How Goodera helped Citrix plan and scale their Month of Service with Virtual Volunteering
1500+
employee volunteers
44 countries
with hyperlocal opportunities
300+
beneficiaries impacted
THE CHALLENGE
A global program to engage 1.5K+ employees
Over the last 12 years, Citrix has conducted their global month of service that kickstarts the spirit of giving through the remainder of the year. Every year they use in-person volunteering activities for their teams that help galvanize Citrix employees to give back to the community.
One of the things Citrix employees really wanted was to support Nonprofits that were in the same geolocation as them, with causes that were close to their hearts. This was a challenging task for a company with employees that work out of multiple time-zones. Together, we solved this by delivering the same 5-star experience to employees working out of Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh, Singapore, or China.
To achieve this, we worked closely with Jo Moskowitz - Director Corporate Citizenship at Citrix to plan and create a framework that successfully helped us execute Citrix’s global month of service across 44 countries.
One of the things Citrix employees really wanted was to support Nonprofits that were in the same geolocation as them, with causes that were close to their hearts. This was a challenging task for a company with employees that work out of multiple time-zones. Together, we solved this by delivering the same 5-star experience to employees working out of Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh, Singapore, or China.
To achieve this, we worked closely with Jo Moskowitz - Director Corporate Citizenship at Citrix to plan and create a framework that successfully helped us execute Citrix’s global month of service across 44 countries.
When COVID hit in 2020 and throughout all of 2021, we had to pivot to virtual volunteering. For us to find, vet, communicate and set up virtual volunteer activities for our global Citrites and all those geographies was very overwhelming. As hard as we tried, it was incredibly time intensive and ineffective. So in February of 2022 we decided it was time to bring in the experts and help us drive this global employee engagement program with a very short time frame in mind.
Jo Moskowitz
Director Corporate Citizenship at Citrix
THE SOLUTION
Building a month-long global engagement program
Selecting the right impact areas, NPO discovery and vetting, end to end execution, impact assessment and communication were all important considerations in Citrix’s requirement list. Goodera exceeded expectations in all these areas by providing:
A robust framework that covered all bases - right from building out the volunteering calendar to post-event employee feedback surveys.
End to end on-ground managed volunteering experiences for Citrites across the globe.
Post engagement impact reports and communications strategies.
Goodera volunteering experts help plan and design the volunteering engagement
The planning stage involved 3 major steps :
1. Setting goals and deciding impact areas
Citrix’s corporate giving themes spanned across the following impact areas : Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, STEM education, Environment and sustainability. Goodera helped align volunteering activities and experiences with these key strategic impact areas.
Items like resource allocation, bandwidth required and budgets were also finalised in this stage.
Jo’s mantra for rolling out large global programs such as these is to ‘Think big and execute flawlessly’. Hence, their goal was to involve 15% of all their employees in this program. That’s more than 1500 employee volunteers!
2. Selecting and vetting nonprofits
Citrix was able to access Goodera’s network of more than 50,000 vetted global nonprofits and select the ones that integrated the best with their program. Every nonprofit was Benevity approved and listed on their platform.
60
volunteering activities to choose from
27
Unique activities
07
activities for every week
3. Designing the engagement
Here’s where it all started to come together - Goodera baked the impact areas and activities in with different time zones for the geographically dispersed employees.
This is also where the Calendars were booked, instruction manuals for each of the 27 activities were sent out to Citrix employees, and volunteer FAQ portals were set up.
Calendar setup
Instruction manual for every activity
FAQs portal for volunteers
Goodera enabled smooth transition from in-person to virtual events
To ensure the success of a global program of this scale, Goodera left no stone unturned for the execution of every event. Support was rendered on the following levels :
1. Engagement level
For engagement, Goodera -
- Created a central FAQ and knowledge-base which was used for consistency, awareness around other initiatives, and making personal donations to nonprofit partners.
- Provided customised scripts and email templates to Citrix community ambassadors for training their volunteer champions
We have community ambassadors in multiple locations across the world, who act as our feet on the ground in promoting the culture of giving. Goodera gave us scripts and templates that the ambassadors could use to encourage their teams to volunteer, which was huge.
- Jo Moskowitz
2. Event-level
For the event, Goodera -
- Curated a "know before you go" manual for volunteers. This consisted of resources that equipped employees with knowledge on-
- The cause area
- The nonprofit
- The activity - Provided a Goodera ambassador to host the event
- Brought in representatives from the nonprofit teams
- Conducted icebreakers and challenges during the event to help employees in getting to know each other and collaborate better in a virtual environment
“We realised that we needed our employees to see all 27 activities for the month at one time (which was not possible on the Benevity platform) and then be able to book the activity of their choice. This is where Goodera created a customised portal for us where our employees could look at all 27 activities at once”
- Jo Moskowitz
A centralised booking portal and marketing solutions for the events, powered by Goodera
Goodera’s event marketing team provided on-demand collaterals like banners, flyers, emailers and digital backgrounds to encourage high levels of participation. To increase levels of excitement among the employee volunteers, games like ‘Volunteer of the week’ and ‘Most creative project’ were conceptualised.
Once the activity was completed, every volunteer received an email with:
- a certificate of appreciation
- a screenshot of a team image
- a Volunteer badge
- a thank you note from the nonprofit
THE RESULTS
The month of service conducted in April 2022 helped kickstart the momentum of volunteering at Citrix. Consequently, virtual volunteering was incorporated in their various employee resource groups - with events being curated for pride month, juneteenth and veterans day.
Going forward, we’re going to have Goodera curate volunteering events for our ERGs during heritage months and in-person events for our tier 1 locations. We’re really glad to have Goodera do the heavy lifting for us and take care of the day to day activities when it comes to curating volunteering opportunities.
Jo Moskowitz
Director Corporate Citizenship at Citrix
