SAP promises its employees an experience that will "Grow your career, collaborate with the best, and create a brighter future." As a recognized leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and featured in numerous "Best Place to Work" rankings, SAP is deeply committed to providing growth opportunities for its employees. Among its most popular offerings are its skills-based volunteering programs. With increasing demand for these initiatives, SAP sought a partner to help expand and scale its skills-based volunteering efforts globally.

SAP was already a leader in skills-based volunteering, leveraging the SaaS platform Benevity to promote volunteer opportunities to employees, regional champions, and CSR leaders who managed localized programs.

Additionally, SAP sponsored a travel-based volunteer initiative called the Social Sabbatical. These efforts provided valuable insights: employees who participated in skills-based volunteering reported increased loyalty, enhanced learning, and significant growth in leadership capabilities.

However, as demand for these programs grew, the SAP CSR team faced the challenge of scaling skills-based volunteering across its global workforce in a cost-effective way,

In close collaboration with the SAP team, MovingWorlds tailored the program to align with SAP’s specific needs and priorities. The program needed to:

• Broaden the Appeal to employees beyond the usual suspects. We targeted career-minded employees that had the potential to keep growing into future leaders in the company. The research indicated that these employees are busy and require the time, location, and duration flexibility in their projects.
• Build on the existing programs, partners, and brand already in place to help SAP’s CSR team tell a cohesive impact story, and also build a clear business case to leaders and executive sponsors.
• Align with the company’s HR strategy of helping people develop through real-world experiences and learning, and be recognized as a complement to SAP’s talent strategy.
• Be scalable across all the various geographies in which SAP operates.
• Be manageable by the existing CSR team even as we worked to engage thousands of employees, without hiring new team members.

SAP is a leader in supporting social innovators, and it already had strong partnerships with a variety of organizations and required employees to continue supporting

1. Impact investors like Acumen, who had networks of social entrepreneurs
2. Nonprofit networks like Social Enterprise World Forum, who were building social enterprise support ecosystems globally
3. Foundations including We Are Family Foundation, which invests in youth entrepreneurs
4. Volunteer program vendors like Pyxera Global, which managed its in-person programs

MovingWorlds onboarded SAP’s partners to the platform, enabling SAP employees to access all of SAP’s impact partners in one place.

SAP employees could now access:

• “Self-paced” programming at any time. Employees had the flexibility to participate in the program when their work or personal schedule allowed.
• “Cohort-based” programming. Employees participated with a cohort of their peers, as individuals or in teams, and benefited from additional peer networking and program support.

In both self-paced and cohort-based programming, employees had access to projects that meet their unique skills and experience, geography, and impact interests. All projects fell into the following categories:

• Coaching: 3-6 month long engagements helping social entrepreneurs develop as leaders, usually 1-4 hrs per month.
• Mentoring: 3-6 month long engagements to help social entrepreneurs focus on a specific company-building challenge, usually 1-4 hrs per month.
• Training: Leading training sessions on a particular subject, tool, and/or industry, usually a few blocks of a few hours.
• Consulting: Working alongside key members of the social enterprise to support a specific project, usually focused work for 1-10 days.
• Advice calls: Short, informal engagements to provide on-demand expertise to social enterprises, usually a series of calls over a couple weeks.

The platform also provided guidance on how employees could communicate with their managers to gain support for the time investment. Additionally, it offered personalized coaching throughout the process to enhance learning outcomes and maximize the impact of the experience.

Once employees complete their project, learning, and impact report, we recognize them with a signed certificate and badge that they can add to their LinkedIn profile and CV.

Employees love to share their accomplishments across social media.

Once done, they can easily use the platform to keep working on other projects, join another cohort, or work on another team.