Frequently Asked Questions
Intro to OnHand
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OnHand is a social and eco impact platform that encourages employees to do more good in their day-to-day lives while helping companies meet their CSR objectives.
Founded by charities such as the Red Cross, WaterAid, and Macmillan Cancer Support, we engage your teams in doing good through accessible volunteering activities around a variety of causes.
OnHand has two key elements:
An app for employees to browse, accept, and complete good deeds on demand, from volunteering to eco action
A web dashboard with real-time data for social impact measurement, from CO2e reduced and hours volunteered to trees planted and leaderboards showing which teams and individuals are doing the most good
In short, OnHand empowers socially responsible companies to create and track positive impact in one place.
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We host all kinds of volunteering on the OnHand platform to support your CSR initiatives. Some types of volunteer work include:
Local community volunteering
Remote volunteering
Group volunteering
Micro volunteering
Skills-based volunteering
Social and environmental pledges
Essentially, any volunteering that helps people and planet, we’re on it. We’re here to help businesses supporting charities, local communities, and the planet. Find out more about the types of volunteering we offer here. -
Micro volunteering is volunteering condensed into short, accessible chunks. It could be 15 minutes twice a week; it could be 30 minutes whenever suits you.
It involves doing good without needing to commit to regular corporate volunteering sessions, and it’s the perfect solution for busy employees without much time to spend regularly doing good. Micro volunteering takes the pain out of volunteer management, as your people can decide when volunteering works for them.
If you’re struggling with how to organise CSR activities, micro volunteering in the workplace offers a simple solution, empowering employees to create positive impact on their own terms.
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Flexible volunteering is at the heart of what we do! We believe in an anywhere, anytime workplace volunteering policy – whether your employees are signing a petition for a cause they care about in 5 minutes or gardening for a neighbour for 5 hours, we have something to suit everyone.
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The onboarding and launch process at OnHand is designed to ensure a smooth and successful introduction to our platform, enabling your organisation to maximise its impact through volunteering. Here’s what we’ll do to get you up and running:
Setting Up Your Organisation
OnHand will work closely with you to create a profile for your organisation within our platform.
Dashboard Setup & Reporting
We’ll help you set up your personalised reporting dashboard, so you can easily track and measure the impact of your employees' volunteering. This dashboard provides real-time insights into volunteer hours, activities, and the positive change being created, allowing you to stay up-to-date on all the good your team is doing.
Platform Launch & Engagement Strategy
To ensure maximum engagement from your employees, OnHand will support you in launching the platform internally. We provide promotional materials, launch communications, and strategies to encourage participation and get your team excited about volunteering opportunities.
Ongoing Support
After the launch, we continue to offer support, ensuring your employees have access to the right opportunities and that you can track their progress and impact. We’re here to help you achieve your volunteering goals.
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Your organisation can add their logo to all employees’ experience via the desktop and app platform. Need something more custom? Speak to one of the OnHand team at hello@beonhand.co.uk.
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OnHand is a global platform – we’re live in over 40 countries! We’re constantly adding new opportunities to the app, and our Partnerships team works with you to understand where your employees are based and how we can make your experience world-class. Basically, no matter where you are, we’ve got plenty of community volunteering ideas and opportunities.
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The cost of OnHand varies depending on the size of your organisation and what pricing tier you want to commit to.
For organisations under 50 employees, our starter package costs £1500 per annum. For a bespoke pricing quote, book a demo with us.
Group Volunteering
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Yes! Get in touch to see how we can help with your next corporate volunteering day. Simply fill in our form with details about your team and day and we’ll be in touch with your group volunteering options.
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With OnHand, you’ll never run out of volunteer day ideas. Our group volunteering days take many shapes and forms, depending on how many team members take part, your location, and the causes you care about. Take a look at some of our group volunteering day examples.
Environmental
Get the team together for a day outside helping with a wide range of causes including tree planting, community garden projects, animal charity sanctuary experiences, or wildlife help.
Food Poverty & Homelessness Support
Get your team volunteering at local food banks, soup kitchens, food drives, donation warehouses, and other homelessness and housing initiatives.
Older Adult Care & Social Isolation
Give back to local and leading older adult homes and charities to support loneliness, social isolation and give your team the opportunity to create new social connections.
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Team missions start at £1,500 for teams of 10-15 people and £2,500 for teams up to 25 people.
Chat to us to also find out about bespoke options for larger teams and bundle packages for multiple volunteering days.
