World Hunger Day is marked every 28 May to champion not just awareness of food poverty, but sustainable solutions to it. And that second part is the one that tends to get overlooked. Hunger, like so many of the challenges facing communities across the UK and beyond, is not resolved by a single intervention or a one-off act of goodwill. It requires sustained effort, long-term investment, and organisations willing to commit to communities over years rather than months.
It’s something we talk about a lot at Employee Volunteering. Sustained commitment, over years rather than months, is what creates the kind of community impact that actually lasts. And it is what separates a corporate volunteering programme that genuinely changes things from one that simply means well.
A good start is exactly that: a start
Every volunteering programme begins somewhere. For many businesses, that means a handful of well-chosen activities, dipping a toe into the water so to speak, with causes that feel right for the organisation, and formats that get people engaged. Events that build early momentum, test what resonates, and give employees their first experience of giving their time and skills to something that genuinely matters.
That is a perfectly good place to begin. In fact, it is the right place to begin.
But a well-run first year of volunteering is not, on its own, a strategy. It is the foundation of one. The businesses that get the most from their programmes, for their employees, for their communities and for their own culture and reputation, are the ones that treat year one as the beginning of a journey rather than the destination.
We don’t just help businesses start volunteering. We help them build programmes they’ll still be proud of in ten years’ time.
Getting clear on your volunteering objectives
The most important conversation we have with any new client is not about what activities to run. It is about what they want volunteering to do for their organisation, at this point in time, connected to goals that genuinely matter to the business. Volunteering objectives are what give a programme its direction, and understanding the priority among them shapes every decision that follows.
In our experience, most businesses are working towards some combination of these five volunteering objectives:
- 01 Building and embedding company culture and values
- 02 Strengthening employee experience, engagement and wellbeing
- 03 Creating meaningful, lasting local community impact
- 04 Supporting team development, new joiners and cross-team connection
- 05 Building brand reputation and delivering evidenced social value
These objectives don’t stay fixed. As a programme matures, the balance often shifts. A business focused on culture and employee experience in year one may find itself prioritising social value reporting and brand reputation by year four. Part of our role is to revisit those objectives regularly, to make sure the programme is still pulling in the right direction and still working hard for the business as well as for the communities it serves.
What a sustained volunteering journey actually looks like
We talk to every client about their volunteering journey: a three to five year outlook that gives the programme direction, ambition and a clear sense of where it is heading. The phases build on each other and the momentum compounds:
01 Establish
Set the right foundations. Align to causes that genuinely resonate. Build early participation habits and establish volunteering as part of how the business operates. Activities are often team based, outdoor and practical as a starting point.
02 Embed
Deepen community partnerships. Broaden participation across the whole workforce and broaden inclusivity. Build volunteering into the rhythm of the business year so it becomes expected, valued and looked forward to.
03 Evolve
Introduce skills-based and bespoke projects. Volunteering becomes a recognised, celebrated part of company culture, brand and social value reporting.
What makes this journey so compelling is what happens to the people involved. Employees who volunteer once become employees who volunteer regularly, who talk about it to new colleagues, who feel a genuine connection to the communities their business serves. Community organisations that receive a single visit become long-term partners who plan ahead, who develop with the support they receive, and whose progress becomes part of the business’s story too.
That kind of impact appears in employee surveys, in tender submissions, in company values statements and in the way people talk about where they work. It cannot be manufactured in a single year. But it can absolutely be built, with the right programme design, the right partnerships and the right commitment to the long term.
Keeping the momentum going
One of the things we hear most often from HR and community relations leads is that keeping volunteering alive inside a business, maintaining the energy, making the case to leadership and demonstrating continued value, is as much of a challenge as designing the programme in the first place.
This is where storytelling matters enormously. The businesses whose programmes keep growing year on year are almost always the ones that get good at telling the story of what their volunteering is achieving. Not just hours logged and events delivered, but the community organisation that has grown because of a sustained relationship. The employee who discovered a new skill on a volunteering project that changed how they think about their own career. The new joiner who mentioned the programme in their interview as one of the reasons they wanted to work there.
These stories are what keep leaders committed, employees engaged and communities invested. Capturing them, shaping them and using them to build the case for the next phase of the journey is something we work on with every client we partner with.
Five things that make a volunteering programme sustainable
- 01 Clear volunteering objectives
- Revisited regularly, aligned to business goals and shared with everyone responsible for delivering them.
- 02 Long-term community partnerships
- Relationships that go beyond a single visit and build genuine mutual value, for communities and for the volunteers who return to them.
- 03 Inclusive programme design
- Formats that work for the whole workforce, building broad participation and a richer, more honest evidence base.
- 04 Impact measurement that tells a story
- Not just outputs, but outcomes: the kind of evidence that builds the internal case for continued investment and the external case for social value.
