Most executives believe in the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet when it comes to actual investment, there's a disconnect. According to Harvard Business Review, business executives acknowledge CSR's value but struggle to scale their programs beyond pilot initiatives.

This paradox came into sharp focus during a recent Social Impact World webinar, titled The ROI of Skills-Based Volunteering, featuring two companies that have cracked the code: EY and SAP. Their approaches offer a blueprint for CSR leaders ready to move skills-based volunteering from the margins to the strategic center of their organizations. The below is a summary of that webinar, and at the bottom, you can access the recording, slides, and key assets (including a helpful ROI calculator).

But first… an important note about what drives us as corporate responsibility leaders: Impact. While this post is about how corporations benefit from implementing skills-based volunteering, it’s important to highlight that skills-based volunteering also is a critical driver for consistent, scaled sustainable development. Before examining the business case, it's critical to address why skills-based volunteering matters from a mission perspective.

MovingWorlds, which facilitates programs for both EY and SAP, reports an 84 NPS score from social enterprises—a “world class” level. Over 70% of participating organizations report increased partnerships that generate revenue, 85% achieve successful knowledge transfer to local teams, and more than 90% accelerate their overall impact.

This dual value creation—meaningful social impact alongside measurable business returns—is what transforms skills-based volunteering from a nice-to-have into a strategic imperative. Companies no longer need to choose between doing good and doing well. The most successful programs, as EY and SAP demonstrate, achieve both.

Now… on to the summary of the webinar with the amazing Erin and Noshin!

The Five Business Drivers You Need to Track

Before diving into specific strategies, it's crucial to understand the five core areas where CSR programs deliver measurable business value:

1. New Market Opportunities

Employees volunteering with social innovators gain firsthand insight into customer needs and product adaptation requirements that traditional market research might miss. Unilever discovered product innovations through employees volunteering with Kasha, a social enterprise serving women in underserved areas.

2. Proactive Regulatory Relationships

Governments increasingly require social value commitments in procurement, like the UK's Social Value Act that Noshin highlighted. Companies with robust skills-based volunteering programs can quantify their contributions—hours donated, organizations supported, capabilities built—turning compliance into competitive advantage.

3. Talent Attraction and Retention

EY's data shows volunteers demonstrate significantly higher retention, performance, and pride scores than non-volunteers. Skills-based volunteering offers authentic development through solving real business challenges, creating the purpose-driven engagement that retains top talent. SAP has similar data, sharing that 74% of employees report a long-term impact on their professional careers and 86% said their ability to collaborate with global and diverse colleagues improved by participating in programs like this. 

4. Stakeholder Value Enhancement

When executives from EY and client companies co-coach social entrepreneurs together, they build relationships beyond transactional business. EY notes that clients participating in joint volunteering show higher loyalty, improved net promoter scores, and enhanced brand perception.

5. Supply Chain Resilience

Skills-based volunteering builds capacity in your ecosystem—Reckitt employees volunteer to strengthen entrepreneurs who then become suppliers. For service companies, this might mean building digital capabilities of partner organizations that become future collaborators.

These aren't theoretical benefits. They're measurable outcomes that EY and SAP track religiously.

How to Build the Business Case

Build a Data Story

EY Ripples, the firm's global corporate responsibility program, has impacted 250 million lives through 14,000+ skills-based volunteering initiatives involving 600,000 employees. But the real story isn't the scale—it's the rigor behind their measurement.

From day one in 2018, EY started tracking every single volunteering initiative globally. They know exactly who participated, for how long, and in what capacity. This infrastructure, combined with the internal partnership with HR, enabled them to conduct a game-changing analysis: comparing volunteers against non-volunteers in their annual EY-wide pulse surveys. 

The results? Employees who volunteer through Ripples demonstrate:

• Higher retention rates

• Better performance metrics

• Greater pride in working at EY

"We translate that into a pound value, a dollar value metric," explains Noshin Suleman, Associate Director of EY's Global Corporate Responsibility team. "That metric has really opened many doors for us across executive conversations."

The lesson: Start building your data infrastructure today. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is now.

Design Programs for Business Impact

SAP takes a spectrum approach to skills-based volunteering, carefully aligning programs with business objectives. Specifically, their pro bono consulting portfolio includes:

Social Sabbatical: Four-week immersive experiences for high performers, working directly with nonprofits and social enterprises abroad. Teams are thoughtfully constructed to maximize cross-regional collaboration.