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The group volunteering cost includes:
Establishing what causes your team cares about
Sourcing opportunities for your team day
Arranging dates and times for you to carry out your group volunteering
Bespoke help ahead of the event and after the event, whatever your needs
Covering the charity’s outgoing costs, such as setting your team up with a dedicated Project Officer, insurance for each volunteer, and a contribution towards tools and materials
Support for the charity's wider environmental and community projects
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For the most choice, we need 8 weeks minimum to set up a group volunteering session for your team. This time involves sourcing opportunities, arranging dates, liaising with charities, and getting your employees on board for the volunteering.
Product Features
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At OnHand, we track 3 key metrics for measuring social impact and carbon reduction on your organisation’s bespoke reporting dashboard:
Actions completed
Trees planted
CO2e reduced (in metric tons)
Every volunteer will be able to see their personal stats on the OnHand leaderboard, but OnHand admins have even more access to tracking and reporting. Your all-time stats can be filtered to the day, and you can see exactly what your employees are up to on the OnHand app, including which charities they support the most and what types of actions they’re most interested in.
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Yes! If you do your own volunteering outside of what the OnHand app offers, you can add your own actions and earn Hero Points for doing good. We love to see how many unique volunteering opportunities our OnHand heroes get up to.
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OnHand boasts a huge variety of features to keep your employees active and engaged. Some of our key features include:
Individual and team leaderboards to gamify doing good
Bespoke reporting tools to keep track of your employees’ activities
Huge breadth of opportunities, with a cause for everyone to care about
Ability to upload and access photos of your team getting stuck in
CO2e tracking to reduce carbon footprints
Tree planting facilitated through user activity and engagement
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Yes! Employees can create an OnHand account or login using their work credentials. This will work even if users have already signed up in the conventional way.
We support most authentication providers, including Microsoft and Google. Reach out to us at hello@beonhand.co.uk if you have further questions about SSO.
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The onboarding and launch process at OnHand is designed to ensure a smooth and successful introduction to our platform, enabling your organisation to maximise its impact through volunteering. Here’s what we’ll do to get you up and running:
Setting Up Your Organisation
OnHand will work closely with you to create a profile for your organisation within our platform.
Dashboard Setup & Reporting
We’ll help you set up your personalised reporting dashboard, so you can easily track and measure the impact of your employees' volunteering. This dashboard provides real-time insights into volunteer hours, activities, and the positive change being created, allowing you to stay up-to-date on all the good your team is doing.
Platform Launch & Engagement Strategy
To ensure maximum engagement from your employees, OnHand will support you in launching the platform internally. We provide promotional materials, launch communications, and strategies to encourage participation and get your team excited about volunteering opportunities.
Ongoing Support
After the launch, we continue to offer support, ensuring your employees have access to the right opportunities and that you can track their progress and impact. We’re here to help you achieve your volunteering goals.
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We comply with key data protection standards including GDPR for safeguarding EU personal data and utilise Heroku who have attained SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, which ensure stringent data security, availability and confidentiality controls. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, aligning with best practices in data protection. OnHand is Cyber Essentials Plus certified which demonstrates our commitment to robust cybersecurity practices. This certification validates that we meet high standards for defending against common cyber threats by providing an additional layer of assurance in protecting customer data and securing our systems.
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Your all-time OnHand usage stats can be filtered by week, month, quarter, year—to the day. You can see exactly what your employees are up to on the OnHand app, including which charities they support the most and what types of actions they’re most interested in. If you’ve set up teams by location, you’ll also be able to view who’s topping the leaderboard and where they’re earning the most Hero Points.
Sustainability
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At OnHand, we don’t believe that carbon offsetting is an effective way to live a sustainable lifestyle. Instead, we promote sustainable actions to reduce carbon emissions at the source. OnHanders pledge to make small, easy lifestyle changes (such as washing clothes at a lower temperature, reducing meat consumption, and taking public transport over driving) to reduce their individual carbon footprints.
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We’re partnered with Eden Reforestation Projects to plant trees in vulnerable areas around the globe. We plant a tree every time an OnHander completes their first action on-app, and we plant an additional tree for every 10 actions after that. Read about our tree planting here.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
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Yes! OnHand is the perfect addition to your CSR strategy. When it comes to CSR, volunteer programs are one of the simplest ways to boost your impact.
To further understand how volunteering encourages a strong CSR policy, and the importance of corporate social responsibility for attracting and retaining talent, check out our free handbook.
Plus, find out why OnHand has been named CSR Software Leader by G2 for transforming CSR activities.
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OnHand is an all-in-one impact platform for driving CSR, meaning it covers a huge range of social, environmental, and people-focused solutions. Our platform hosts 1000s of opportunities to do good, so you’ll never run out of CSR ideas. Some of these include:
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
OnHand forefronts diversity, equity & inclusion through a lot of its offerings. One of our main features is our bitesize talks, where OnHand founder Sanjay Lobo interviews an expert around a cause we care about, like homelessness, poverty, refugeeism, youth support, and racial inequality.
