Untitled screen cap Starbucks community service page 21 Nov 14Starbucks encourages their partners (Starbucks calls their employees, “partners”) to get involved in community service. Customers are usually welcome to participate too.

This is the community service webpage, which looks like it recently went through a re-design:

The front of the page says, “Join us in reaching our goal of 1 million community service hours per year by 2015.”

Then I noticed that below that goal, there’s a running total of their progress towards the goal of  the one million community service hours per year by 2015. As I type this, Starbucks has logged in 417,818 hours:

Untitled 2I have to admit that when I saw that number, my reaction was “They’re not even close. Maybe every two years, they’ll log in one million community service hours.” It’s November and Starbucks hasn’t made it half way to one million community service hours! Let’s hope that next year goes better!

And then I wondered why it is that Starbucks hasn’t made their goal? That’s the real reason that I am writing this article. Hopefully I can inspire you to find a project, join in, help out, and start a conversation about community service in your store or district. The holidays are a perfect time to give your time to others. The holidays are a giving season!

As to the reasons why Starbucks is so far behind their goals, but I came up with the following guesses:

Starbucks makes a big push to have people volunteer during the month of April – their designated “global month of service” but is less vocal about volunteering during other months.

It’s quite possible that many partners (and probably the overwhelming majority of customers) don’t even know that this website exists. Maybe the website could be printed on the receipts for a while?

It’s also possible that people might be more charged up about volunteering if Starbucks arranged a few large marquee events throughout the year – a constant reminder of using scale for good.

It’s also possible that there’s a lot more volunteering going on than what actually gets logged in on the website. I can imagine 3 or 4 partners working together on project – like volunteering at a food bank – yet skipping the step of logging in the project and hours.

And last but not least, I have heard a couple of partners tell me that the new website is harder to log onto as a partner from before – something to do with browser compatibility? I’m not sure if that’s a real issue, but it’s just one more thing I’d throw into the mix.

I don’t know why Starbucks is so far behind their goal, but those are my guesses.

I do know that I’d like to see all my readers create a profile, log in, and start volunteering. By the way, I too am very guilty of having volunteered during the April Global Month of Service, and then not really thought a lot about it since then! I need to sign up for a project!

Hopefully I’ve persuaded you to sign up! Here’s the website again – Starbucks Community Service website.