UC Santa Cruz

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an integral component of many companies especially technology companies. A huge percentage of technology companies want to engage their employees through corporate social responsibility as well; leading to the evolution of a new kind term- “Employee Community Engagement”. With 80% job seekers preferring to work for companies that are socially responsible and employee engagement reducing the staff turnover, CSR and employee engagement has become something not just preferable, but a need of the hour to affect the bottom line of companies.

The current method of doing CSR and employee engagement for companies is to manage the process manually, using spreadsheets, emails and calls. This process is extremely time consuming, allows companies no analytics and insights into their engagement process. My main contributions include interviewing five companies to find the problems, building a technical solution and implement it with users and finally recording the results and trends.

To create a technology solution for this problem, I interviewed the head of community and government relations for five different companies ranging for 50 to 10,000 employees & analyzed their requirements based on their answers. The top problems were analyzed to be too much work as overhead, no tracking of employee data, lack of employee engagement, less employee turn out and skill and cause matching.

I built an MVP in core PHP was build to solve these problems first for company heads, nonprofits as well as employee volunteers before moving on to solve for other issues to see if using a technology platform may help solve the problem. A smooth user registration and onboarding was created for each of the user types so that everyone in a company can be engaged easily on the platform, a twitter like networking community was created so that users can interact about their philanthropy, administrators were given traceability regarding the engagement levels of their employees, an opportunity to create events and send out invitations through the portal was allowed, the creation of specific events was allowed for a nonprofit and an opportunity for closed team events for employees was allowed after the creation of the proposal by a nonprofit.

Implementing this saw an increase in engagement of employees from 4% to an average of 25% with a shift in the usage of CSR for team and culture building by the company as well. With increase in usage, requirements for grant management and workplace donations surfaced as well which would be a future leap for the product to become an end to end corporate social responsibility solution.