Leveraging top talent to meet the community’s greatest needs!!

• Saumya, a senior professional from a well established corporate volunteers during her lunch hours by talking to several vendors in getting a website done for a start up non-profit.
• Kumar, another senior professional volunteers his time at a start up which mentors children on various career paths. He started as a mentor for five children and gradually got involved in strategically developing plans to scale up the organisation.

There has been an increasing trend of senior corporate professionals volunteering for smaller non profit set ups on a pro bono basis. By doing such pro bono projects, an individual grows and learns exponentially because of working with limited resources, acquiring new skills and enhancing one’s networking skills. Pro bono projects are an important part of skill based volunteering project that provides non-profit with skills and expertise critical to maintaining a productive organisation.

A non profit may not be able to ‘Hire’ a fortune 500 executive; however they can find a pool of 500 professional willing to volunteer pro-bono to help with various tasks. The benefit of such skill based volunteering is two fold:

Benefit to NGO:  Getting skilled volunteers to do more with less or no remuneration such as designing business strategy, creating brand strategy, outreach plan. By replacing high cost contract services with skilled volunteer services, non profits are able to stretch their grants/funds and show good custodianship of the funds available to them.

Benefit to Volunteers: Volunteering provides creative change from daily work that enhances the overall work experience. It provides volunteers organisational, leadership, communication and decision making skills.  Volunteering can help in expanding the work experience and thus ensuring better career growth.

Skill Based Volunteering (S.B.V.) is the answer to some good work experience for volunteers, lots of pro-bono benefit to community, good corporate citizenship for socially responsible business.

So let’s leverage the top talent within our network to take up some SBV projects…