Enhancing Our Volunteer Program

Through skills-based volunteering, PG&E employees can leverage their professional skills and expertise to assist nonprofit organizations.

At PG&E, we continue to explore new strategies to enhance our successful employee volunteer program. Last year, we reached a major milestone by completing our first "skill-based" volunteering project with GRID Alternatives, a non-profit that helps low-income California homeowners install solar electric systems. This pilot initiative showed how we can design volunteer opportunities that match employees' specific skills with the specialized needs of particular non-profit organizations.

Because of the dramatic growth of its operations, GRID Alternatives found it needed a single intranet platform to enable better communication among its employees. PG&E assembled a cross-functional team of IT and other employee volunteers, with support from Accenture, to design a robust intranet site to manage the non-profit’s internal data and resources. PG&E also donated $5,000 to build the site.

Employees were excited to use their skills to help a community partner and GRID Alternatives now benefits from a single system that connects multiple offices. Building on this success, PG&E is planning additional skill-based volunteering projects for 2010.