How to Engage Volunteers in Your Association's Work

A man uses a walkie-talkie to communicate at volunteer event

Breaking Down Basic Employee Volunteering Programs

Imagine you finally land a meeting with the community engagement manager of a major local employer. You have been trying to get through to their office for months. Within the first five minutes, the manager mentions they are looking to move away from traditional service and instead focus on skills-based volunteering and VTO opportunities for their staff.

If you find yourself nodding along while secretly wondering how these terms translate into actual tasks for your nonprofit, you aren’t alone. In fact, many nonprofit leaders find themselves overwhelmed by the technical language and the different program structures businesses use for their volunteer efforts.

‍This guide breaks down the most common employee volunteerism models. The goal is to help you better navigate corporate collaborations and feel prepared to offer opportunities that balance their business goals and your mission’s needs.

Direct Service Volunteering

Direct service is the most traditional form of employee volunteering, where corporate employees work face-to-face with your organization and those you serve. This might look like volunteers:

Serving meals at a shelter
Maintaining a trail at a local park
Tutoring students in an after-school program
Cleaning pet crates at an animal shelter

Businesses value these programs because they empower employees to create meaningful relationships with each other and their community while seeing their impact firsthand.

From a coordinator’s perspective, direct service is excellent for high-visibility projects. These opportunities help volunteers form an emotional connection that comes from meeting the people or seeing the places they are helping.

To prepare for these opportunities, ensure you have a clear orientation process, safety standards, and on-site supervision ready to go. When managing groups of employee volunteers, have a specific list of tasks to ensure everyone can contribute.

Indirect Service Volunteering

Indirect service allows employees to support your cause without interacting face-to-face with the end beneficiaries. This might look like volunteers:

Organizing a holiday toy drive
Assembling hygiene kits for unhoused community members
Writing messages of encouragement to hospitalized individuals

For businesses, these opportunities are highly flexible. In many cases, they can be integrated into a lunch hour or a staff meeting, making them a low-friction option for companies with tight production schedules or limited transportation.

From a coordinator’s perspective, indirect service allows your nonprofit to receive high-quality tangible goods or administrative support without the logistical burden of hosting a large group on-site.

For example, let’s say you’re hosting a clothing drive in coordination with a company. Provide the business with a clear list of items and specific brand or size requirements. Offer to drop off collection bins or send promotional flyers to make the project as easy as possible for their internal organizer to lead.

Skills-Based Volunteering

Skills-based volunteering leverages the professional expertise of employees to solve specific operational challenges for your nonprofit. Double the Donation’s skills-based volunteering guide highlights several examples of these opportunities, such as:

Marketing help, like preparing external newsletters
Financial management, such as writing grant proposals or finding new revenue sources
Technology and IT support
Graphic design support for social media or your website

Businesses create unique professional development opportunities for their team members when they line up skills-based initiatives. Plus, employees feel a sense of accomplishment when they use their hard-earned skills to move the needle for a cause they care about.

For your nonprofit, this high-impact model provides access to professional services that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive. Depending on the type of project, you might treat your team of corporate volunteers as consultants rather than general helpers.

Volunteer Grants

Also called Dollars for Doers programs, volunteer grants are initiatives where a company provides a monetary donation as a match for the hours its employees volunteer. Here’s how the process typically works:

An individual employee volunteers at your organization for a set number of hours.
After completing the service, they log those hours in their company's internal giving or corporate social responsibility (CSR) portal.
Your nonprofit receives a notification or email to verify that those hours were served.
Upon confirmation, the company issues a grant payment to your organization, often calculated at a specific dollar amount per hour served.

This might look like a flat donation of $100 for 20 hours of volunteering, or a $5 donation for every hour volunteered.

‍From your nonprofit’s perspective, these grants turn a simple volunteer shift into a dual contribution of time and money. Educating all of your volunteers about these programs is vital because many don’t realize their time can be converted into a check for your mission.

For this type of volunteering program, you’ll need to keep meticulous logs of volunteer hours to confirm contributions. Make sure your volunteer management software makes this easy.

Volunteer Time Off

Volunteer time off (VTO) is a corporate policy that provides paid hours for employees to volunteer during the workweek. They might receive 20 hours per year to spend helping nonprofits during work hours.

When you know a volunteer receives VTO, you can suggest ideas like:

Tutoring every Tuesday morning
Serving on a committee during work hours
Taking a paid day of service to staff an event

For companies, VTO serves as an attractive benefit for modern job seekers and helps the company build long-term, sustainable relationships with the community. For nonprofits, VTO volunteers tend to be reliable since they’re being paid by their companies to be there. These individuals are typically strong candidates for recurring, essential roles that require consistent presence and a high level of professionalism.

‍Uncommon Giving’s volunteering program guide highlights a powerful example of a company that offers generous VTO. According to the guide, RingCentral empowered its employees to contribute over 200 hours in just one year by offering unlimited VTO. As a bonus, the company offers volunteer grants, which resulted in $424,000 worth of donations.

Similar to volunteer grants, your nonprofit will need strong hour tracking tools in place to tap into these corporate volunteer programs. This makes it easy to confirm volunteers’ contributions with their employers.

Wrapping Up

Understanding common corporate volunteering models empowers you to transition from being a passive recipient of corporate help to a strategic partner. When you understand how a business structures its community engagement programs, you can pitch opportunities that provide genuine value to employees while solving your specific operational needs. This professional alignment is what turns a one-off event into a decade-long partnership.