YourCause Enhances Existing Volunteer Platform, Adds Skills-Based Volunteering to CSRconnect

Online, July 23, 2012 (Newswire.com) - YourCause announces the latest enhancements to the CSRconnect employee engagement platform: skills-based volunteer (SBV) tracking and reporting. The new feature allows users to search, find and track their skills within volunteer opportunities. In addition, more than 4,000 current non-profit admins and their organizations can create skills-based volunteer events in the platform. The addition of skills-based volunteering is the second of two major enhancements to the CSRconnect volunteer module within the last two months.

The skills-based volunteer tracking and reporting feature includes:

•Industry accepted 20 category high-level skills taxonomy
•216 specific skills for users to add to their skills profile
•Matching volunteer events based on a user's location and skills posted
•Logging specific skills to a user's (or team's) volunteer event
•Search capabilities based on users interested skills
•Posting volunteer events seeking necessary skills
•Reporting based on skills, level of expertise and participation rates

"As skills-based volunteering continues to attract more attention and relevance, we hope to play an active role in innovating and developing capabilities that best facilitate skills-based volunteering," said Matthew Combs, Founder and CEO of YourCause. "This is the latest effort in our ongoing goal to optimize CSRconnect to improve all employee volunteerism programs."

With the increase in demand by companies seeking to initiate SBV programs, it is a key element to improve business and employee performance, community impact, nonprofit connectivity, and overall corporate reputation.

Almost 8.1 billion hours were volunteered by Americans in 2011, according to Volunteers of America. Though, the same number of hours devoted to skills-based volunteerism can generate over 500% the value of traditional volunteerism (True Impact, LLC, 2012 Volunteerism ROI Tracker). Leveraging SBV programs is one example of how corporate volunteerism is gradually changing and uniquely addressing community impact in a new way of volunteering.

In the near future, YourCause plans to build a feature that will add pro-bono volunteering included with skills-based, offering users the ability to contribute their expertise to nonprofit organizations.