Equipping corporate leaders for nonprofit board service

Intuit Inc., creator of QuickBooks, is a familiar entity to many nonprofit leaders for their financial management products, software donations, and technical support. For years, Intuit has also supported the work of nonprofits across the U.S. and internationally by offering employee volunteer hours, matching employee contributions to nonprofits, and providing service grants to nonprofit organizations where their employees serve on the Board. Since 2014 Intuit employees have volunteered a total of 159,000 hours and raised in excess of $21 million for local nonprofit organizations.

This past year Intuit stepped up its game to do even more after seeing their board service grant funds were being underutilized. “The people at Intuit are so generous and so engaged in their communities. Our programs to support employee volunteerism and giving have been widely successful, so it raised the question of why board grant funds were being left on the table,” says Dee Reel, Senior Program Manager for Corporate Citizenship at Intuit. Dee led the effort internally to learn more and discovered that the topic of nonprofit board service was itself unfamiliar to many Intuit employees. With this understanding of the underlying problem to solve, Dee contacted Center for Volunteer & Nonprofit Leadership (CVNL) in search of nonprofit and governance expertise.