Corporate Volunteering: Benefits and Challenges for Nonprofits

• Published date: 01 December 2013
• Date: 01 December 2013
• Author: Axel Schilling,Olga Samuel,Patricia Wolf
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21089

Corporate Volunteering

Benefits and Challenges for Nonprofits

Olga Samuel,

1

Patricia Wolf,

2

Axel Schilling

1

1University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland,

2Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts

In the frame of corporate social responsibility, corporate volun-

teering is almost exclusively studied from the point of view of

companies, while the perspectives of nonprofit organizations

are neglected. Hence, this article focuses on the perspective of

managers of nonprofit organizations on volunteer partnership

projects with for-profit companies. In the center of this article

lie nonprofit managers’ strategy and motivation for participat-

ing in corporate volunteering, conception of corporate volun-

teer activities, and the often-cited win-win-win aspect. Key

findings suggest that a majority of the questioned nonprofits

lack strategic behavior and management tools for undertaking

volunteer partnership projects with companies. Nevertheless,

corporate volunteering is widely perceived as an opportunity

and a promising method of raising donations for nonprofit

organizations. This article suggests that the key to successful

future cooperation between nonprofits and profit-oriented

organizations lies in the processes of internal evaluation and

subsequent strategy development.

Keywords: nonprofit management, corporate volunteering,

collaboration, qualitative research

Correspondence to: Olga Samuel, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern

Switzerland, Institute for Nonprofit and Public Management, Peter Merian-Str. 86,

CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland. E-mail: olga.samuel@fhnw.ch

We express our gratitude to the Swiss Confederation’s innovation promotion

agency (CTI) for funding our research; we offer our thanks to Gian-Claudio

Gentile, Christian Lorenz, Theo Wehner for their valuable feedback, Robin and

Simeon for reading the article at an early stage and for helping to develop this arti-

cle, Alexandra for her proofreading, and four anonymous reviewers.

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 2013 © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc 163

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21089

164 SAMUEL, WOLF, SCHILLING

Nonprofit Management & Leadership DOI: 10.1002/nml

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS (NPOS) BECAME increasingly im-

portant in the late twentieth century, in the United States

and Northwest European countries, because governments

were gradually outsourcing various tasks to them (Salamon and

Anheier 1996). At the same time, these societies increasingly ex-

pected companies not only to be profit-oriented but also to behave

according to social and ecological standards and to take responsi-

bility for their actions (Carroll 1991; Habisch and Schmidpeter

2003; Windsor 2001). According to Carroll (1991), society de-

mands that companies take over moral (“Be ethical”) and philan-

thropic responsibilities (“Be a good corporate citizen”; see also

Andriof and McIntosh 2001) along with their traditional economic

(“Be profitable”) and legal responsibilities (“Obey the law”). Busi-

nesses are trying to position themselves as accountable players in

the arena of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Eells and Watson

(1974, 247) define CSR as follows: “In its broadest sense, corpo-

rate social responsibility represents a . . . broad concern with busi-

ness’s role in supporting and improving that social order.”

The idea of Carroll’s four-layered pyramid made its way into man-

agement practice during the 1980s and ’90s. In the early twenty-first

century, CSR is a widely accepted part of companies’ responsibilities

(Matten, Crane, and Chapple 2003). CSR includes a wide range of

actions, including employee volunteering outside of a company’s

core tasks. Corporate volunteering (CV) occurs when “a company

encourages its employees to offer their time and expertise as volun-

teers to non-profit organizations. These volunteer activities can be

undertaken within or outside the employees’ official workload and

time” (Meijs and van der Voort 2004, 21).

Since many NPOs strongly depend on contributions of volun-

teers, cooperation with corporate volunteers and companies offers a

variety of possible benefits for nonprofits. In addition, CV is an

opportunity for nonprofit organizations to spread their missions to

a wider public. According to Hustinx and Lammertyn (2003), vol-

unteerism underwent a change from lifelong commitment to self-

realization and more sporadic volunteering in the late twentieth

century, which led to an overall increase of interest in volunteering

(Hustinx and Lammertyn 2003). Much literature has focused on

companies however, and leaves out nonprofits’ perspectives on cor-

porate volunteering. Few studies have aimed to understand non-

profits’ reasons for participating in CV and how they organize it (see

Austin 1998; Lee and Higgins 2000; Quirk 1998). In this study

the authors explored the perspectives of nonprofit managers who

have experience in carrying out volunteer partnership activities

with for-profit companies.

This article addresses two key questions: (1) What motivates

nonprofit managers to take part in CV collaborations? (2) Is the

often-cited win-win-win situation a reality? We have drawn on empir-

ical research conducted in eight Swiss NPOs. The data stem from

The authors

explored the

perspectives of

nonprofit

managers who

have experience

in carrying out

volunteer

partnership

activities with for-

profit companies.