AECOM staff Give Back

AECOM is ranked as the world’s leading engineering firm, and Fortune magazine named it among the “World’s Most Admired Companies” for the last three years. To support their corporate vision of delivering a better world, AECOM runs a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program in both Australia and New Zealand called ‘Give Back’. Led by Lauren Allen, Director of Business Integration, Give Back partners with GoodCompany to deliver a philanthropy platform that makes is it easy for staff participate in the community at a local level.

“We want to provide a way for our people to support their own charities and causes directly through payroll. We chose GoodCompany as our partner because they made it easy to set up ‘Give Back’ options. It’s critical to let people align with something that’s important to them personally, as well as to offer broader options. Our staff can choose from local and global charities, fund-raising and sponsorship events,” says Lauren.

GoodCompany’s volunteering function allows AECOM’s Australia and New Zealand staff to use their annual one day ‘volunteer leave’. New staff are encouraged to join Give Back as part of the on-boarding process. “We’ve got a business full of really motivated, socially-minded people who want to Give Back to the community in the way they choose,” says Lauren, “I love that our Give Back platform provides access to support a wide variety of charities.”

Staff receive a monthly donation summary, and Lauren says that commitments to Give Back tend to be long-lasting. GoodCompany minimises the administrative overhead to both companies and charities by offering multiple donating or volunteering activities to staff, and also allowing for one-off donations.

“Having all the administration done for us and getting full reporting, has been invaluable,” says Lauren. “GoodCompany do all the governance and vetting of charities, which takes a lot of the risk out of our hands. Of all the platforms we’ve seen, it has the highest percentage of donation dollars provided to the charity.”