What is Skills-Based Volunteering?

"Professional expertise made accessible to organizations serving the public good"
(Taproot Foundation).

In other words, rather than painting a wall or cleaning up a park, volunteers offer their own professional services to a nonprofit organization for free or, in rare cases, significantly reduced fees. Despite the fact that this appears to be an obvious win-win, very few nonprofits engage skilled volunteers.

Why is this Important?

Non profits are increasingly being relied upon to address and solve our human service issues and those with a strong infrastructure are more likely to succeed. However, the problem is that the majority of nonprofits either don’t have the manpower or don’t have the skill sets needed to create and maintain a strong infrastructure. Skills such as human resources, strategic planning and IT expertise, often found in the corporate sector, can meaningfully impact nonprofit organizations.

According to the 2009 Deloitte Impact Survey, 97% of nonprofit organizations surveyed agreed that they could increase their organization’s social impact if they received pro bono consulting and contract services however less than 25% have any plans to use or look into skilled volunteers or pro bono services within the year. In fact, approximately 40% actually spend $50,000-$250,000 for said services. Note that the majority of non profits have operating budgets of less than $250,000.

 

Volunteering vs. Skills Based Volunteering vs. Pro Bono: What’s the difference?

By understanding the different ways that people can serve their community, companies and individuals can better identify the service opportunities that will give them the most meaningful experience. Likewise, nonprofits can better target and achieve their goals by engaging volunteers in non traditional ways.

 

Volunteerism

Volunteerism is a broad term. It ranges from spending an hour shoveling your neighbor’s walk after a blizzard to spending months preparing a defense for a client free of charge and, everything in between. Opportunities can take the form of transactional or relational engagements; be episodic or ongoing; require professional level skills or no skills at all; serve the community directly or indirectly; the list goes on.

Skills Based Volunteerism (SBV)

Skills Based Volunteerism (SBV) is a form of volunteering that leverages and specifically matches the knowledge and expertise of volunteers to the needs of nonprofits. In this way, SBV can build and sustain a nonprofit’s capacity enabling them to achieve their mission successfully.

However, this too is a broad term. SBV encompasses projects that draw on a person’s skills, experience, talents and/or education. What sets SBV apart from general volunteering is that the projects require a higher level of skill and know-how to be executed successfully and therefore often require more time and resources on the part of the nonprofit to ensure success.

 

Pro Bono

Pro Bono is a type of skills based volunteering and occurs when an individual or company provides one of their business services, which they would normally offer to a client for a fee, to a nonprofit free of charge or in some cases, for an extremely nominal fee (such as the nonprofit may only be charged for the materials a volunteer uses to create a new marketing brochure). Pro bono work typically requires a large amount of time to find the right match, and then a large amount of time and resources to ensure the project is successful.

Note: This is not to be confused with a company or individual who provides their business product to a nonprofit free of charge which is called giving in-kind and is not considered to be a form of volunteering.