VolunteerMatch Makes It Easy for Companies to Give Back

With more than 100,000 participating nonprofit organizations and 13 million people looking for volunteering opportunities, VolunteerMatch is the largest online platform for connecting volunteers with social causes. Since its launch in 1998, VolunteerMatch has helped the social sector generate more than $6.8 billion worth of volunteer services.

For private companies interested in building their corporate volunteer programs, VolunteerMatch’s robust network of nonprofits and volunteers offers a number of ways to give back to the community. YourMatch™, for example, is a volunteer management service that can streamline and scale companies’ employee volunteer programs. Using a customizable interactive online portal provided by VolunteerMatch, corporations can match their employees with volunteer opportunities across the country and clearly track their progress. The interface allows employee engagement managers to track the results of corporate volunteer programs — Groupon, for example, increased the total volunteer hours logged by its employees by 600 percent using the YourMatch™ solution.

Companies can also tap into the APIs offered by VolunteerMatch to develop engaging applications to motivate employees to participate in volunteering. Case in point: Twilio, the San Francisco-based cloud communications company that went public last week, designed a creative app that lets employees simply text their zip codes to a designated number and receive instant information about volunteer opportunities in their communities.  

VolunteerMatch has a dedicated group of 170 corporate partners that share its goal of extending the reach and impact of volunteerism. It receives help on the technology front from companies like Amazon Web Services and MySQL to make its online platform run smoothly and securely for hundreds of thousands of users. Media companies such as Discovery Communications promote VolunteerMatch in Public Service Announcement (PSA) campaigns and integrate the VolunteerMatch portal into their online platforms to encourage their audiences to serve their communities.

VolunteerMatch Team | Credit: Volunteer Match

VolunteerMatch has also partnered with LinkedIn For Good to repost every VolunteerMatch opportunity  automatically to LinkedIn’s Volunteer Marketplace, which has 10,000,000 active members. In a reflection of VolunteerMatch’s prominence in the corporate community, its board of directors includes several high-profile corporate executives,, including Jay Backstrand, Vice President of JPMorgan Private Bank, and Meg Garlinghouse, Head of LinkedIn for Good.

VolunteerMatch President Greg Baldwin sees the organization playing a vital role in democracy — “a great counterweight,” as he puts it, “to inequality and indifference.” “We are out to… reinvent how people collaborate to stand for the values they care about most,” he says — to be a “one-of-a-kind network creating new possibilities for everyone to find his or her opportunity to make a difference.”