I’m going to say something that will annoy a lot of CSR managers: most corporate volunteering programs are a waste of everyone’s time.

I don’t mean all of them. There are companies doing genuinely useful skills-based volunteering that makes a real difference to nonprofit organisations. But the standard model — where a team of office workers in matching t-shirts spend a day painting a community centre or sorting donations at a food bank — is mostly performative. It makes the company look good in the annual report. It gives staff a nice day out of the office. And it creates an enormous amount of work for the nonprofit that receives them.

I know this because I’ve talked to the nonprofits.

What the charities actually think

Here’s what nonprofit leaders have told me, almost universally, when I ask about corporate volunteering days:

“It takes more staff time to organise and supervise the volunteers than it would to just do the work ourselves.”

“They’re enthusiastic but unskilled. We spend more time training them than they spend working.”

“The real value is the donation that comes with it. The volunteering itself is mostly a distraction.”

“We can’t say no because they’re a major funder. So we smile and create busywork for 30 people in branded polos.”

That last one is particularly telling. Many nonprofits feel they can’t refuse corporate volunteering because it might jeopardise their funding relationship. So they spend hours creating activities that feel meaningful to the volunteers but don’t actually advance the organisation’s mission.

This is not community engagement. It’s community theatre.

The photo opportunity problem

Scroll through any major company’s social media around their volunteer day and you’ll see the same images: smiling employees holding paint rollers, high-fiving children, sorting cans into boxes. It looks wonderful. The engagement metrics are strong.

But ask yourself: what actually changed? Was the community centre better off because 20 marketing professionals spent four hours painting it, compared to if the company had just written a cheque and the nonprofit had hired a painter? Almost certainly not. The painter would have done a better job in less time.

The value of the corporate volunteering day wasn’t the volunteering. It was the internal morale boost for the company and the social media content. Those are legitimate things to want, but let’s not pretend they’re community impact.

Skills-based volunteering is different

Now, there’s a category of corporate volunteering that I think genuinely works, and that’s skills-based volunteering. This is where a company offers the specific professional expertise of its staff to a nonprofit that needs it.

An accounting firm providing pro bono financial modelling to a social enterprise. A law firm doing pro bono legal work for a community organisation. A tech company building a database for a charity that’s been running on spreadsheets.

This works because it provides something the nonprofit actually needs and can’t easily get elsewhere. It’s genuinely additional value, not manufactured busywork.

The challenge is that skills-based volunteering is harder to organise, less photogenic, and often involves longer-term commitments rather than a single-day event. It doesn’t fit neatly into the corporate CSR calendar.

What companies should do instead

If companies genuinely want to support their communities, here’s what would actually help:

Give money. Unrestricted funding is the most valuable thing a company can provide to a nonprofit. It lets the organisation spend the money where it’s most needed, without jumping through hoops.

Offer skills, not labour. If you’re going to volunteer, volunteer your professional expertise. Board service, strategic advice, technical support, financial planning. Things that create lasting value.

Listen to what nonprofits actually need. Before designing your community engagement program, ask the organisations you want to help what would actually be useful. You might be surprised by the answer.

Pay for the coordination. If you insist on doing team volunteering days, include funding to cover the nonprofit’s costs of hosting you. Staff time, materials, supervision — these aren’t free.

Commit long-term. A one-day volunteering event once a year creates almost no lasting value. A sustained partnership with regular, meaningful engagement does. But that requires more commitment than most companies are willing to make.

The awkward truth

The awkward truth about corporate volunteering is that it’s mostly designed to benefit the company, not the community. It builds team cohesion. It supports recruitment. It creates content for the ESG report. These are all fine objectives, but they should be acknowledged honestly rather than dressed up as philanthropy.

If a company wants to spend money on team-building, it should call it team-building. If it wants to support the community, it should ask the community what support it actually needs.

The two things aren’t the same, and pretending they are does a disservice to everyone involved.