For our team here at Ad Victoriam Solutions (AdVic®), volunteering has always been a part of our company’s DNA. Every employee has 40 hours of annual paid time off to volunteer with their chosen organization. Some team members volunteer to chaperone school field trips, others coach youth sports teams, and many just pick community-organized volunteer events throughout the year, like cleanups and food pantry shifts. 

But for those members of our hybrid team who live near our North Atlanta headquarters – Alpharetta, GA – we have a special opportunity to serve, the AdVic Highway! No, there isn’t a highway named after us, but there is a one-mile stretch of McFarland Parkway that connects our two offices. Back in 2020, when we were looking for something that would allow us to regularly get our team together in service, we reached out to Keep Forsyth County (FoCo) Beautiful and found out the road was available for adoption. 

Driving Employee Engagement Through Volunteerism

Since our founding, volunteering has been a part of who we are. Our CEO spends a lot of his weekends with his wife and daughters volunteering with different nonprofit organizations, and our President is a Chaplain in the Georgia National Guard and a Sunday School instructor at his local church. As they talked about building a different type of company, they agreed that we should not only encourage our team to serve their communities, but we should pay them for an entire week of service every year. 

As we began to tally and track our annual volunteer hours, we noticed a correlation between our volunteerism and our employee engagement scores. Not only were the volunteer events popular, but that instilled a sense of community service and made our employees feel like they were a part of something more than just another job. Our summer tradition now includes annual cleanups led by each incoming Elevate training cohort. 

Celebrating Our Service

As a part of the program with Keep FoCo Beautiful, a national nonprofit affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, we are committed to four cleanups every year. While we’ve tried different days and times, we’ve found that weekdays work best for turnout and that a little motivational carrot on the end of the stick never hurts. So as soon as the last bag of trash has been tied and our hands have been washed, we head back to Halcyon and reward our volunteer crew with a social hour at one of the incredible restaurants right outside our office. 

Measuring Our Impact Over the Past Five Years

At AdVic, we’re firm believers in measuring what matters. And that doesn’t just stop at sales and revenue numbers but also extends to metrics we discovered as we pursued B Corp certification. Things like total volunteer hours, employee volunteer participation rate, and volunteer impact & outcomes. 

And while four roadside cleanups don’t sound like a huge impact, when you add up the numbers over the past five years, it’s pretty impressive. 

• 17 cleanups
• 204 Volunteers
• 306 volunteer hours
• 136 bags of trash collected
• 5,440 pounds of trash (almost 3 tons!!!) off of the AdVic Highway and out of our storm drains and waterways

The Win-Win of Giving Back

We’re excited to celebrate five years of the AdVic Highway and the positive impact it has had on our company. As a company that works for the triple bottom line, we’re also excited at the positive impact it has had on two of our most important stakeholders, our workers and our community. The act of giving back gives our team a unique way to come together that isn’t just happy hour drinks and appetizers. And the outcome of giving back is removing almost three tons of bottles, cans, styrofoam containers, and more from the soil and our waterways. 

If you’re interested in doing something similar with your team, we suggest using Keep America Beautiful’s affiliate search option to find your local chapter. They will be able to help identify adoptable roads and will even provide all of the bags, grabbers, and safety vests for your team’s cleanups. And if you want to ask us some follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to us, we would be happy to help! 

Read more Social Impact blogs from Ad Victoriam Solutions.

AdVic thanks Profitable Purpose Consulting‘s Nathan Stuck for his contributions to this blog.

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After an inaugural volunteer week in 2019, and a two-year delay because of pandemic-related postponements, May the Fourth Volunteer With You week was back this year at Ad Victoriam Solutions (AdVic®). With three events at our headquarters just outside of Atlanta, and our remote employees participating in events across the country, our team came together to give back.

The Stats of Our Labor

Of AdVic’s 141 team members, 47 of our team members spent at least some portion of their week serving their local community. From the Mobbly Bayou in Florida to the beaches of Southern California, our team worked with 22 different organizations over the weeklong volunteer drive. Other highlights of the week included:

• 205 total hours of service
• Six bags of trash picked up along the road connecting our two offices in the Atlanta area
• 96 meal kits prepared, which included 768 meals for HOPE Atlanta,  an organization that feeds children in need. 

Nonprofits Benefit From AdVic’s Project Victory Team

The week also included another cohort of nonprofits working with our Project Victory team to unleash the power of Salesforce.org. With three teams of two AdVic consultants, these organizations are moving out of Google Sheets and manual data entry and updates and into a world of real-time reporting and actionable insights, empowering them to greater efficiency and a better ability to serve. This year’s recipients were: 

• Journeymen Triangle, a North Carolina nonprofit that pairs volunteer mentors with adolescent males to support their path to becoming men of integrity.
• Water4Mercy, a Florida-based nonprofit, works with villages in Tanzania to supply the technology and infrastructure needed to provide clean drinking water.
• B Local Georgia organizes a community of B Corp’s in Georgia. As B Corp momentum continues to grow, this project will help them expand their academic offerings to schools throughout the state. 

More Work to Do

As a B Corp, we take our commitment to serving our stakeholders very seriously, with a goal to donate 2% of revenue in the form of volunteer time (each employee gets 40 hours of paid time off to volunteer) and pro bono services. This year’s goal is 3,200 hours and in one week, we achieved 6.25% of that target. 

With a little more than seven full months to go in the year, there is still a lot of work to do, but we’re encouraged by our team’s efforts so far. Year-to-date, our team has served 936.5 hours and 50% of the team has used at least a portion of their Volunteer Time Off. We’re proud of our team for stepping up and excited that this week was once again possible after all that the previous two years threw at everyone. 

