Deloitte

Deloitte on making an impact

Deloitte Impact Foundation – Deloitte has the ambitious goal to have all its employees spend 1% of their working hours on societal projects. They call this ‘the 1% goal’. The PMO team of the Deloitte Impact Foundation enables employees to reach this goal.

Together with the Deloitte Impact Foundation, GoodUp engages the internal Deloitte community towards this objective. By centralising Deloitte’s impact projects on their own corporate volunteering platform and making clever use of our engagement services, we’ve quickly boosted – and created a solid foundation to scale – impact.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a big increase in participation. Employees spent thousands of hours more on impact projects, which is great.

Laura Grootenboer, CSR Deloitte Impact Foundation

The challenge

As one of the first accounting firms in the world, founded 174 years ago, making a positive difference has always been important to Deloitte. But, over the last few years, they have intensified their efforts to make a positive impact on society.

Deloitte’s commitment to positive impact has been inspired by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The past decades, disruptive technologies have emerged, changing the way we live and work. Deloitte recognises the challenges this Industrial Revolution brings to our society. According to the firm, it’s creating a fast-growing gap between a technologically advanced world and millions of people unprepared to participate in it. With their efforts, they want to close this gap.

“Deloitte is happy to contribute to society. It is an important part of our joint global purpose: to make an impact that matters.” says Peter Bommel, CEO Deloitte The Netherlands.”

This ambition led to Deloitte’s IMPACT Day in 2016. That day, 70,000 Deloitte professionals volunteered and celebrated a year-round commitment of Deloitte to the local communities. An awesome way of contributing to society with the firm.

However, the Dutch branch of Deloitte wanted to take a step further. They were looking for a way to really engage their employees from the bottom up to make an impact on society. To make that happen, they needed a dedicated space where employees could go for impact. And that’s where the expertise of GoodUp came in.

Deloitte Impact Foundation

Together with Deloitte The Netherlands, we set up the Deloitte Impact Foundation. Laura Grootenboer, PMO at the Deloitte Impact Foundation explains:

“The Deloitte Impact Foundation allows Deloitte employees to spend one percent of their time on societal projects.”

During this time, they can apply their knowledge, time, and skills to benefit society across one of the three themes: education, endurable society, and societal innovation. The purpose that ties it all together is making an impact that matters.

Guided by these themes and the overarching purpose, employees can create their own projects, or join an existing do-good initiative. They do this on a virtual marketplace, provided by GoodUp. Every Deloitte employee who wants to do good can visit the platform, and start or join a project that makes an impact on society.
“Essentially, the GoodUp platform is the face for the Deloitte Impact Foundation, and that’s very valuable to us.” says Laura Grootenboer.

Maximising impact with skills-based volunteering

Corporate volunteering is a great way for companies to make a social impact, but the Deloitte projects take it a step further. They explicitly focus on employees using their skills and expertise for good. Laura:

“Projects need to comply with several criteria, such as focus on education, societal innovation, and endurable society, and applying Deloitte’s knowledge and expertise to benefit society.”

GoodUp strongly advises skills-based volunteering and the GoodUp platform is specifically built to facilitate that. Not only does skills-based volunteering take the do-good project to the next level, it also empowers the employees to grow as a professional and individual. Because of their expertise, they can provide a valuable and unique contribution to the project and improve their skills at the same time, bringing back a stronger skillset to the workplace.

Bottom-up employee initiatives

An awesome example is a project between Deloitte en ITvitae. Deloitte’s Salesforce Instructor Jan Vreedenburgh created this project after reading ITvitae’s story in a local newspaper. ITvitae is a foundation that educates people with autism to help them find long-term employment. They do this through courses and classes that prepare them to join the workforce. When Jan read their story, he saw an opportunity to help them with his expertise as Salesforce trainer.

He reached out to ITvitae, made the necessary arrangements within Deloitte, and posted his project to the Deloitte Impact Platform. After posting the project, there was an immediate interest from colleagues to join his initiative. Now, he and his colleagues are teaching a Salesforce course to a group of talented entrepreneurs with autism. Jan:

“This project has been an amazing experience for all of us. What gives me extra satisfaction, is the fact that you’re changing peoples’ lives for the better.”

Creating a community for skills-based volunteering and impact

A platform is a very powerful tool to grow your impact community, but you need people who lead the way. To create momentum for the platform, we helped Deloitte set up a network of ambassadors.

“The ambassadors of the Impact Foundation are actually our eyes and ears within various locations and functions of Deloitte. This way, we can reach more people and reach a larger community within Deloitte.”