Wellbeing
We promote pledges on the OnHand app to enhance our OnHand users’ wellbeing. From taking a ‘wellbeing hour’ to encouraging chats with friends to turning off devices at lunchtime and getting out of the office, we encourage small life changes to improve wellbeing.
Sustainability
Alongside our wellbeing pledges, sustainability and eco pledges are a core part of the OnHand experience. We make it easy for employees to make small changes anytime, anywhere, that reduce CO2e. From eating meat-free for a week to hanging out clothes instead of tumble drying them, it’s never been simpler to cut that carbon footprint.
Volunteering
Volunteering is at the heart of what OnHand does. Volunteering takes so many shapes and sizes, and we have something to fit every cause. The app holds opportunities for local communities, vulnerable individuals, group settings, remote volunteering, and more, with focuses on mentoring, skill enhancement, companionship, and more.
When it comes to CSR, definitions matter. If you’re still asking yourself “what is CSR?”, make sure you head over to our complete guide on types of CSR models, so you can fully understand exactly how OnHand can help with each aspect. -
Corporate Social Responsibility is all about integrating social, ethical, and environmental concerns into your organisation's framework, so that you’re clear on what your values are and what you’re working towards. Having this framework in place and implementing a corporate responsibility program is great for demonstrating what really matters to you as a company, both to potential employees and to users or customers invested in the organisation's journey.
With 64% of millennials saying that they would consider a company’s values when applying to work there, ensuring that you have strong company values will attract top talent, boost brand reputation, and secure crucial investment.
If you’re considering building your own CSR strategy, check out our guide to crafting an effective CSR policy with lots of CSR examples to give you some inspiration. -
According to Social Value UK: “Social value is the quantification of the relative importance that people place on the changes they experience in their lives.”
This means that social value is the quantified result of a project’s positive impact. It’s a different way of measuring success – moving beyond direct financial benefits, social value allows us to holistically measure other benefits. Check out our guide on social value framework measurements to make sure you’re up-to-date on how to measure your impact.
Some social value initiatives that OnHand supports are:
Reducing CO2e with a cycle to work scheme
Collecting donations for a local foodbank
Encouraging employees to volunteer
Supporting local charities
Recycling company computers and other tech
Enhancing employee wellbeing
For the full picture, read our guide on social value in business.
Employee Volunteer Programs (EVPs)
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Yes! Company volunteering programs thrive with a variety of opportunities, flexible options, and a way to celebrate wins. From skilled volunteering to micro opportunities, OnHand provides you with the tools you need to use your volunteering skills and make a meaningful impact in your Employee Volunteer Program.
Read our 10 steps for a successful employee volunteer program to understand how we integrate into all parts of your EVP!
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Volunteering makes the world a better place – but a successful corporate volunteering program does more than just that. A good employee volunteering strategy can affect your business in so many ways, such as:
Increasing employee engagement and productivity
Attracting and retaining top talent
Boosting brand reputation
Securing key green investment
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OnHand’s on-demand volunteering and impact platform was built with diversity and inclusion in mind. Our platform offers a comprehensive solution to support your company's CSR and ESG initiatives, including setting up and managing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).
We can create specific ERGs for you, in unlimited number, allocate curated "packs" of actions for each ERG to take, and record all the impact generated.
Read our guide to further understand how ERGs can benefit your business and how OnHand supports your ERGs.
Employee Engagement
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Getting your employees engaged in volunteering is crucial to making the most of the OnHand platform. We’ve got a full guide on our top 10 tips to engage your team, but highlights include:
Lead by example and get leadership involved in doing good
Reward good behaviour with shoutouts and prizes
Create internal competitions to encourage friendly rivalry
Set times during the month for your team to all volunteer at once
Focus on the end result and the causes you’re committed to
Read our 10 steps for a successful employee volunteer program to understand how we integrate into all parts of your EVP!
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It sure does! We all know that doing good makes you feel good, but the relationship between volunteering and employee engagement isn’t based on feeling: it’s based on facts.
Studies show an obvious positive correlation between employee engagement and volunteering. And, don’t forget, more engaged teams are more productive. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams are 18% more productive and companies with highly engaged employees are 23% more profitable.
The Boston School of Management’s 2023 Community Involvement Study showed that employee volunteering is a key driver of employee engagement. A huge 91% of the companies that measured the connection found a positive correlation between employee volunteering and employee engagement scores.
To learn more, check out our blog on the subject here.