Volunteer Vision connects corporate employees as mentors for job seekers, refugees, and students. We asked the social startup our seven questions—read for yourself!
1. Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
We are Volunteer Vision—launched by three founders passionate about social engagement and CSR. We are the first SaaS provider for digital employee engagement, also known as corporate volunteering. We train, connect, and support employees who want to volunteer as online mentors for refugees on a one-on-one basis via our platform. Our online courses all focus on careers, training, and language. This enables us to provide location-independent support and demonstrates how effective digital engagement can be! The company's founding has both a scientific and practical background: Suska Dreesbach holds a doctorate in employee engagement, and Prof. Dr. Barbara Scheck has been working on various aspects of social entrepreneurship for years. Together with the third founder, Julia Winkler, they built one of Germany's largest corporate volunteering initiatives before founding the company. This gave rise to the idea of making engagement possible digitally, and the foundation for Volunteer Vision was laid.
2. But that's been around for a long time!
True! There are many physical mentoring formats and digital platforms. But the combination of both is not: 1:1 live mentoring of employees with eLearning materials tailored to the target group is actually quite new and closes a gap in the engagement area.
3. What has been your biggest challenge so far?
Letting things slide sometimes—a challenge we face again and again every day. And always keeping our focus and not trying to implement all our exciting ideas at once.
4. What are the three main ingredients for your recipe for success?
1) Know where our expertise lies — and which experts we need to work with to achieve the best possible result.
2) We combine the “best of both worlds”: we have a valid business model that allows us to offer our program to mentees free of charge, independent of donations, thus keeping the social purpose in focus.
3) Professionalism — even though we are a very young company, a high standard of quality in all business areas is particularly important to us.
5. Let’s get down to business: How is business going?
We can't complain. Thanks to Simon, we were able to launch our platform in our first year of business, convince our first business angel, and acquire six major companies. We'll leave the exact numbers to your imagination! 😉
6. What does Munich mean to you?
Of course, Munich shapes our culture: We work thoroughly, we meet deadlines, and everything is proofread three times. You can't really get the corporate spirit out of us anymore. While our Berlin colleagues have already been out partying three times, we're just opening the first glass of champagne. Okay, admittedly, Berlin sounds more exciting, but we're growing our product at lightning speed, and we're happy to be able to build a solid team without a hire-and-fire approach! One thing that's always underestimated is the great network that Munich offers: Through the universities, we're directly connected to the founders of Personio, Konux & Co. And in the end, we fulfill another Munich cliché: We really enjoy the B2B business.
7. How will your startup become the next unicorn? Or will we see you soon at Epic Fail Night?
Both possibilities are exciting! But joking aside, we do all this because we hope to provide real social value. So, we dream of becoming an impact unicorn 🙂 . Epic fail stories also make life more colorful, and sometimes we like things neon!
