Skills-Based Volunteering: Putting the 'Pro' in Pro Bono
Joe Harrell used to love his job. Now, he loves it even more. One big reason is that he's discovered a unique way to combine his professional skills with his desire to help his community. For more than three years, Harrell has donated his time and creativity to various nonprofit organizations in and around New York City via the Taproot Foundation, a San Francisco-based consulting firm that matches nonprofits in need of professional assistance with skilled volunteers, at no cost to the recipient organization.
Like a traditional foundation, Taproot solicits grant applications from nonprofit organizations. However, instead of offering cash assistance, Taproot provides "service grants," in the areas of marketing, information technology, creative services, and human resources/management.
Harrell, whose day job is director of corporate communications for Time Warner, first heard about Taproot in 2003, when a colleague's husband told him the growing company was seeking volunteers for its first round of projects in New York. Although Joe had dabbled in community service in the past, most of his experiences were one-time efforts with large organizations that allowed him to support causes he believed in but left him feeling somewhat unfulfilled. Harrell saw Taproot as an opportunity to bring his specific skills to the table and have a more rewarding experience.
"It's appealing in that it's similar to what I do, but it's not exactly what I do, so it gives me a chance to keep my skills sharp in ways that I'm not forced to on the job," Harrell said looking back upon his experiences to date. "And it also allows me to work on the same types of projects that I do on a day-to-day basis, with different people. Just knowing how somebody at an agency is going to approach the same task that you do on a daily basis can be eye-opening."
Upon reviewing Taproot's website, Harrell was immediately drawn to the company's uniformity of approach, employment of extensive pre-project training, and development of detailed "blueprints" specific to each assignment. He subsequently submitted his resume and was quickly contacted by someone staffing a volunteer team tasked with enhancing the online presence of Providence House, a nonprofit that provides shelter and support to homeless, abused, and formerly incarcerated women and their children. Harrell and approximately 30 potential volunteers attended an orientation during which Taproot personnel clearly delineated the consultancy's concept, process, and expectations.
"I think everybody left the orientation very charged and impressed with what they [Taproot] had going," said Harrell, who was soon assigned to the Providence House project as a website copywriter.
Harrell and a team of five other volunteers spent approximately six months retooling Providence House's website to help better articulate the nonprofit's mission. Harrell noted that the professional volunteers assigned to a given project can range from entry level to CEO, recent grads to retirees, and unemployed to self-employed. At Providence House, his team members included full-time employees from Grey Interactive, a woman in between jobs, and someone pursuing a master's degree in online communications from NYU.
According to Harrell, approximately one-third of a project's time is spent learning about the nonprofit and its goals. "You need to get to know an organization before you can really make an impact with it," he said. "And I think once you do that, the whole experience is more rewarding and you're able to see exactly how you can provide value for it."
During the assignment, the volunteers work closely with the nonprofit's employees. A volunteer "project manager" serves as the primary day-to-day point of contact with the nonprofit and the leader of the project team, while an "account director," the most senior volunteer position, works with the client to ensure that they are ready to begin a project, coaches the nonprofit's executive director on possible internal challenges, and makes certain that the grantee is upholding its responsibilities.
While Taproot projects are challenging and require careful coordination of schedules, Harrell firmly believes that skills-based volunteering, compared with other community service opportunities, "ultimately ends up being more rewarding for the volunteer and more valuable for the recipient of the volunteer's time."
Just a few months after the work with Providence House was wrapped up, Taproot approached Harrell and asked if he would serve as the project manager on a naming effort for the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, now known as the Pratt Center for Community Development.
Around the same time, something really interesting happened. Time Warner, looking to step up its community engagement, began exploring the formation of a corporate partnership with Taproot. After careful consideration, including discussions with Harrell about his personal volunteer experiences, Time Warner and Taproot launched Pro Bono Consulting (PBC) in 2005. Time Warner sees the partnership as both an opportunity to provide much-needed assistance to local nonprofits and a chance for its employees to hone their skill sets.
And what about Harrell? He couldn't be more pleased. Since the launching of PBC, he has served as the account director on three projects -- a branding/identity effort for the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, the development of a brochure for Studio in a School, and the enhancement of Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America's website. He's still working on the latter two.
Time Warner's partnership with Taproot, he said, "is just one of the many things that make you think that you're in the right job, with the right company, and that you don't have this strange dichotomy between your personal life and your values and your work life, which I fear a lot of people feel."
