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LinkedIn is adding a new “Volunteer Experience & Causes” field to profiles, the company announced Wednesday. The section will let users highlight and showcase their unpaid or charitable work experience.

Promoting your charitable experience will help get you a job, according to a recent survey by LinkedIn. The company polled nearly 2,000 U.S. professionals and found that 41% said that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work just as much as paid work. Of the hiring managers surveyed, 20% said they gave a job based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience.

Of the 2,000 professionals surveyed, 89% had volunteer experience but only 45% included that information on their resume.

Striving to make everyday business tasks more engaging, a growing number of firms, including International Business Machines Corp. and consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., are incorporating elements of videogames into the workplace. They're deploying reward and competitive tactics commonly found in the gaming world to make tasks such as management training, data entry and brainstorming seem less like work. Employees receive points or badges for completing jobs or meeting time limits for assignments, for example. Companies also may use leaderboards, which let players view one another's scores, to encourage friendly competition and motivate performance, experts say. This "gamification" of the workplace, or "enterprise gamification" in tech-industry parlance, is a fast-growing business. Companies have used digital games for a number of years to help market products to consumers and build brand loyalty. What's emerging is using games to motivate their own employees.

Tech-industry research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014, some 70% of large companies will use the techniques for at least one business process. Market researcher M2 Research estimates revenue from gamification software, consulting and marketing will reach $938 million by 2014 from less than $100 million this year.

SAP even turned its gamification efforts into a game, holding a series of "Gamification Cups" to generate ideas for turning various business processes into games.

new business certification as an innovative way to put the province at the forefront of the work-life balance movement

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d is a seal of excellence that sends th

aking the checkin and making it philanthropic

lets users post their actions via SMS, web, email, Foursquare or Google Talk.

ach act earns the user points that can be redeemed for actual rewards and discounts

Transparency and corporate responsibility are more important than ever to consumers as they struggle with purchasing decisions in a tough econom

despite the recession, 75 percent of consumers believe social responsibility is important, and 55 percent of consumers said they would choose a product that supports a particular cause against similar products that don't

the survey found that 70 percent of consumers are willing to pay a premium for products from socially responsible companies

focusing on a market before an actual product idea

By starting with a market and focusing on data/interviews to find an addressable problem, rather than building software from day one, we encountered problems I would never have predicted

spent our time talking to as many parents/teacher/psychiatrists that would give us their time

Fundraising Software, Online Payments, Donor Management In addition to 4aGoodCause, ActiveGiving, Antharia|onDeposit, DonateNow, Donor Perfect, Donor Tools, eTapestry, GiftTool Solutions, Orange Leap, and Sage Fundraising 50, which we listed previously, you might take a look at these options:

For decades, the decision to be an environmentally and socially responsible company has been based on the bottom line: Would it be profitable?

In terms of traditional accounting and the legal requirements of corporations, costs always outweighed benefits.But it now seems that this equation is starting to lean the other way as brands recognize the potential financial and reputational advantages they can gain by engaging with consumers around the shared ambition of building a better world.

We can see this already happening among some leading brands such as Pepsi, Google, Nike, Patagonia and Starbucks, who have all earned consumer respect for their involvement

A 2009 study by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education reported that 84 percent of professionals from a variety of industries said that they do not measure ROI within social media. This, tallied with my own experience, suggests there is a widespread desire to jump into social networking without all—or even some—of the answers. But not making the attempt to explore metrics is not an option for businesses with long-term vision and goals. ROI does not mean "Return on Ignorance."

The barrier to entry in social networks is much lower than in most other communications and branding channels. In many cases, establishing a presence in these networks is free. But remember the saying, "nothing in life is free?" The same holds true in social media. Your time has a price tag, and resources don't materialize without costs. At the same time, the imperative of social media is real.

how many different variations of the “product feedback cycle” there are.

What he means by this is simply, how long does it take and how many layers does feedback on the product go through before it gets to engineering.

There are a few options.  First, you could have clients talk directly to engineers.  While that in theory is the shortest path the feedback cycle could take, that’s typically not the best solution.  Most engineering teams prefer to stay “heads down” and not be interrupted, and are also rarely involved in the client day-to-day, so context switching is hard for them.  You should definitely have interaction there, but probably not all the time. 

Our first Am Law Pro Bono 100 project takes an in depth look at firms’ pro bono matters.

How Are Analytics Shaping Social Games?

The freemium gaming business is expanding rapidly. We all know about the Facebook behemoth Zynga, which now claims over 250 million monthly players, and is valued at anywhere between -10bn.

“Our objective generally is to increase monetisation and improve player satisfaction,”