3 tips to set up your corporate page for success

Congratulations! You just created a user account on the Business Involved platform. With this user account, you can now create a (corporate) organization page. This article explains how to create an organization account. Importantly, choose “company” as type of organization when creating an organization. The organization page is your company’s volunteering portal on the platform. Therefore, this article uses these two terms interchangeably.

✅ Have you received a notification that your organization has been accepted to the platform? 

Then it is time to learn how to get the most out of your reach, network, and the platform. To make sure your organisation page becomes a success among colleagues and potential volunteers, we recommend to keep working with the platform and optimise messages for your target group. With the tips and tools discussed in this article, you will take your organisation page to the next level!

Before:

After:

1. Start configuring your settings

First, you want your organization page to be as attractive as it can be! It must be clear to your colleagues, as well as potential volunteering organizations, what your organisation is all about. This can be configured in the organisation settings. The settings menu consists of different tabs: Profile, Privacy, Customize, and Embed. However, this article discusses only the Profile, Customize, and Embed tab, as those make a notable difference in setting your organisation up for success. In the next sections, the tabs are shortly explained with some helpful tips and tricks! Check this video to see how to navigate between the tabs.

Profile

In the Profile section, you find all information you filled in when creating your organisation on the platform, as well as some extra options. The sections marked with the red asterisk (*) are mandatory but try to fill in as much as possible.

One important part of the profile section is Add extra information for members. Once new colleagues join your organization page/volunteering portal on the platform, they must know immediately what possibilities they can expect on your volunteering portal. You can, for example, welcome your colleagues with a nice introductory text, or provide some more information about the purpose of your portal, or why you are invited to join. This information can be styled with rich text, videos, URLs, and images. Make use of this feature to reward your members for joining, and stay clear on the purpose of your portal!

Another important feature is the Cover photo. Many organisations forget to upload a cover photo, which means that a distinctive feature can sometimes be missed. This is the first thing as the first thing visitors of your volunteering portal see! So spend some time on your cover photom and if you need some creative tools, we listed them at the bottom of the page! In this article, we show how to change your cover photo.

General tips:

• Be as complete as possible on your organisation page. Although some options are not mandatory, it is highly recommended to fill these options, as this increases your findability on the platform. It also gives more, and better exposure to your organisation on the platform! Win-win! 👊
• Take some time to find the best fitting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Causes for your organisation. These variables are used by users to find organisations and opportunities, so make sure these variables truly fit your organisation’s goals and mission. If you need some more inspiration on SDGs and how your organisation can contribute, feel free to check out the insights and recording of Deedmob’s inspiration session with Sandra Pellegrom, the Dutch National SDG Coordinator! 🌍

Customize

In the Customize tab, there are five different customizable options. These are the main venues through which you can make a difference to your volunteering portal! 

The first option is Recommended opportunities. When this is checked on, you can recommend some opportunities to your colleagues. These can be your own opportunities, but also from other social organizations. Recommended opportunities have a prominent place in your volunteering portal, so get a feel of what your colleagues and community care about. Getting these recommended opportunities right is pivotal to your colleagues joining and reaching your impact goal! To get these recommendations right, you can browse through the available opportunities, contact the Business Involved team, or do our volunteering quiz to find out your and your colleagues volunteering preferences.

This video shows how to add recommended opportunities: https://www.loom.com/share/dca030eddf284a33ac5be8e29c8474c5

The second option is Teams. Teams are a great solution for your company if your company has a decentralized CSR strategy, teams, divisions, or goals. As the volunteering portal admin, you can allow the teams to manage their separate division’s volunteering portal, which means they can add volunteer positions, activities, workshops and events without having to manage the entire portal This makes your organisation page more manageable, reduces the number of people involved in managing your organisation page, and at the same time gives more autonomy to the teams. Teams can also be used to create workgroups and different events. Say, for example, you want to organise a Beach Clean Up, and have a dedicated workgroup working on that. The teams functionality gives this workgroup the autonomy and opportunity to own this project on the platform! This article describes more about the teams functionality!

The third option is Members can create opportunities. Do you want to give all members the autonomy to post opportunities on your organization’s behalf? Activate this option, and your organisation will be fully community driven! This can pose some risks to your organisation, as this could leave your organisation’s volunteering opportunities somewhat unmoderated. Therefore, we suggest you only check this option when Private opportunities (the next slider) are the only opportunities you want to use.

The fourth option is Private opportunities. This allows for private opportunities, only visible for members of the organisation. You can use this option to organise member-only events, such as drinks or gatherings, or for example for opportunities for only your own pool of members. Think for example of fundraising events, own initiatives, or collecting materials such as laptops, cuddly toys, or other things.

The last option is the Impact Goal. The impact goal refers to the number of hours that you want to volunteer as an organisation. This impact goal is shown at the top of your organisation page and is a big stimulus to every member of your organisation, as you are open about what impact you want to make, and how close you are to that goal. The more, the better, but stay realistic. It is not realistic for a small organisation to have 10.000 impact hours, so change your impact goal along the way and work toward that goal! 🎯

Embed

Last, you can embed your opportunities on other websites outside of the platform. This can be your own website, but also a related website, by messaging the particular web admin. Embedding opportunities on other websites is very easy and a nice addition for extra visibility on other websites, or, for example, to promote your opportunities on your Intranet. This article explains how to display opportunities on other websites or in your Intranet.

2. Invite your members/colleagues to your volunteer portal and opportunities

We’ve just established that customizing your organisation profile can go a long way for your organisation to attract members. The more people join your organisation and volunteer, the quicker you reach your impact goal! 🚀 

This means that you want to invite your colleagues to your volunteer portal. Volunteering is so much more fun when you do this as a group! There are multiple ways in which you can add people to your organization. This article explains how!

Pro tip #1: use the Let people join with a special link to create a shortcut in your Intranet, as a button on your employee portal, or in a newsletter to let employees automatically join your organization upon registration! See this video on how to generate this link:

Pro tip #2: use the internal message system to invite colleagues for interesting opportunities in bulk. See this video on how to do this:

Pro tip #3: use the same URL you send in that email to invite colleagues via Slack, WhatsApp, or other portals!

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help

This one tip is one of the best we could give. You can always ask for help from other companies, but also from the Business Involved team. We want to help you get the most out of your volunteer portal to help you make, measure, and visualize impact. 

Your questions might have already been answered on the dedicated company volunteer pages, so have a look there! Otherwise, you can find the contact information on the contact page. Otherwise, we have some other final tips.

• We created a volunteer quiz to make it easier for you and your colleagues to find out what volunteering opportunities suit you! Find out what volunteer you are in under a minute with our volunteer quiz.
• Our tech partner Deedmob has a helpdesk filled with articles which can help you further. Feel free to check out the helpdesk for tips, tricks, and improve your experience!
• Check out our news articles to stay up to date and read up on this article about how Wipro Gets Involved via the platform and how corporate volunteering has benefited social organizations and companies over the past six months via Business Involved in this article!

Our favourite websites for creatives (and non-creatives)

As promised: our favourite online tools to make your Organisation page look professional. Here are some (free) websites to get you started right away:

• For free stock images, Unsplash and Pexels
• For designs, Canva
• Prefer some more of your own images? Bring a good camera to your next event (or use your phone!)
• Create your own volunteering opportunity on volunteer.deedmob.com, or your local volunteer centre, to recruit creatives to give your organisation a hand (think social media experts, photographers, website builders)
• Finally, to add GIFs to your descriptions, use Giphy