Innovation

Blackbaud has developed a software package, AngelPoints, which provides a unique integrated Corporate Social Responsibility solution. This radical innovation has the ability to help any company align its profit with its core values by utilising the collective power of their employees to make a lasting positive impact on the local community and other causes which the company supports. AngelPoints is an easily scalable platform, which can help organizations in any industry, with multiple subsidiaries. This allows them to inspire and motivate all of their employees to promote greater sustainability and responsibility in order to improve their lives, those in the community, and even further afield. AngelPoints is primarily focused on improving efficiency and participation in two broad areas: volunteering and giving (Blackbaud 2017).

AngelPoints Volunteering allows a company to introduce and set up its own employee volunteer program, or increase the efficiency of an existing one. The intuitive cloud-based solution enables the management of projects to be streamlined by fully automating the process. It also provides employees with the opportunity to build their own unique profile where they can actively manage, record, and be recognized for their contributions using an incentive-based reward scheme.

By implementing the platform, employees are encouraged and motivated to become more involved in their communities, and help towards, not only, the achievement of business, social and environmental goals, but the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations as well, which will be discussed in more detail below.

AngelPoints Giving is designed to further engage employees in their corporate volunteer efforts by promoting increased participation and improving the impact of a company’s employee giving programs. AngelPoints Giving provides an easy-to-manage platform for gifts, donations and disaster relief solutions.

Inspiration

Blackbaud was originally inspired to create a cloud-based platform based on the knowledge that the US private sector was mismanaging internal CSR data and implementing volunteering/giving programmes inefficiently.

The developers began by reviewing the sector and observed that private US companies were inefficiently archiving their CSR activities by using Microsoft Office and other applications. Blackbaud identified that this practice was highly inefficient for two primary reasons. Firstly, each internal department needed to manually communicate information related to company-sponsored activities and individual employee activities to the businesses community engagement office. Individuals within this department usually sorted and classified all of this information into a single database, which is highly labour and time intensive especially if there is a large number of employees and activities. Secondly, they noticed that as time progresses these companies inevitably changed. Companies hired new people when new positions were created and older employees retired, they began tracking new metrics to measure performance and as the original developers of the internal CSR databases left the company, other developers with new ideas augmented the design of the CSR tracking system. Thus, the original design of the existing database became antiquated and not flexible enough to adapt to the demands of a growing volume of information. This resulted in private companies with CSR databases which were inaccurate, hard to access, and highly inefficient. Blackbaud explicitly identified a need to streamline the process of communication and connect discrete parts of companies.

Additionally, depository businesses in the US are required to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act (1977) by providing support to low and middle-income communities. One way these companies report their compliance to the regulators (FDIC and OCC) is to use the CSR activities of their employees and provide an impact story. However, due to the disorganization in recording these activities (for the reasons outlined above), these companies found it highly difficult to identify the pertinent employee activities to disclose to the regulators. As these companies are obliged legally to comply, Blackbaud identified that the companies in this subsector could be potential long-term customers as they would be motivated to purchase solutions to streamline the method of reporting to regulators.

Given the apparent demand for CSR data solutions in the US private sector, Blackbaud recognized a viable market opportunity to provide an innovative cloud-based solution product.

Overall impact

CSR, corporate giving and employee engagement has become an integral part of both an organization’s long-term business strategy and its culture. It’s essential that an organization realizes that having a clear blueprint for its CSR programs is a must-have and a critical aspect to the success of every business. Corporate giving and employee engagement can be a very beneficial asset to attract and retain talented employees. It also has a powerful effect of strengthening and improving an organizations image and facilitates increased support for the various communities and constituents with whom they support. Taking an all-inclusive approach to CSR ensures that an organization has a lasting impact on the communities in which they live and work and in building a giving culture that contributes to an organization’s overall brand story.

AngelPoints is a tool which can be used to increase collaboration across public and private sectors in order to leverage employee volunteerism and ultimately advance the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). One key component to the future success of SDGs is the measurement of human capital. There is a great understanding that these goals cannot be achieved by one body, but instead by multiple organizations combining their resources to achieve a common goal. By providing people and businesses with the opportunity to increase sustainability, gather resources, and connect solutions, AngelPoints is contributing to the accomplishment of SDG 17: Partnership of the Goals and SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production.

There's an enormous demand for people to engage and give back, but there's not a lot of supply of opportunities. Therefore, AngelPoints works on that supply issue and tries to provide the opportunities that align with the organization’s core values. They focus on what they want to do, what they want to achieve, and the story they want to tell while creating an experience around all those objectives. People are increasingly enthusiastic about volunteering and are looking to be guided towards activities which they can contribute to. Employees expect the company they work for to be focused on more than just their bottom line. Brand loyalty is also increased and secured if consumers determine that an organisation is having a positive effect on society.

AngelPoints provides a median of communication for organizations to work together towards a common goal, especially other companies and social sector partners who strive towards shared objectives and values. This provides the platform needed to utilise, consolidate and direct the substantial power of trillions of dollars of private resources to help deliver on sustainable development objectives, which is one of the main aims of the Partnership of the Goals SDG (United Nations 2017).People working together provides for a greater probability of success than people working individually. The success of SDGs is really going to be dependent upon how many people get involved, how they get involved, and how active people are. Multinational companies that represent a vast number of employees all need to start to coalesce around what they care about and need to start collaborating with one another. The foundation for increased SDG impact is an active community which is open to individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, as well as large corporations. Everyone has an important role to play.

