Volunteer engagement is crucial to the success of every community initiative and even more when you are keen to connect employees to the workplace. Every community leader would love to know how and what makes employees volunteer and stay committed. Thinking of the most appropriate questions and framing them accurately can improve the chances of the organization benefitting from a volunteer poll. Here are a few suggestions to consider while crafting your internal employee volunteer survey.
Identify the purpose: There can be multiple reasons for doing a study – to get a pulse of the volunteering sentiment, tailor programs that make the most impact, understand concerns and barriers to volunteering, building employees’ volunteering capabilities, encouraging participation in events or learning about their current perceptions. You can’t obviously run an extensive survey and get enough participation. Therefore, it is important to first narrow the focus based on how and where your community investment is heading.
Know your limitations: Your employees are short on time and not everyone will participate. Corporate Social responsibility may also not be on the agenda of every leader. Hence know what your survey results can garner. If your intention is to arrive at a set of measures for the organization to follow then tailor the survey with questions that solicit such responses.
Structure it right: Every volunteer survey will have key themes to consider and you may want to chunk them under logical headers such as awareness, participation levels, preferences, impact, skills and support. You can ask questions about their interest to be a part of the decision making body or seek thoughts on projects the company can take.
Solicit feedback: It may be possible that a lot of your employees are already committing time on community work elsewhere. Gaining insights on how and where they do so can help you create your community strategy better. Also invite suggestions on the survey questions as you build your framework.
Create a communication plan: This is probably the most overlooked segment of any survey. Think of ways that will land the survey among employees. Timing and messages are important for the success of any communication plan. Involve leaders and the corporate social responsibility team to promote the survey and the value the company will gain from running it. Your plan must include elements to share findings and actions as a result of the output.
Have other suggestions for building a corporate social responsibility survey? Keen to hear from you.
