If you missed it, VolunteerMatch’s latest Best Practice Network Webinar with Jason Saul was spectacular. While we love all our webinars, Saul’s hour-long exploration of how companies can leverage social innovation to generate real value and solve business challenges neatly summarized much of our approach to corporate volunteer engagement and CSR.

Importantly, after describing how changing historical conditions have led to a “reset” point for both corporate strategies in business and CSR, Saul pivots to share how companies (and CSR execs) can take the first step toward a bold if uncertain future.

We’ve posted a recording of the webinar here. [37MB | WMV ]

Jason Saul is Founder and CEO of Mission Measurement, a Chicago-based consulting firm that helps companies, schools, foundations, and nonprofits to measure and improve their social impact. He’s also author of the recent book “Social Innovation, Inc: 5 Ways to Profit from Social Change,” and much of his BPN webinar pulled from the book. Saul’s clients include Walmart, McDonald’s, Levi Strauss & Co., Easter Seals, and American Red Cross, among others. We’ve been especially intrigued by Mission Measurement’s work behind the scenes of the Pepsi Refresh Project. Not only was PRP out in front of the trend toward crowd-sourced consumer engagement campaigns to provide grants to social good projects, they’ve also been ahead of what we think will be a long-term trend to retool the crowd-sourced model to be more outcomes-based.

According to Saul, last year U.S. businesses produced $1.6 trillion in profit while U.S. nonprofits only raised around $300 million – which works out to only about $200,000 per nonprofit (not including churches and faith-based groups) So companies will have to be the main drivers of social change.

Here are a few snapshots from the webinar:

• Reset & Misalignment - We’re living in a “reset” moment of significant historical change. Unsettled companies are putting new focus on finding value — which has created misalignment between the needs of top executives to produce bottom-line results and the needs of CSR professionals who are unsure whether their activities really do produce measurable outcomes.
• Business Necessity Trumps Altruism – One important change is that it’s now OK for companies to expect investment return on their social programs. Examples like Toyota and Walmart, for example, have shown how some of the best social outcomes have come from programs that were not truly altruistic but instead driven by business necessity.
  
• The Bar is Set Low for Programs, Not High for Solutions – Today’s companies are expected to have traditional philanthropy programs (giving, volunteering, CSR reporting, etc.), so it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd unless you’re willing to raise the bar. That means moving away from easy programs, which focus on delivering help, to solutions, which focus on fundamentally changing conditions. Solutions are also where real economic value will be located.The leading companies will be raising the bar. For example, for company whose business challenge involved expanding into developing markets, a social good solution might be focused on developing infrastructure, human resources development, or delivering other vital services that communities will want to pay for.  Saul pointed to the efforts of UK grocer Tesco to move into U.S. markets. It turns out that moving into “food deserts” was a great business strategy – while also solving a serious social problem in communities.

CSR Pros Need to Evolve Too

While the future of business requires leveraging social change to produce value, today’s existing CSR professionals work in the uncertain terrain between the old model of corporate philanthropy and the new one.

The Social Contract model was based on managing risk (risk to reputation, risk to retention) by being a good citizen – i.e., it used business profits to create social change. The Social Capital Market model turns this upside down by focusing on using social change to produce profits and solve business challenges. Today’s program administrator needs to be tomorrow’s social entrepreneur.

Early in the webinar Saul told an anecdote to illustrates this. A CSR professional is excitedly sharing numbers from her company’s employee volunteer program with the CEO: “Great news!” she says.  “We had 400,000 hours volunteered this year!” The CEO replies, “So what’s so great about that? That means we had 400,000 hours where employees weren’t working.”

More important, those are hours where new solutions to big business challenges weren’t being explored.

But what role should volunteer program administrators play in this search for solutions to business challenges?  Saul argues that within the domain of volunteer engagement, no one is better suited to identify the positive business outcomes that employee service could address.

Need to increase customer base? Create a volunteer program that introduces the brand to new audiences. Need to boost employee retention? Create a volunteer program that uplifts morale and staff attitudes. Need to change customer relations attitudes? Create a volunteer program that engages more employees directly with customers. And so on.

Each of these examples shows similar characteristics:

• Identifying outcomes that make sense for the business to be addressing.
• Engaging in a different conversation that the one previously.
• Being outcomes driven – that is, designing strategies to produces the measurements you want to see, rather than perfunctorily measuring a existing work.
• Thinking in terms of solving problems; not creating projects.

A Shift in Aim, Not Necessarily Work

So, brass tacks. During the Q&A session at the end of the presentation, the very first question from the audience was how employee volunteer program administrators and other CSR professionals can take the first step toward evolving their work from a traditional approach to a future-forward social capital market approach.

First, Saul advised, state your intent to model you work on a different outcome – but be sure to clarify that the work itself is not likely to change any time soon. This will be a progressive, and not a radical, shift. “The work will stay the same,” he said, “but your aim will be different.”

Then see how you your existing relationships can be reworked toward your new outcomes-orientation. Those relationships are likely to be the building blocks of your new role as an volunteer engagement social entrepreneur.

There’s more in the webinar, and it’s well worth a viewing. Click here to download it today. [37MB | WMV ]

And don’t forget to check out our BPN schedule to see what’s coming up.