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InvolveSoft: Boosting Employee Engagement with Community Building

It’s said that the best success stories always begin with struggles, a stumble or a radical change of direction. As a little boy growing up in a blue-collar family, Gaurav Bhattacharya didn’t have an easy childhood. Little did he know at the tender age of two that his life would change overnight after losing his father to cancer. However, life took a turn for the better when he learned to code in a Microsoft volunteering outreach program at the age of ten. On joining high school, Bhattacharya met Saumya Bhatnagar, which marked yet another pivotal moment in his life. The duo’s inclination towards volunteerism, combined with their technology backgrounds and experience, led them to lay the cornerstone of InvolveSoft—an opportunity for enterprises to give back to the community and also boost their employee engagement. The propensity for embracing social responsibility has led global leaders to offer their employees paid volunteer time off (VTO) to participate in community engagement opportunities. InvolveSoft fuels employee participation in such VTO programs, delivering a boon to corporate culture and enriching the lives of those in need.

Describing InvolveSoft as “a workplace community platform”, Bhattacharya underscores that the company aims to make the workplace lively through increased communication between employees who bond over community building. “We founded InvolveSoft to address businesses’ need to engage their employees in volunteering to support their communities,” says Bhattacharya, co-founder and CEO, InvolveSoft.

The mission-based company has devised a platform for managing, measuring, and growing a wide range of corporate volunteerism programs and activities—such as constructing homes for the underprivileged, preparing meals, cleaning drives and the like. The client onboarding process at InvolveSoft enables users to log into the platform using single sign-on integration. Following this, they need to provide details of the causes they are passionate about, skills that they can volunteer, and time accorded to volunteering. “This information aids in the recommendation of activities the employee would be interested in,” informs Bhatnagar, co-founder and CTO, InvolveSoft.

The platform collects data about employees’ passion and makes an informed decision to keep them engaged in volunteerism.

The platform enables one-click event booking, simplifies the process of creating events and manages volunteering initiatives for clients across departments, cities, and countries with its proprietary algorithm. After an event is booked, the InvolveSoft admin coordinates with them to ensure participation. By facilitating event management, the InvolveSoft platform enables the volunteering coordinators or the HR department of the enterprise to set up the event on the platform and add people. Further, features like invites, RSVP, and reminders available on the platform boost participation. Added to that, the platform’s social media-like features enable the admin to monitor volunteers, who can vote, add pictures, and comment on events. Brand reputation improves when the satisfied staff discusses it on social media, and B2C companies often see an increase in ROI. The platform simplifies impact reporting by tracking customizable metrics on an automated dashboard. The detailed information about the participants at an event, the time allotted to it and its net impact reflect a healthy work culture and aids in popularizing the brand. “A major challenge faced by several organizations is the lack of communication between employees and their disconnect to their company’s mission,” explains Bhatnagar. The company’s platform seeks to bridge this gap by enhancing interpersonal communication among employees.

In an instance, a client without a systematic program, who used a manual process involving spreadsheets to invite volunteers to their company-wide events, observed a 275 percent increase in participation within a year of using InvolveSoft.

Scripting similar success stories, InvolveSoft seeks to grow its user base to ensure customer satisfaction, which in turn leaves a positive social impact on the workplace and the community. “While we have certain revenue milestones, our chief target is to become a global, customer-focused brand,” Bhattacharya concludes.