On Oct. 7, 2021, more than 3,000 Nielsen employees across 40 countries volunteered at over 360 events or individual activities for our ninth annual Nielsen Global Impact Day (NGID). As our global day of service, NGID encourages our people to step back, give back and connect with their communities by donating their time and talents to make an impact. Nielsen volunteers collectively logged over 9,700 volunteer hours through Nielsen Global Impact Day events and initiatives this year.
NGID is the annual call to action for CARES, one of Nielsen’s 13 Business Resource Groups (BRGs) that’s focused on driving social action through volunteering. Nielsen people are encouraged to plan and participate in volunteer events on NGID and throughout the year, using their 24 hours of annual volunteer time.
While we did not hold NGID in 2020 due to COVID-19 (focusing instead on ongoing “In It Together” virtual volunteering), we knew we didn’t want to miss another year! Teams of NGID planning leads stepped up with energy and creativity to organize a variety of virtual and socially distanced volunteer events in our communities.
Through dozens of virtual volunteering events around the world, Nielsen employees designed educational posters for children and vulnerable adults in India, shared career experiences with students and young adults in Mexico and the U.K., recorded children’s books for under-resourced students in the U.S., learned how to save trees through urban science and much more.
Other Nielsen volunteers spent the day cleaning up beaches and parks, emptying out their closets to donate lightly used items to local nonprofits and helping with outdoor painting and repair work in their communities.
“Given the many challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nielsen CARES & GREEN South Asia team and I had to really think out of the box to organise virtual activities to enable large scale participation,” said Divya Bhagyanath, Associate Director, APAC Enrichment and CARES and GREEN Co-Lead for South Asia. “It was heartening to see the show of solidarity exhibited by the employees through mass volunteering. My chat was flooded with messages about how much it helped individuals feel that they were doing something at a time of crisis.”
As part of our companywide commitment to advance representation in media and technology, Nielsen also teamed up with Common Impact to host a virtual Pitch Competition. Fifty-four Nielsen volunteers leveraged their specialized skills to propose solutions to organizational challenges faced by five nonprofit partners: Asian American Journalists Association, Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, INCLUDEnyc, Inevitable Foundation and the Think Tank for Inclusion & Equity.
“I’ve been inspired to see the courage, commitment and dedication that so many of the volunteers and leaders showed on Nielsen Global Impact Day and throughout the year,” said Andrea Bertels, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship. “Even through the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, NGID continued to provide a meaningful and engaging opportunity for our employees to reconnect, recharge and give back through their volunteer time.”
For more information on Nielsen’s volunteering programs, progress on our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments, as well as other ways that Nielsen gives back, visit Nielsen’s 2021 Interim Responsibility Update.
