A free digital service has launched to help charities advertise their employee volunteering programmes directly to prospective private sector partners.

The platform, launched by the volunteering platform Doit, will enable charities to advertise volunteering opportunities such as specific events, individual vacancies including trustee roles, requests for donations of materials, or open-ended invitations to organise volunteering opportunities for corporate partners.

The service will be free for charities to use and will allow them to advertise volunteering opportunities exclusively to participating businesses and their employees. 

It will be accompanied by a brokerage service where the Doit team will link up charities with businesses interested in the kind of employee volunteering opportunities they offer.

Charities will be able to advertise their roles by logging into their Doit account online and posting the opportunities to the new Doit Day app, the business-exclusive volunteering board which opened to corporate sign-ups last month.

Voluntary organisations can also ask the Doit team to add opportunities to the database on their behalf.

Participating charities can choose to either manage applications using Doit’s free tools or redirect interested organisations to their own systems.

About 200 businesses are being given access to the Doit Day app and the organisation is pitching the service to a wider pool of about 1,800 further organisations on its mailing list. 

One of the major businesses already backing the scheme is Mitie, a UK facilities management and services provider, which is expected to use the platform to seek volunteering opportunities for its 64,000 staff at about 200 UK locations.

Doit told Third Sector that the platform’s launch came as more companies were adopting or strengthening their employee volunteering opportunities and was conceived partly in response to calls from senior charity leaders. 

This includes a public appeal made by Catherine Johnstone, chief executive of the Royal Voluntary Service, earlier this year. Johnstone urged companies to expand their employee volunteering opportunities, after RVS research showed that professional fundraising could add £4.6bn to the UK economy through improved wellbeing and development.

George Grima, chief executive of Doit, said: “In a challenging economic climate, businesses need a way to add value to their reward packages and charities need both more volunteers and to nurture better private sector relationships. 

“For both sectors, one of the biggest barriers is trying to find and build connections across the divide. Doit Day is like a digital bridge that does that work for everyone involved so they can focus on the good stuff – volunteering!”