Inspiring over 120,000 employees to volunteer in their local communities
DHL Express
Creating a strong culture of volunteering empowers employees to make a positive impact in their communities while enhancing their connection to a company’s purpose. Supporting employees in their volunteering efforts strengthens the workforce and the local communities they serve.
With volunteering being a key pillar in DHL Express’s purpose strategy, DHL wanted to foster a greater employee-led volunteering culture and centralise all initiatives to inspire employees globally to improve lives in their local areas.
Inspiring employees to volunteer and make a difference in their local communities is key to DHL Express. However, with 120,000 employees across the globe, volunteering initiatives were becoming disjointed, and colleagues were not always aware of all the initiatives taking place.
DHL Express wanted to centralise all volunteering initiatives under one umbrella and support employees to share their volunteering stories, discover volunteering opportunities in their local areas, and overcome barriers to volunteering.
With a new volunteering umbrella, #VolunteersAtExpress, there was an opportunity to launch a new global approach to volunteering at DHL Express and inspire employees to make a difference, together.
At DHL Express, ‘EveryONE can make a difference’
With a global audience where different cultures have different attitudes to volunteering, the campaign needed to work on a global scale and have an employee-led approach. The solution? Communicating that EveryOne counts – one minute, one hour, one person – it all adds up to make a difference.
The campaign aimed to help employees overcome barriers to volunteering, increase the visibility of existing volunteering initiatives, and give colleagues a platform to share their volunteering experiences.
The creative approach of using a film strip to show images of employees volunteering allowed employee-generated imagery to take centre stage – further cementing the employee-led approach to the campaign.
The campaign materials included everything DHL Express needed to educate employees about the new volunteering approach and inspire them to volunteer, including; posters, social media posts, quizzes, polls, ideas to build engagement, email headers, digital screens, and editable social media templates.
Making a meaningful difference
The EveryONE campaign not only achieved its goals but also created a ripple effect of positive change, strengthening employees’ connection to DHL Express’s purpose-driven culture.
Within the first two months alone participants logged 4,100 volunteering hours, which skyrocketed to 76,866 hours by the end of 2023. More than 211,000 people have benefited from the volunteering efforts and 18,000 trees have been planted.
