Developing a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program can be a daunting task. Where to focus? How to give? How to engage participating employees? These are a few of many questions to consider. Yet the importance and potential impact of CSR programs is enormous, which is why I’m so passionate about developing this program at Bluewolf. As a company, we have given to non-profit organizations around the world, organized charity bike rides, and volunteered at food banks. As individuals, we highly value philanthropy — Bluewolf “pack members” participate in everything from disaster relief to pro bono consulting work.

My goal for formalizing our social responsibility program was to amplify the impacts of our individuals and offer volunteer opportunities for all pack members. My challenge was how to achieve this.

Articulate motivations.

The first component of a successful social responsibility program is to define your motivations: Why are you investing in the program, and why is it important? For us, it was recognizing the technical skills gap between IT corporations and their surrounding communities. By working to bridge this technical divide, we can help strengthen our communities and expose youth to otherwise inaccessible opportunities. We started by defining our mission to "educate, empower, and enable youth through digital literacy guidance, personal and professional development, and mentorship."

Define a focused strategy.

Once we knew why we wanted to expand on our culture of giving, we needed to look at how we would accomplish this. By concentrating on a distinct impact area, we could focus our efforts to magnify our impact as an organization. We chose to focus on technology education and youth mentorship, an intersection at which our specialized skill sets can offer significant value. With diverse offices around the world, it was crucial to build a program that could scale and grow in order to be adopted and iterated upon by each region. We chose to partner with the international non-profit First Tee, an organization that shared our values, and allowed us to provide mentorship to their youth.

Build out a scaleable curriculum.

The next step was to move forward with what program design would allow us to implement our goal of providing youth mentorship and bridging the technical skills gap. Being a consulting company with remote and office-based employees led us to design a program that provided varied volunteer opportunities. The first project to take root is our office based “Young Entrepreneurs Program.” Modeled off of salesforce.com’s BizAcademy, our program introduces high school students to roles in a business, business plans, as well as strategies to build a professional presence online. In April, we successfully ran our first mentorship program in San Francisco with 11 students from Leadership High School. It was an amazing experience — seeing the youth pitch us their business plans upon completion of the program was hugely rewarding.  As our mentorship program grows, we’ll begin to focus on building out a pro bono program for our remote pack members to enable non-profits through Salesforce consulting.

Grow through a champion network.

Building out our initial foundation was only the first step. As this program develops, I am collaborating with regional champions to grow and expand the program to a national and international scale. These champions become spokespeople for the program to help excite and engage participants. Reaching out to the executives of each region also helps gain additional support from the top down. With this starting point, we can move forward to organize volunteer events at every Bluewolf office.

The process of building this program has been, and will continue to be, an evolution. I've learned that there is a balance between designing the "perfect" program and executing an initial pilot. By starting small, we were able to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, thereby allowing us to make adjustments to the program accordingly. I am so proud that to date, we have had over 40 pack members in San Francisco alone offer their time to mentor 41 local youth — and this is only the beginning. Our goal is to offer volunteer events in all Bluewolf regions to truly make an impact on the communities around us. 

To learn more about Bluewolf’s philanthropic efforts, contact us or check out our philanthropy work.