While we’ll continue to serve throughout the year, our impact team will now turn its focus to Giving November, where we’ll be volunteering and fundraising for our employees favorite charities, and providing additional pro bono consulting services to nonprofits. 

In closing, “May the Fourth Be With You” year-round and may it inspire you to be the change you want to see in the world. 

Volunteerism is just a small part of how AdVic – a Certified B Corporation – gives back to our communities and the world at-large. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

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If the past two years have shown us anything, it’s that, in spite of a lot of progress over time, the world still needs a lot of fixing. 

There are many opportunities to make a difference for the greater good, even if it’s small, it has an impact. For example, what if your hour of picking up trash, of mentoring an at-risk child, of serving food at a homeless shelter does matter? What if that tiny ripple is a part of a larger wave? 

At Ad Victoriam Solutions, we believe that it is. It’s one of the reasons we give every employee 40 hours of paid time-off to volunteer every year. It’s also why we have our own adopted highway and encourage our employees to get involved in their communities, to give back, regardless of cause or organization, to make their own ripple. 

We talked to some of our most dedicated volunteers to get their perspective and came up with four simple ways anybody can get involved and give back. We hope they will help you find some inspiration and your own calling to give back. 

1. Sign Up For Something

The simplest step is to sign up for something. From sites like VolunteerMatch and GivePulse, to company organized events through tools like Selflessly, signing up for a volunteer day has never been easier. If you’ve been on the bench for a while and are afraid to get back in the give-back game, sign up for something you know you can do. 

AdVic Tatiana Romanko, an alumnus from our Elevate program epitomized that sentiment when she told us that, “I noticed pretty quickly that AdVic had a culture of service and giving back. Soon after I started, I saw a call for volunteers at the Gasparilla Music Festival and signed up. And I had a blast!”    

And like Newton’s First Law of Motion taught us, an object in motion stays in motion. A simple Saturday volunteer shift led Romanko to continue that volunteerism throughout the year, adding, “That day reminded me how much I enjoy serving–I found myself signing up for volunteer events and raising my hand for company community initiatives like never before. This year, I set a goal to finish in the top three at the company for overall volunteer hours.” 

2. Volunteer Your Skills

For those that don’t know, AdVic specializes in Salesforce implementations, which include custom build-outs, integrations that often require custom code, and an incredibly meticulous loading of existing data. In layman’s terms, we have some really smart people with an incredibly rare skill set. 

As we move to the new normal of remote work, opportunities abound to give back virtually, especially for those with technical skills. 

AdVic’s own Grant Keller spearheaded our first career development program with Goodwill of North Georgia, which brought in AdVic employees as mentors and culminated with a one-day event where the students put their new knowledge into use, building out real Salesforce orgs for four deserving nonprofits. “This was an incredibly fulfilling way to give back”, Keller says, adding that “a virtual opportunity offered me and several other employees the chance to give back in a city I didn’t live in, but in a cause I truly believed in.” 

There are now a ton of virtual volunteer opportunities for those with technology (and beyond) skills. If commuting, work-life balance, or other time-related commitments are getting in the way of you giving back, think about volunteering virtually. (Pictured, below: Recent volunteer events for the AdVic Team.)

3. Join a Nonprofit Board

There are more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics. And almost every single one of them has a board of directors, usually consisting of 8-10 volunteers. Using some simple math (and a calculator), that’s 12,000,000-15,000,000 nonprofit board seats that need to be filled. 

While they require more commitment than a Saturday sign-up, few volunteer experiences offer the opportunity to give back, while also directing and driving the impact an organization makes. At AdVic, no one embodies this spirit like our Director of Corporate Culture & Strategic Impact, Nathan Stuck.

Stuck serves on four different nonprofit boards and chairs both Keep Athens Beautiful and B Local Georgia. He told us, “Serving on a board is incredibly rewarding. Not only do I get involved in community outreach events, but I also get to play a part in the overall strategy.” Through his work, Stuck has adopted clean-up highways, created awareness and fundraising programs, and helped nonprofits drive donations and scale their impact. 

His advice is simple: “Follow some of your favorite nonprofits. They all have boards and some of those seats turn over every year. When you see the announcement calling for board nominations, submit one. You’ll be blown away by the incredible change you can bring to your community by serving on a board.” 

4. Pursue Your Passion

At AdVic, we want our team to choose a way to give back based on their passion.. From mentoring students to picking up trash, we encourage everyone to find their civic passion and pursue it. So, find your own passion and find a way to give back. 

Our best example comes from Marshall Hunt, our 2021 Volunteer of the Year. Marshall volunteered over 260 hours to his church and a youth camp at which he spent his 40 hours of VTO (volunteer time-off) chaperoning. “My church, and my faith, have given me more than I could have ever imagined. I live my life to pay back that debt and provide others with the same guidance and direction that I received,” Hunt remarked. 

Marshall’s advice is rather simple: “Whatever cause you’re passionate about, get involved and jump in feet first. It’s been the most rewarding experience of my life.”  

Take Action, Make Progress

No matter your passion, your skill set, or your available free time, find a way to get involved. Every hour of service adds up to the bigger change we need in this world. And it is our duty as citizens to give back, as Muhammad Ali famously remarked, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.” 

You alone cannot fix it, but we all need to take action so we can make progress as a society. So open that browser, and search “Google opportunities near me,” and sign up. Heck, maybe we’ll see you there!

Volunteerism is just a small part of how AdVic – a Certified B Corporation – gives back to our communities and the world at-large. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Related Resources:

More Social Impact Blogs from AdVic

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