Volunteering Engagement Portal

Building on its 175-plus-year history, our client is one of the largest professional services companies in the world, spanning 150 countries and territories. It is recognised as one of the leading Big Four accounting firms and the largest consultancy network in the world by revenue. Our customer provides industry-leading audit and assurance, tax and legal, consulting, financial advisory, and risk advisory services to nearly 90% of the Fortune Global 500 and thousands of private companies

• Size: 345 000 employees
• Geographical Reach: Global – 150 Countries
• Turnover (2021): USD 50B

As a purpose-led organisation, our customer aims to make a positive impact on society through its Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)  initiatives, covered under the sustainability umbrella. They established a foundation that develops strategic collaborations with a wide range of social enterprises to collaborate on projects focusing on education, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. To ensure the success of the CSR activities, it was important that all employees were engaged and exposed to opportunities to value their talents and positively impact social and charitable causes.

The Challenges

The process for the employees to participate in any CSR activity was done manually, via emails. This process was lengthy with no visibility of the activities and the number of participants for each activity. This caused a decrease in the participation and engagement of employees, hence negatively impacting the CSR program of the company.

The Requirements

The key business requirements of our customer to streamline the CSR participation process were as follows:

• A centralised information and registration portal for CSR volunteer activities.

Research has shown that CSR initiatives in a workplace are correlated to the well-being of employees. Engaging employees with the opportunity to give back to society gives them a sense of purpose and helps to create a more positive view of the employer. Furthermore, it is a great way to attract key talents and is a contributing factor in maintaining low attrition rates. However, CSR is a relatively new concept and although it is at the forefront of many global enterprises’ minds, the existing off-the-shelf solutions to manage these activities do not cater for this emerging demand. Our customer required a custom application to gain visibility and have broader support for these volunteering initiatives as well as, achieve a high level of engagement and participation across the company.

• Legacy systems & rapid deployment

The emergence of CSR in its various forms has left many enterprises thinking about ways to reach their audiences. They needed a digital solution without complex customisation or traditional, and often, lengthy application development approaches. With legacy systems unable to offer these capabilities entirely or without significant investment and customisation, our client was seeking to move to an application model that was highly customisable, intuitive, and rapidly deployable – within 30 days.

• An application architecture to meet evolving requirements

It was essential that the portal coped with the evolving requirements of the business. To ensure this, the underlying application architecture should offer flexibility to modify or adapt the design without limitation.

The Solution & Outcomes

AMO designed and deployed a web-based solution to empower employees to smoothly participate in volunteering opportunities, providing them with a centralised information and registration portal for all local and international activities. The application was rapidly built and deployed across the enterprise in 6 weeks providing our client with the following key features & benefits:

The ability to monitor engagement 

Fundamental to the application’s success is its ability to capture employee engagement with real-time updates of employees enrolling in various activities or interacting with new initiatives. The number of participants for each activity is recorded with live updates. This enables administrators to gain maximum visibility on the initiatives which are more popular, as well as have insights into which activities employees are drawn to based on their roles & talents.

Swift enrolment process

In order to maintain a high level of user engagement, the activities are listed in a way that would enable employees to register easily and without the need to input too many details. Additionally, activity time slots and locations are allocated, enabling employees to choose their preferred times and sites. Thus making the registration process short and easy.

Application built on a low-code platform

We delivered a highly customised application built on a low code automation platform, incorporating smart process automation capabilities, not inherently available within existing applications. Furthermore, we compounded fundamental integration, auditing, and tracking capabilities essential to the enterprise.

The development architecture of this new platform allows our customer to respond to evolving market requirements with agility by providing business users with custom functionality in a commercially competitive way and within a rapid timeframe.

Role-based administration & intuitive interface

This feature offers the ability to delegate some of the administrative tasks to Power Users. Role-based administration also allows certain features, permissions, and views for a subset of users.
Additionally, the application’s intuitiveness gives the admin team the power to create/delete/edit events easily.

Spotlighting featured ideas and activities

The solution provides the capability to spotlight new ideas and upcoming events on the home page to gauge employee interest.

To summarise

This centralised portal has streamlined the engagement of all employees in CSR activities whereby the employees can register for an activity of their choosing in one place.  The easy-to-use and intuitive application has maximised user adoption and engagement. This was vital for our customer to empower their employees and ensure that the skills and expertise of every member of the company were used to make an impact that truly matters in society.

Additionally, this year we have deployed the second version of this application offering a wider range of features and functionalities at the request of our customer. Due to the way the application architecture was built, their evolving needs and requirements were implemented quickly without affecting the smooth running of the CSR program.