Ryan Scott is the CEO and Founder at Causecast, the leading cause integration company. The platform offers workforce matching donations, volunteering including dollars for doers, disaster response, and custom campaigns. He is the Founder of The Impact and Educational Sections of the Huffington Post. Ryan Scott has served as Board Member of the Taproot Foundation. He has been a game platform developer. Ryan also holds a patent from the NetCreations, Inc., a company he co-founded. — by Elena Tarassenko
Can you please speak about the need you see present for improved employee engagement in volunteer work and corporate social responsibility?
The world’s leading companies in 2015 understand the need for employee volunteer programs and the majority offer some sort of opportunities for their employees to give back. Engaging one’s employees in community impact isn’t just a nice thing to do; it’s an essential part of today’s bottom line. But it’s not enough to simply offer a program and assume that your employees will gratefully line up to get involved. Too many companies don’t put forth the effort to foster employee engagement in their programs, and the result is that participation rates are typically low. This is a lost opportunity with many ripples of consequences. Corporate volunteerism presents a powerful opportunity to transform the relationship that companies have with their communities, employees and stakeholders, and it’s vital that companies treat this part of their business with the same degree of care and thought as the rest of their operations.
Explain the new pro-social model for capitalists and why this theory is important.
In the past, creating economic value was purely the domain of corporations while social value creation was left to nonprofits, and never the twain shall meet. But what we’ve found is when corporations and nonprofits work together – combining a company’s unique ability to leverage capital with a nonprofit’s talents in working on social problems – we have something new, and we call it shared value. The magic of shared value is scale. We can finally get solutions at the scale that is required to actually solve those problems. I believe that by leveraging the power of capitalism in the service of causes and stretching the skills of your employees, we will see a historic shift to a world where, ultimately, businesses will compete with each other not only to make the most profit, but to do the most good. That’s the world we’re working toward.
How does your platform succeed in engaging employees’ corporations?
I think that only when companies demonstrate economic incentive to creating social value will we be able to reach the scale we need to solve our problems, and I’m honored to be a part of helping enable companies to craft and execute these programs. The economic incentive will not come without seeing real impact – within communities and within the companies themselves, and impact won’t happen without robust engagement. At Causecast, we believe that engagement in volunteering and giving comes from a social, mobile and interactive experience. That’s why we designed our platform to foster a real-time connection between employees and their peers, their community and the company. Everything is designed to be easy, highly secure, automated and engaging, making involvement so seamless, trusted and fun that employees want more. Ultimately, the volunteer experience needs to feel rewarding for employees, administrators and nonprofits – that’s how you build on positive experiences to create a corporate culture of giving back.
If you could summarize what corporations have to gain from using a platform such as Causecast in a few phrases, what would they be?
For innovative growth companies, Causecast provides giving and volunteering technology solutions to reach the highest levels of employee engagement and social impact. In contrast to the sluggish, forms-based, top-down administrator focus that has historically dominated employee giving and volunteering mindset, our unique technology and one-on-one support model enables companies to build high-impact employee-led programs that are globally meaningful, locally relevant, and easy to manage – for a far lower total cost of ownership than traditional solutions.
Where do you believe senior executives have the most impact in terms of promoting social impact and investment within corporations?
The more that senior leaders can point to the bottom line benefits of corporate social responsibility, the more investment they’ll see their companies making in these areas. What we’ve started to see happen is more and more of our clients realize they want to invest in our system for recruiting and retention purposes, not just for PR. Recruiting and retention are the real business needs they can measure and something all businesses are struggling with right now. Ultimately, because of financial incentives, retaining top-level employees who are involved with the company’s corporate social responsibility programs will increase giving and the impact they’re going to have on the world. It’s also very important that senior executives demonstrate their leadership and commitment to their philanthropy initiatives by participating in them alongside their employees. 
What do you see as the connection between working on boards of nonprofits and the Causecast initiative?
Board service offers unique advantages as a form of volunteering that should influence anyone interested in their personal and professional growth as well as their ability to make a difference. No matter what your professional field or expertise, everyone should step up to the experience of serving on a nonprofit board for its untold positive benefits. That’s why one project I’m particularly enthusiastic about is giving all of our clients’ employees the opportunity to get involved with nonprofit board service, which is typically an opportunity exclusive to VPs and executives. There’s an organization that we’re working with for this project called CariClub.
What about Horyou’s Social Innovation and Global Ethics Forum (SIGEF) is most interesting to you?
I’m very excited to see what strategic collaborations and powerful ideas emerge from SIGEF 2015, particularly within the “Technological Evolution for Social Good” theme. I’ve made that my life’s work, first as the co-founder of NetCreations, which paved the way for opt-in email marketing, and now as the CEO and founder of Causecast. It’s not easy to pull off an event like this on a global scale, but I think the world is in desperate need of it. I’m looking forward to the meaningful change that will inevitably result from this exciting social experiment.
