Winners of 5th Annual VolunteerMatch Corporate Volunteer Awards Announced

(3BL Media / theCSRfeed) May 20, 2011 - VolunteerMatch has announced the winners of the 2011 Corporate Volunteer Awards. In a May 12 ceremony at the VolunteerMatch Client Summit in Chicago, the organization recognized Discovery Communications, Hagerty Insurance, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Union Bank for their outstanding innovation, commitment and leadership in corporate volunteer engagement.

VolunteerMatch is the Web’s most popular volunteer network, supporting an online community of 78,000 organizations, millions of volunteers and more than 140 leading businesses. This was the fifth time that VolunteerMatch has given the awards, based on objective or subjective criteria against a variety of benchmarks across the VolunteerMatch family of corporate clients. This year the awards were expanded to include a new category for recently launched programs.

The 2011 Corporate Volunteer Award winners are:

Employee Volunteer Program of the Year - Large Businesses:
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Employees in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s “Volunteers in Action” program have logged more than 550,000 hours since the company joined VolunteerMatch in 2006. In 2010, nearly 1,300 of LANL’s 10,000-plus employees logged 250,245 hours of volunteer service, a 29% increase from the previous year. In addition, more than $150,000 will be donated to 225 nonprofit organizations on behalf of employees and retirees for volunteer hours completed in 2010.

Employee Volunteer Program of the Year - Small-Medium Businesses:
Hagerty Insurance
For the second year in a row, Hagerty Insurance received the highest honor for outstanding performance for an Employee Volunteer Program with fewer than 10,000 participants. In 2010 the Traverse City, Mich.-based insurer of collectible cars and boats maintained an astonishing 92% participation rate, even as 50 new employees joined the 440-person company.

Champions of the Year:
Ryan Bjorkquist & Jan Woolsey, Union Bank
It was a year of firsts for Union Bank, which owes much of its success to leadership from administrators Jan Woolsey and Ryan Bjorkquist. In 2010, the California-based bank’s employees tripled their volunteer hours to more than 19,000 hours through smart mission-aligned programs like Union Bank’s Financial Literacy Month Campaign, as well as eight hours of paid work time annually for organizations and activities that qualify under the Community Reinvestment Act.

Breakout Performance:
Discovery Communications
Newly launched at VolunteerMatch, Discovery Communications had outstanding success engaging employees in a variety of service programs in 2010. As part of the Silver Spring, MD-based media company’s signature “Discover Your Impact Day” event, 3,000 employees on five continents took part in volunteerism activities, giving back to nonprofits supporting land, water and people. The company also launched a pro bono initiative, “Discovery Impact: Creating Change,” where more than 200 Discovery employees provided creative, marketing, communications, events and social media services to 40 nonprofit organizations during a 12-hour marathon event. Additionally, the program featured workshops for some 200 other regional nonprofits on topics like social media, events planning and public relations.

“It is a privilege to be supporting these outstanding programs and their commitment to social responsibility,” said Greg Baldwin, president of VolunteerMatch.

To learn more about the 2011 Corporate Volunteer Awards, visit:
http://www.volunteermatchsummit.org/Awards/105

To learn more about VolunteerMatch, visit:
http://www.volunteermatch.org/

To follow VolunteerMatch CSR on Twitter, visit:
http://twitter.com/#!/vm_solutions

VM13994