Why your corporate event needs a social impact experience

Corporate meetings, events, and conferences are a ripe opportunity for CSR professionals to engage their team and achieve their volunteer hour goals.

CSR professionals have numerous hurdles to overcome when planning social impact experiences for employees. From finding an experience that aligns with company values to managing nonprofit partners, there’s nothing easy about creating purpose-driven employee engagement events.

One of the most common challenges that CSR experts encounter is reaching their participation goals and achieving volunteer hour objectives.

A dive into Visit.org data reveals that forward-thinking HR, DEI, and CSR professionals are increasingly building social impact experiences into their company’s existing meetings, events, sales kickoffs, and conferences.

These experiences complement — and can even replace — traditional happy hours and bar tabs. In fact, according to a 2017 Deloitte survey, 70% of workers believe that volunteer activities are more likely to boost employee morale than company-sponsored happy hours.

Visit.org in-person event participants are rapidly growing. In the last four months of 2023, we’ve seen the same number of in-person participants it took eight months to see in 2022.

Additionally, each Visit.org in-person experience enjoys higher attendance. Year-to-date May 2023, the average number of employee participants per experience increased from 38 to 167, an incredible 340% growth.

Such figures show that increasingly more Visit.org corporate partners are adding in-person experiences to their company’s planned events. This tactic fosters noticeably greater employee participation and person-to-person camaraderie.

“Having a social impact component at a conference or meeting builds strong connections between colleagues who may be strangers,” explains Thi Nguyen, senior event manager at Visit.org who organizes on-the-ground experiences at in-person events. “It’s a great way to bring people together while enabling them to step outside of the day-to-day corporate gathering norms.”

Case study: Social impact experiences at conferences, meetings, and corporate events

When CSR experts tap into the inherently high attendance at their existing meetings and conferences, they achieve their impact hour goals, make a greater community impact, and build meaningful attendee connections.

For example, in early 2023, one of Visit.org's corporate partners wanted to integrate in-person volunteering into its annual sales kickoff event. But with 1,441 attendees, the CSR team required help crafting hands-on experiences tailored to support first responders around the world, from Ukraine to the United Kingdom to Tennessee.

Visit.org’s team of experts curated micro-experiences for conference attendees to volunteer between meetings, enabling maximum impact in minimal time. Dozens of Visit.org’s event staff were on-site to facilitate quality, high-participation experiences throughout the four-day event.

The result? Over 50% of conference attendees participated in the micro-experiences, and the Visit.org corporate partner built 1,700 medical and wellness kits for first responders and recorded hundreds of gratitude videos for nurses and midwives.

Attendees who participated in the activity experienced meaningful connections with both their colleagues and their broader community.

“I love this,” said one employee volunteer. “Can I make one more kit? What a great way to make a difference and interact with my colleagues.”

Learn more about integrating in-person social impact experiences into your corporate meeting or event. Reach out to our team to learn more.