- 05 Named internal champions
- A team of people who own the programme, connect it to business strategy and keep momentum going between activities and across years – and are recognised for doing so.
A note on Social Value
For businesses tendering for or delivering public sector contracts, social value commitments are increasingly scrutinised. Promises made at tender stage are only credible if they are backed by programmes that can demonstrate lasting, measurable impact over the life of a contract.
A sustained volunteering programme with documented outcomes and deepening community relationships does that work. We help businesses build both the programme and the evidence base together, so that what is committed to at tender is what gets delivered, reported and built on.
Where does your volunteering journey go next?
Whether you are establishing your first programme, embedding what you have already started, or looking to take an existing commitment further, the most valuable step is the same: set clear objectives, plan and invest in a programme that builds year on year, and commit to the communities you want to serve.
World Hunger Day is a good prompt for this conversation. The challenges our communities face are not going away. The businesses that stay the course, year after year, are the ones that build lasting relationships, genuine community impact and a volunteering culture their employees are proud to be part of.
We would love to hear where your organisation is on its volunteering journey. Drop a comment below, or get in touch to talk about what the next chapter could look like.
Employee Volunteering is a specialist corporate volunteering consultancy and technology provider. We design and deliver bespoke volunteering programmes for businesses across the UK, from first-year foundations to decade-long partnerships that build real, lasting impact.
#EmployeeVolunteering #CorporateVolunteering #SocialValue #CSR
References
[1] Social Value International. Principles of social value. socialvalueint.org. Effective social value measurement requires evidence of lasting outcomes rather than one-off outputs.
[2] UN Global Compact. Sustainable business practices and long-term social impact. unglobalcompact.org. Organisations committing to long-term community investment demonstrate stronger accountability and more durable outcomes.
[3] Gallup. State of the global workplace report. 2023. Employees connected to long-term organisational purpose demonstrate higher engagement, loyalty and discretionary effort.
[4] World Hunger Day. worldhungerday.org. Accessed May 2025.
FAQs
What is a corporate volunteering journey and why does it matter?
A corporate volunteering journey is the idea that employee volunteering works best when it is planned and delivered as a long-term, evolving programme rather than a series of disconnected one-off events. Rather than asking “what shall we do this year?”, businesses that take a journey approach start by asking what they want volunteering to achieve, set clear objectives aligned to their goals, and build a programme that develops in ambition and impact year on year.
At Employee Volunteering, we work with clients on a three to five year outlook from the very start. The early stages focus on establishing the right foundations: causes that resonate with employees, formats that work for the whole workforce, and activities that build early enthusiasm and habit. From there, programmes evolve to include deeper community partnerships, skills-based projects, and more sophisticated impact measurement. Many of our clients have been on this journey with us for over ten years, adding to their programmes every year because they can see the value compounding. A volunteering journey is not a more complicated version of the same thing. It is a fundamentally different and more rewarding approach.
How do you measure the impact of a long-term employee volunteering programme?
Measuring the impact of employee volunteering well means going beyond the basics of hours logged and events delivered. Those outputs matter, but they only tell part of the story. The most meaningful measurement tracks outcomes: what has actually changed for the communities involved, for the employees who took part, and for the business itself.
Employee Volunteering helps clients build an evidence base that captures all three of these dimensions. On the community side, that means documenting the progress of long-term partner organisations, tracking the difference that returning volunteers make over time, and gathering feedback directly from beneficiaries. On the employee side, it means connecting volunteering participation to engagement survey data, wellbeing indicators and retention. For the business, it means translating that evidence into the kind of social value reporting that stands up to scrutiny in tender submissions and annual reports. Good impact measurement is not a spreadsheet completed at the end of the year. It is a strand of programme design that runs from day one, built to tell a story that makes the case for continued investment and growing ambition.
How can employee volunteering support social value commitments in public sector contracts?
Social value has become one of the most scrutinised elements of public sector procurement in the UK. Businesses tendering for or delivering public sector contracts are expected to demonstrate not just that they intend to create social value, but that they have the programmes in place to deliver it, measure it and report on it credibly over the life of a contract.
A one-off volunteering day does not evidence social value in any meaningful sense. What procurement teams and contract managers are looking for is sustained community investment: long-term partnerships with local organisations, documented outcomes that build year on year, and a clear link between volunteering activity and the social priorities relevant to the contract. Employee Volunteering works with businesses to design programmes that meet exactly this standard. We help clients align their volunteering objectives to their social value commitments at tender stage, build the community partnerships that underpin those commitments, and capture the evidence needed to report on them accurately and compellingly. For businesses where social value is a significant part of how they win and retain public sector work, a well-designed, long-term volunteering programme is one of the most practical and impactful investments they can make.
