The Business of Benefits: ASCAP’s employee volunteer day

Here’s this week’s edition of our Business of Benefits series, where we spotlight benefits that are driving value for HR leaders, digging into their design and ROI. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

If you’re interested in talking about a workplace benefit you love for an upcoming edition, click here to get in touch. You can also reach out directly to HR Brew’s total rewards reporter, Courtney Vinopal: [email protected]

For more than a century, the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has advocated on behalf of workers in the music industry—namely songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music publishers. The organization is in the business of aggregating copyright licenses and returning the revenue back to artists to ensure they’re paid fairly for their work, CEO Elizabeth Matthews told HR Brew.

When Matthews first became CEO in 2015, she spent a lot of time talking to the organization’s head of HR, “about what we could do to really lift morale, to create happier employees…employees that deeply understood that they were working here in service of others, of those creators who really need people out there in the wide, wide world advocating for them.”

A company-wide volunteering day came out of these conversations. Since 2016, the organization has allowed every employee to take a day away from work to volunteer during an event called “ASCAP Notes the Cause.” ASCAP partners with New York Cares, a volunteer organization, on the initiative.

On July 23, New York City-based employees participated in nine different volunteer opportunities throughout the area, including painting and gardening at a public school on the Upper West Side, leading activities at local centers for senior citizens, and painting pieces of a mural that will be donated to P.S. 161 (a K–8 school) in Harlem. Workers at ASCAP’s London, Nashville, and Los Angeles offices also took part in the volunteer day.

Matthews told us more about the program.

Explain the business case for this benefit.

It really started with the results of an organizational health index survey that we had conducted. I was very focused at that time and interested in just driving engagement of employees, ensuring that we were all sort of aligned and rallying around the same mission.

So I just simply saw this as yet another way to perhaps drive that engagement level.

It starts out really as a proof of concept. It’s an experiment, and you don’t actually know if it’s working unless you’re measuring it.

What level of investment does this benefit represent for your organization?

We bring in about $2 billion. Our overhead rate, which means our cost base, is 10%.

If you think about, what would be in that budget? You’re buying people T-shirts. You’re buying some level of food or water. You are contracting with the organization that’s organizing all of this on your behalf. In this case, it would be New York Cares.

And then, I suppose, if you really want a cost base on an activity like this for any company, you’re going to measure time spent. Because you’re taking people off a task….they’re not doing their day-to-day job; they’re doing something else. But the actual operating cost associated with something like this is quite low, reasonable.

How are you measuring the ROI of this benefit?

When we first started the program, it was probably around 30%, 35% of those [who wanted to] volunteer actually signed up and did it, and now we’re three out of every four employees. They’re signing up and they’re out there and they’re doing something. This is not required. It is not mandatory. It is all voluntary, and you have a choice. You can work your normal hours…or you can go out and do something different. So I think we’re quite pleased with the results, but of course we’ll never be satisfied until we see 100% of everybody out there.

I would just add that higher endorphins, higher levels of happiness breed higher levels of job satisfaction.

When you think of attraction, retention, normal attrition rates that any organization is bearing right now…it’s a hard time for a lot of people. So I hope it spreads. I hope all companies start doing this because I think it’s good for all of our communities, no matter where you live, to bring people together, to align them around a mission, and to give back to others.