Value Co-Creation Through Skills-Based Volunteering

Though scholars and practitioners generally believe skills-based volunteering (SBV) offers a win-win-win solution to serve companies, employees, and NPOs, some complexities exist its implementation because of different stakeholders’ expectations and needs. To fill this gap, this study adopts a multi-stakeholder approach. We rely on HR co-creation theory and conduct interviews with three groups of stakeholders, i.e., company managers, employees and non-profits, to understand how a successful SBV can be co-created to achieve a triple win outcome. The results reveal a value co-creation model via SBV that allows triple wins of all the stakeholders. Such a model suggests the importance of ensuring a match between the two sides in terms of types of skills, scope of projects, time commitment needed, pre-training to calibrate the use of skills. We also attribute the conditions of successful SBVs to three main factors: facilitating information symmetry across stakeholders, building an SBV-inducive organizational culture and leveraging partners to tackle resource constraints.