To have a truly noticeable impact on the SDGs, it's going to take the mobilization of all the resources of the world to do so. It’s imperative that the professional population of the globe, from all levels of an organization, are aware of the SDGs and work together to ensure their achievement. AngelPoints is a stepping stone in the right direction.

Business benefit

The ability to measure the overall impact of all CSR activities is significantly tied to the 17th Sustainable Development Goal (United Nations, 2017). The AngelPoints platform allows for the efficient interaction between the community and enterprise to produce a Multi-stakeholder partnership. This partnership allows for the sharing of knowledge, technology, and financial resources which is a target of SDG 17. The following section will illustrate the specific business benefits derived from utilising the AngelPoints platform.

Created in 2001, the AngelPoints platform was initially created for U.S. businesses to manage their CSR initiatives. The success of the software solution incentivized these firms to implement the system in their subsidiaries globally. For example, since 2012 the U.S. branch of the financial services company Northern Trust has been managing their CSR activities with the AngelPoints platform. Due to the accrued business benefits since implementation, the software has begun to be scaled outwards. In the near future, the entire E.M.E.A. branch of the company will utilize the software package in its operations, as mentioned by the community and affairs manager Jack Doyle.

Business benefits from distributing the innovation are derived by the provider of the software solution, Blackbaud. Additionally, their clients also accumulate many business benefits due to the efficiency gains afforded from implementing the platform since the organization can spend increased amounts of time on strategy and less time on administrative tasks.

Blackbaud’s primary business benefit is purely financial. As the platform is a service, payments are consistently received from clients every month meaning that cash flows are consistent and non-seasonal. Consistent cash flows are a sign to current stakeholders that the existence of the business is not determined by one-off events such as a large purchase order. Additionally, non-periodic cash flows are attractive to new and potential shareholders who are looking to invest in stable companies. AngelPoints is another product on their shelf that provides the benefit of continuing a profitable business.

AngelPoints allows companies globally to harness the giving and volunteering potential of its workforce. This is achieved through the aligning of personal motivations with the opportunity to volunteer, donate, and participate in skills-based placements. The AngelPoints platform is very wide and contains a suite of features that can be used to motivate employees. The platform’s graphical user interface displays branded campaigns, team challenges, top fundraiser leader boards, and employees' individual trophies. Optimally, these instill a competitive psychological incentive to employees who will notice their individual rank and wish to improve their position relative to their co-workers. Also, as CSR activities are always open to new employee participants there is never a situation in which a participant will not be able to volunteer. Clients using the AngelPoints platform report that this powerful tool elevates employee participation rates in CSR activities, increases employee giving, and fosters a sense of giving back to stakeholders within the local community. Companies utilizing this software platform benefit from having a motivated, engaged workforce who are more likely to stay at the company as well as attracting new employees.

Finally, for the U.S. clients of Blackbaud who have implemented the platform, the primary business benefit is the ability to illustrate a nuanced and complete impact story. This story is used to provide evidence that the enterprise is in compliance with all U.S. regulations including the Community Reinvestment Act (1977), meaning the company avoids unnecessary fines and penalties. To do this, AngelPoints captures the CSR activity data of all participating employees (as discussed above).

Using this data, the embedded analytics and measurement tools easily quantifies the information to provide a report on the giving trends, time efficiency, and numerous other metrics of employees. Collectively these metrics are used as evidence to produce a compelling narrative detailing the overall company’s CSR activities and the incredible social and environmental impact of the executed activities.

Social and environmental benefit

Social Benefits of AngelPoints

The most obvious benefit of the AngelPoints platform is the funding and volunteer expertise it helps deliver to non-profit organizations. AngelPoints incorporates the main objectives of Goal 17 of the SDGs by providing opportunities and partnerships for people to connect and socialize around issues that they have in common and share their vision. These partnerships lead to a more successful sustainable development agenda (United Nations 2017).

Behind this concrete benefit are several intangible social benefits as well. These include:

· Making appropriate matches between an individual’s skills or interests and a charity’s need.

· Disbursing quality information about social causes and opportunities for citizen action.

· Strengthening of bonds between the business community and civil society.

· Increasing self-esteem among individuals who receive positive peer feedback for their volunteer and giving efforts. It may also be true that individuals are more inclined toward charitable activities when they are recognized for their efforts by their employer and their colleagues.

Environmental Benefits of AngelPoints

As with social benefits, there appears to be an obvious benefit to the environment from AngelPoints and that is the reduction in paper consumption. In a recent interview with Northern Trust employee, Jack Doyle (Community Affairs Manager), it was emphasized that there would be a reduction in the consumption of paper once CSR activities are managed digitally. This presumably applies to all of Blackbaud’s clients utilizing AngelPoints. This reduction does not accrue to AngelPoints alone, as there are other digital CSR programs out there, but certainly AngelPoints shares in that achievement. This aligns with Goal 12 of the SDGs (United Nations, 2017) and provides a technological solution which increases sustainable consumption. Thus, AngelPoints is promoting efficient use of natural resources. The reduction of paper leads to a reduction in waste generation. Another factor which contributes to the environmental benefit would be the increasing number of partnerships that are created between Environmental Charities and other organizations through the use of AngelPoints, which enhances the global partnership for sustainable development.

Interview

Jack Doyle, Interview with Community Affairs Employee