Benevity’s State of Corporate Purpose report has just launched, and it paints a picture of an industry in transition. Purpose programs are under more scrutiny, communications strategies are being rewritten, and companies are quietly recalibrating what they’re willing to say publicly about their social impact work. From this transition, an important signal is emerging: volunteerism is finally getting serious attention and along with it, some serious expectations.
The broader context is telling: 55% of companies reported increased scrutiny of their purpose programs, and in response, many have gone quiet. Seventy-six percent say they remain committed but communicate more cautiously, 69% changed how they describe their programs externally, and 85% are careful about which issues to support vocally, regardless of company size. At the same time, companies are investing more in storytelling (the number two area of increased budget this year), often offloading that work to nonprofit partners. Nearly half of nonprofits handle the extra workload through unpaid staff overtime, and 49% say donors rarely or never fund the effort.
So we have an industry that’s speaking more quietly while spending more on communications, a tension that only resolves when the stories companies tell are grounded in real, rigorous impact rather than surface-level PR. And that’s where volunteerism enters the picture.
Volunteerism Steps Into the Spotlight
Fifty percent of companies say they’re increasing their investments in employee volunteering. They’re looking for HR outcomes like employee engagement (96%) and culture and connection (91%) as key objectives — and they’re digging deeper to mine these programs for business returns:
- 80% want to link volunteering to business metrics
- 74% want to measure impact on employee performance, development, and mobility
- 69% want to quantify social value created by volunteers
- 69% want to understand the impact of volunteering on team performance
For the first time, we’re starting to see signs that companies may move beyond vanity metrics like employee volunteer hours and participation percentages. That’s a welcome change in focus.
The Challenge
Companies are looking at volunteerism to deliver against outcomes it was never designed (in its current form) to deliver. And the nonprofit side of the equation tells us why. According to Benevity’s report, 50% of nonprofits say large, team-based volunteering events provide little or no long-term capacity, and 41% say corporate volunteer engagements rarely or never lead to significant financial donations or long-term funding partnerships.
The disconnect is real. Companies want employee engagement, culture change, skill development, and measurable business impact. But the most common corporate volunteer model — a big group showing up for a one-off day of service — isn’t built to deliver any of those things. It’s built to generate participation numbers and photo ops. And both the companies and the nonprofits know it.
A New “Why” for Volunteerism — But Not a New “How”
Against the backdrop of AI’s impact on the workplace, a new rationale for volunteerism is also emerging: developing critical human skills that will matter most as companies navigate this transition. Skills like enabling social connections, developing empathy, innovation, creativity, and problem solving.
Benevity says volunteerism is at a turning point and we couldn’t agree more. One of the report’s suggestions is to position volunteering as a learning and development investment, building strategic alignment with talent and learning teams to integrate volunteering into employee development plans, performance conversations, and leadership programs.
This is the right instinct. But instinct alone won’t get companies there.
Not All Volunteerism Is Created Equal
A word of caution: not all companies are well positioned to lean into this strategy, because not all corporate volunteerism is designed to produce these outcomes. Many corporate volunteer programs are what we’d classify as “transactional”, organized around tasks, logistics, and basic outputs. Transactional programs ask: Did we get the task done quickly? How many people showed up? How many hours did we log? These metrics are easy to capture and easy to report, but they tell you almost nothing about whether the experience changed anyone or built anything lasting.
Transformative volunteerism is a fundamentally different approach. It centers the people involved, not just the task. It builds in intentional moments before and after the volunteer experience (what we call the Brief and the Debrief) that close psychological distance, create emotional engagement, and give participants space to process what they encountered. The research on this is clear: adults change fundamental assumptions through experiences that disrupt their existing frame of reference, followed by critical reflection. Without that intentional architecture, you get activity, not growth.
The companies best positioned to deliver against these ambitious HR and business outcomes are those that have first invested in strategic scaling by:
- Intentionally designing employee volunteer leadership networks (often called volunteer ambassadors or champions) — because behavior change at scale requires distributed leadership, not centralized program management
- Training and developing these employees to lead volunteerism for their peers in a way that centers the needs of their communities, aligns with business objectives, and considers the experience of the participant
- Thoughtfully developing a measurement approach that has the capacity to deliver against HR outcomes like employee engagement, culture, and connection, which means measuring engagement depth, repeat participation and behavioral change, not just hours
Where to Start
Our Networked for Impact benchmark report, produced in partnership with Benevity, reveals how volunteer leadership networks are operationally structured across eight dimensions and identifies the critical elements that need to be in place to enable volunteerism to meaningfully scale in a corporate context.
And if you’re serious about unlocking the employee development potential that Benevity’s report points to, it’s imperative to understand the difference between transactional and transformative volunteering and to invest in training the employees who lead volunteerism in that approach.
Volunteerism can do everything this report hopes it can — build empathy, develop leaders, strengthen culture, create real community impact. But only when the experience itself is designed with as much rigor as the business case behind it.
