Employee Volunteering and Giving Programs, the standard for effectiveness created by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. (To participate in this benchmark survey go to www.volunteerbenchmark.com.) In other words, this four-R Atlanta approach might very well represent a future trend of employee volunteering.

So next time you ask yourself “How can we recruit more employee volunteers?” consider the practices of Atlanta companies and instead ask “How can we bring more relevance, relationships, results and renewal to the program?”

» Download The Methods Behind the Magic: Examining the practices of Atlanta’s exemplary employee volunteer programs (pdf; free registration and/or login required)