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When the cyber safety companies NortonLifeLock and Avast merged September 2022 to form the new company, Gen, leaders saw an opportunity to build a new business committed to its people and community. In addition to growing its workforce and having headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, and Tempe, Arizona (U.S.), the merger sparked the creation of updated company values and a corporate social responsibility strategy focused on making local community impact where employees live and work.
With 3,500 employees dispersed across the globe in remote, hybrid, and in-person work environments, Kimberly Bishop, Corporate Responsibility Manager at Gen, was faced with an exciting, yet challenging, opportunity.
“We needed to meet our employees at this moment with valuable, impactful experiences,” she says. “We wanted to bring our workforce together globally around one social impact movement and day.”
While the Gen Corporate Responsibility team had ample experience working with nonprofits, it has generally funded large, well-known national or international organizations. With the company’s first-ever Global Volunteer Day, the team needed to focus on partnering with local nonprofits that made targeted impacts on a community level.
That’s where Visit.org came in.
“It was really difficult to find a partner who could scale with us globally. That’s why we came to Visit.org,” says Kimberly. “We saw Visit.org as the key partner to make this happen on a global scale.”
Sourcing nonprofits around the world for Global Volunteer Day
Gen employees are based in different countries, including the Czech Republic, India, Ireland, and multiple locations in the United States. For Global Volunteer Day, Kimberly’s team aimed to host in-person, virtual, and on-demand social impact experiences so that every employee had an opportunity to volunteer.
Visit.org was instrumental in sourcing local nonprofits around the world, and hosting social impact experiences for Gen.
By partnering with Visit.org, Gen employees were able to participate in a beach cleanup in Dublin, create hygiene kits for community members in Prague and Brno, contribute educational aid to students in Chennai, build art kits in California, and much more. Each experience was guided by a certified Visit.org host and a representative from the nonprofit, ensuring that every employee felt engaged in the activity.
Quite simply, Global Volunteer Day was a big success.
In total, the company’s Global Volunteer Day supported 14 nonprofit organizations through 16 experiences, generating 900 volunteer hours in only 24 hours. Over 550 employees participated by registering for events using the Visit.org platform. Following each experience, employees shared their thoughts with the Gen Corporate Responsibility team via a customizable Visit.org post-event survey.
In addition to making an important impact, employees bonded over meaningful shared experiences. On a broader scale, Global Volunteer Day enabled Gen to put their new corporate values to action and improve employee morale.
“Being able to meet colleagues and focus on a larger social impact goal and mission is great to drive a culture of positivity and connectedness after such a long period of isolation,” says Kimberly.
“As a corporation, we play a big part in how people can feel and engage in their communities. We have a huge opportunity to rally our employees around things that matter.”
Impactful social impact experiences, all year long
With the success of Global Volunteer Day, Kimberly has big plans for the social impact strategy at Gen throughout the rest of the year. In addition to planning 2024’s Global Volunteer Day, she is excited to continue partnering with Visit.org to create programming designed to support the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion employee resource groups.
She’s building an annual calendar with Visit.org’s support to activate employees with social impact on important observance days and months. Kimberly also plans to create a sophisticated volunteer framework that will continue to promote employee social impact participation.
Consistent social impact experiences allow Gen employees to feel connected to their company, colleagues, and community.
“The act of volunteerism in itself is a morale booster," says Kimberly. "People feel good after they volunteer, go into the office, and meet their colleagues and community partners.”
Schedule a call with Visit.org to learn how social impact experiences can help boost employee morale, and foster a culture of positivity
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