What is the point of intellectual volunteering? How can you bring together a team to work on a non-profit project? Dmytro Ivanov, SVP of Technology at SoftServe has the answers.

This article is a part of a series of materials about corporate social responsibility at SoftServe. If you want to know more about our CSR activities, click here.

History of Open Tech

Like most of the processes that make up the company’s corporate social responsibility policy, the foundations of the Оpen Tech project were laid when SoftServe was founded. Because the company’s founders and employees had close ties to local communities, there was regular talk about how the company could help with socially important initiatives.

Dmytro Ivanov, who is now responsible for Open Tech, gave an example: the regional council could not always allocate the funds or staff to create important information resources that people needed.

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It takes a long time for such projects to be implemented. And our employees have always had the desire to help. There were always people who had some free time. Or we hired a few people in advance, knowing that this type of volunteer work is possible in the future. There are people who are quite busy, but they have the drive to make a difference.

BY DMYTRO IVANOV | SVP of TECHNOLOGY

“It takes a long time for such projects to be implemented. And our employees have always had the desire to help. There were always people who had some free time. Or we hired a few people in advance, knowing that this type of volunteer work is possible in the future. There are people who are quite busy, but they have the drive to make a difference,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

Such volunteer projects used to be irregular and unstructured: there was a request for a project that was forwarded to the people that could somehow satisfy this request. The number of such requests gradually increased, and so did the need to improve how they were dealt with.

That’s how Open Tech began, a program that brings together projects that the company is willing to support on a volunteer basis and people who are willing to work on them.

“There are several sources from where we get projects. Firstly, this is the stakeholder network of the company itself, which continue to offer them. Secondly, we started to proactively look for partners to work with, and we are building this ecosystem ourselves. Thirdly, our employees can come to us with suggestions. They know where our help may be needed and they send their requests,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

One of the Open Tech projects the company is especially proud of is Grains of Truth (Zerna Pravdy), which disseminates information about the Holodomor and helps raise money for the Holodomor Museum’s charitable fund.

How does Open Tech work?

“We needed to understand exactly where we were going with this. We needed to understand how Open Tech is woven into our general work program, decide what kinds of projects to take on, and what type of people should be invited to implement them,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

Open Tech eventually came up with the following requirements:

non-profit projects only;
non-religious and non-political projects;
projects can be implemented for government officials, but not on a tender basis;
focus on educational and/or healthcare projects for NGOs and charities.

“We realized that we could not support high-tech, long-term and highly complex projects. After all, the bigger the project, the greater the level of responsibility and higher the expectations, and in this case volunteering alone is not enough,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

That is why Open Tech projects are intended for 3 to 6 months, and their teams contain three to five people. When SoftServe completes the project, it is transferred to the partner organization which is then responsible for launching it. The company is not engaged in hosting, marketing or content creation, which remains the responsibility of the partners. In addition, such cooperation shows the willingness of the partners to work together on projects and share responsibility for them.

The company decided to engage core teams of paid employees in Open Tech. And volunteers then join them. After all, volunteers are also working on their commercial projects. And it is important to see small successes whilst implementing a project. If the implementation is stretched, these successes become noticeable only once a quarter or at the very end.

“One of Open Tech’s missions is to attract people who want to make a difference and have the time and required skills. Eventually, we realized that volunteering alone would not be enough. A team of volunteers only works well on very short-term projects. This can be compared to lighting a fire: the smaller the twigs, the quicker the fire will burn out,” says Dmytro.

Assembling a team for a project

At the start, the team consists of a business analyst and an architect who develop the vision and solutions. At the same time, the team searches for a project manager and designer among the company’s CTOs.

Then the project is registered on the website, where the recruitment for volunteer positions is announced. If insufficient volunteers come through the website, they are found from the network of volunteers who had previously worked on similar projects and who have the required experience. If this does not help, the team invites those employees who are currently between their projects.

Open Tech’s plans and prospects

In the future, the company plans to further develop Open Tech together with commercial partners to jointly implement their CSR projects.

“I hope that such joint projects will help us build stronger, more reliable relationships with our customers. After all, when we do something together, we develop our working relationship and mutual trust. And this is what business is built on,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

In addition, the company intends to expand projects into new locations where SoftServe has not worked before. This will also allow additional experts to be engaged.

Why did the company get involved in technology volunteering?

“Employees, companies, and teams need a goal that has a specific value and benefit,” says Dmytro Ivanov.

He believes that any commercial or volunteer work should be done consciously with a full understanding of how it can benefit.

We have always done this in our professional activities, and we understood that we help businesses to optimize their processes, modernize, and find new business models. And then we realized that we can bring value even without for-profit work.

Furthermore, technology volunteering brings indirect benefits to the company through employee and customer loyalty, as well as goodwill in the market.