Acceleration Collective: A virtual pro bono program open to any employee with two+ years of professional experience. Participants can serve as coaches, mentors, workshop leaders, or project consultants over 8-10 weeks.

Strategic partnerships: In alignment with SAP’s focus on accelerating social business, employees engage through regional and country-specific partners, offering mentorship and other direct support to entrepreneurs. 

Local opportunities. Local champions can organize events that appeal to local needs, even if that branches from skills-based. 

The genius of SAP's approach? 

• A strategic internal partnership with HR, which suggests that 10-15% of work time be related to learning and development, and demonstrating how skills-based volunteering clearly ties to growth in leadership, innovation, and customer service skills.

• Building a coalition of impact partners that offer skills-based volunteering engagements, including several that are made available via the MovingWorlds platform - all of which tie to SAP’s mission and product strategy.

"We don’t see pro bono consulting as taking a step away from your work," notes Erin LaBarge, SAP's Global Program Lead for Volunteer Strategy. "It's leaning into the work that you do at SAP and the skills you lean on everyday, and carving out some time to partner and share those with a social enterprise." The data is clear per a case study published on this volunteering program.

Participants develop concrete skills—cross-cultural agility, growth mindset, active listening, empathy—that directly translate to better customer / stakeholder engagement and innovation capacity.

Cracking the Executive Code: Practical Strategies

Both companies emphasized a hard truth: You're competing for executive attention in 5-15 minute windows. Here's 4 tips on how to maximize the impact of your executive exposure:

1: Speak Their Language

Go beyond positioning CSR as the "do-good function." Instead, articulate value in business terms: retention metrics, innovation pipelines, client satisfaction scores. 

2: Map to Their Priorities

Every executive typically has a support team (i.e. chief of staff, technical assistant, etc.). So, before any executive meeting, work with their support teams to understand current priorities. Come prepared to connect your programs directly to their goals, and equip support team members with the talking points to keep the conversation going.

3: Distribute Your Advocacy

"The days of having one really generous sponsor across the whole executive board...those days are done," Noshin suggested. Build champions across the C-suite: CFO, CHRO, CTO, not just the Chief Sustainability Officer. Using data is crucial for this, so double down on your “data story.”

4: Help Them Feel It

Both companies engage executives as program participants, not just sponsors. SAP's CEO provided mentorship to an impact startup. EY executives co-coach social entrepreneurs for six months alongside Unilever leaders. These experiences transform executives from supporters to champions.

Suggestions on Building Executive Support for Skills-Based Volunteering

1. Plant the Data Tree Now

Build tracking infrastructure immediately. Create unique identifiers for volunteers, track participation hours, and establish baseline metrics for comparison. Partner with HR to access retention and performance data.

2. Find Your Internal Allies

Look beyond your immediate team. One company that MovingWorlds partners with built an informal network including data scientists and an IO psychologist to strengthen their analysis. Work hard across HR, Innovation, Supply Chain, and Product teams to find levers and hook them with program outcomes that you know they will care about. Your allies might be in unexpected places.

3. Start with One Executive Experience

Rather than presenting to executives, involve them directly. Design a short, high-impact engagement—even a two-hour strategy session with a social entrepreneur can be transformative.

In Summary

Skills-based volunteering isn't corporate charity. It's strategic business development that happens to create social impact. Or rather, it’s an important driver of the Sustainable Development Goals that also creates a positive return on investment for corporations that sponsor employees to engage in skills-based volunteering. The companies that understand this—and can prove it with data—will win the war for talent, accelerate innovation, and build the resilient stakeholder relationships required for long-term success.

CSR leaders who continue to position their programs as "nice to have" will face continued budget pressures and limited scale. Those who embrace the rigor demonstrated by EY and SAP will find themselves at the strategic table, driving programs that create value for business, employees, and society.

The question isn't whether to invest in skills-based volunteering. It's whether you'll build the business case that unlocks its full potential.

Need help building a skills-based volunteering programs? Get in touch with us at info@movingworlds.org or learn more about our scalable volunteering programs and software.

Resources Shared

1. Recording of the webinar

2. Slides presented during the webinar (And embedded below)

3. ROI calculator (watch this video explainer first) 

4. ROI narrative

Social Impact World Workshop_ The ROI of Skills-Based VolunteeringDownload