Inside Ryan’s 93% Participation Success: A Modern Approach to Global Community Impact

Ryan’s purpose is to liberate clients from the burden of being overtaxed, freeing their capital to invest, grow, and thrive. With headquarters in Plano, Texas, Ryan provides an integrated suite of federal, state, local, and international tax services. The team of 7,100 professionals serves 74,000+ clients in more than 80 countries, including many global 5,000 companies.

Corporate social responsibility is woven into the DNA of Ryan through the core value of “Generosity Matters – I share success with my clients, colleagues, and the community”. Ryan formalized this commitment in 2011 by forming The Ryan Foundation to support organizations addressing education, health and wellness, and poverty and distress relief. The foundation also supports Ryan’s Employee Financial Assistance Fund, which helps team members going through a personal hardship or natural or manmade disaster. The Foundation amplifies their team members’ passions, providing matches for giving, volunteering, and board service, sponsoring local volunteer initiatives at the office level, and making strategic grants where their clients and leaders are engaged.

The company achieved significant increases in both their giving engagement rate and total donations in 2025 and were featured in the 2026 CSR Industry Report. We interviewed Amy Lee, Deputy Chief of Staff, Community Outreach at Ryan, and Executive Director of The Ryan Foundation, to learn how the organization managed to achieve such incredible results.

 

How does the Ryan Foundation bring your social impact strategy to life for employees across the business?

Over the years, Ryan’s approach has moved away from team members being “voluntold” where to give and volunteer, and moved toward meeting team members where they are, amplifying the impact they are having in their communities.

We moved away from matching only core charities and now invite team members to submit their favorite charities for matching. Team members fill out a form on our RyanSHARES site, and we vet each charity to make sure it falls within our funding areas of education, health and wellness, or poverty and distress relief and has at least 70% of their expenses going directly to programs. Vetted organizations are then eligible to receive matching through our giving and volunteering programs.

Team members can request donation matching up to $2,500 per year and may track individual volunteer hours and board service for our Donations for Doers program. Every 10 hours volunteered by a team member earns the charity a $250 grant, as does each year of board membership. Ryan also provides up to 16 hours paid per year for volunteering at office-sponsored events.

 

 

Ryan has a highly distributed, global workforce. How do you approach engaging employees in volunteering across different regions, time zones, and working styles?

Through our award-winning myRyan program, Ryan was a global, hybrid workplace long before the pandemic forced many companies to shift their model. Team members are trusted to complete their work when and where they need to and are evaluated on results rather than hours clocked. We provide in-office, in-person on location, and virtual volunteer opportunities to engage all team members whether in-office, hybrid, or fully remote. Offices are encouraged to identify causes their team members support and organize efforts around those.

For example, our North Texas offices rally around the North Texas Food Bank’s annual peanut butter drive. We utilize our innate sense of competition (our core value of Wired to Win) to split into teams and host a virtual fundraising contest that culminates in an in-office cookie bake off, raising close to $30,000 each year. In Vancouver, the team raises funds for a nonprofit serving children with disabilities, then spends their RyanSHARES Day as electrical engineers, soldering electrical switches to toys to make them accessible for these children.

Last year, the Paris office issued a steps challenge to their team, with The Ryan Foundation making a donation of 20 Euros per 1,000 steps to Doctors Without Borders. Our Carlsbad, CA office participates each year in the Big Kahuna Lagoon Corporate Cleanup contest, removing trash and invasive species. Team Ryan took home the golden paddle this year for most pounds of trash collected!

 

 

RyanSHARES Day has become a cornerstone of your employee engagement strategy. What makes this initiative so impactful, and how has it evolved over time?

RyanSHARES Day was created as an annual day of service to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the founding of the Firm. We’re hosting our 11^th annual RyanSHARES Day this summer alongside the 35^th anniversary of the firm. Last year RyanSHARES Day engaged 93% of our team members as we provided in-person volunteer opportunities both in-office and on location and virtual volunteer opportunities across all our time zones.

For the first time ever, we opened giving as a participation option, so that those who were unable to volunteer because of business needs or PTO could take part as well. The 10^th annual RyanSHARES Day saw 3,000 donors and 3,500 volunteers provide more than $840,000 in value to our communities across 114 events.

 

Ryan saw a significant increase in giving engagement last year. What strategies helped unlock that growth globally?

When the challenge was issued for 100% participation last year, we knew we’d need to make the program as accessible as possible. Our India team, a significant portion of our team member base, had not utilized our RyanSHARES system for giving previously. The $10USD credit card minimum was not a realistic expectation for our team. We needed to adjust our programs to reflect cultural and regional realities.

We partnered with two NGOs to establish a QR code giving campaign, and then created fundraisers for uploading offline donation receipts, both ensuring donations were matched and participation was recorded in the system. This adaptation resulted in resounding success!

 

 

In addition to the funds invested in matching through The Ryan Foundation, our leadership invested in our culture by offering additional teambuilding funds to offices that achieved 100% participation. The reward for doing good is the chance to further strengthen bonds amongst team members. This model has proven to be a win-win and will be utilized again this year.

 

How have innovations in technology and AI supported the measurement and reporting piece of Ryan’s social impact efforts?

Impact Edge has made reporting on funds donated and hours volunteered attractive and easily available. This dashboard has greatly reduced the time it takes to produce my standard KPI report. I utilized internally licensed AI when it came time to evaluate overall engagement, as I combined data from both giving and volunteering reports, and compared those reports to our HR roster to analyze percentage of participation by each location.

These reports were incredibly useful in engaging office leadership to encourage 100% participation. Leadership appreciated the opportunity to reach out individually with tailored messages to garner participation.