Impact Interview: Heather Venard

Name: Heather Venard

Role/Function: Director of Social Impact and Sustainability, Bumble Inc.

What are you working on these days?

One of the best things about social impact is that it doesn’t have to be confined to your work hours; it can be a part of your every day, both at work and in your personal life.

Working at Bumble Inc. has given me the opportunity to get creative with how we make an impact on the world in ways I never thought possible. One of my favorite recent projects was updating our Moves Making Impact program. This feature, which launched on Bumble in 2019, gives our members the opportunity to designate a cause they care about. Then, we donate to an organization related to that cause every time they make the first move by sending a message to a new match in date mode. Those on our app can choose between Healthy and Safer Relationships, which will benefit the U.S.-based National Domestic Violence Hotline in its work helping people experiencing abuse and shifting power back to survivors; Equity for Women, through Vital Voices’ entrepreneurship program, which supports women-led organizations solving the world’s greatest challenges; or Save the Bees, a project of the National Geographic Society helping women and underrepresented scientists conserve and protect important pollinators. I love that we empower our members to make an impact on incredible organizations that align with our core issue areas and philanthropic pillars.

And we really do dive deep with these partners. I was deeply honored to speak at the 2023 National Conference on Domestic Violence as part of our work with The Hotline. Yes, this was an opportunity to share with a broader audience all the ways we partner with this incredible organization, from Moves Making Impact to an innovative volunteer pilot we launched in 2023, where our Bumble Inc. employees volunteered their time to respond to non crisis inbounds received by the Hotline, so their advocates could prioritize responding to crisis calls and texts. But even more, being at the conference was an opportunity to listen and learn from the lived experiences of survivors, deepening our understanding of how we can do our part to support healthy and equitable relationships. At the end of the day, this is why we do the work we do.

I’m also extraordinarily proud of the work we’re doing around ESG and environmental sustainability - we’ve been hard at work crafting the narrative around our corporate citizenship, and I’m excited to share with you all the next steps on the journey over the next year.

Outside those working hours, getting involved in my local community has always been a huge part of my life. For many years, I volunteered, served on nonprofit boards and got involved as much as possible with the Austin, TX community. And then, in summer 2022, my husband, dog, cat, and I packed everything up and headed to a new adventure in our new home state of Maine! So, I’ve been getting up to speed on the issues in our new community and the nonprofits working to make change. I’m thrilled to be on the leadership team of a local giving circle of women from the Portland, ME, area who pool their funds to make quarterly donations to local organizations. We’ve already donated over $50,000 in a little over a year. I couldn’t be more proud of this collective of engaged, curious and compassionate Mainers.

What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social impact? 

I think my “aha” moment was really, “Wait, I could do this as a job? For real?”. I was working in finance at the time and when my company was acquired, the new managers brought a robust CSR program. I had a career-changing experience volunteering with this team and being mentored by the local market leader. It was the first time I had felt truly, deeply fulfilled in my work, even as a volunteer, and I knew it was what was next for me! I have been so honored to have been mentored and championed by leaders throughout my career who supported my passion for this work, but I’ll always be forever grateful for that first volunteer opportunity that showed me what my professional life could be. 

How did you break into the social impact space?

After becoming more familiar with CSR, I volunteered as much as possible and inquired about the local council of employees who volunteered their time to help organize events and understand what was important to our community. I quickly learned the basics of volunteer management, employee engagement and grant-making, and then asked for guidance from the leaders in that space. I was extraordinarily lucky in my journey, and I recognize my privilege of being in spaces where I was given the opportunity to grow. However, what I learned from that experience was the importance of having the courage to ask. I asked my direct managers if I could spend more time volunteering, I asked if I could join the volunteer council and I asked the leaders I admired if I could take them to coffee, learn about their path, and ask them for advice and guidance. Ask, ask, ask!

Now that I’m further along in my career and in a position to pay it forward, I love meeting people excited about the CSR, ESG, or social impact spaces, hearing about their journeys and sharing what I can as they plot their own paths.

Working in social impact is often about driving change. What is the skill or trait that has been most important for your work as a change agent? How did you learn or hone it?

Whenever I speak to anyone interested in working or learning more about this space, I tell them: Be a sponge. When I tell colleagues who aren’t in this space about the different departments I’ve worked in at various companies doing this work - Public Affairs, HR, Marketing and Brand - they’re usually shocked. How could ESG, sustainability, and social impact work across all of these spaces? But I always say it’s been one of the greatest gifts because our work is deeply impacted by where our roles sit, our partners, and our objectives.

No matter which department I’ve been a part of across my career journey, I’ve always wanted to know why social impact was important to them. Why was it a driving force, not just for the business at large, but for their team objectives? This has given me a much better understanding of the various business cases for our work, which helps me not only pitch to those teams but also to leaders across the organization. By understanding the “why” for the team, the department, and the company at large, we can often drive a much bigger impact on the social causes we want to support.

What most excites you about the social impact space right now?

I love that so many companies are trying to find the right balance between donations, metrics, and partnerships. The impact of Trust-Based Philanthropy has been tremendous, and it’s driven a more thoughtful conversation about nonprofits being the experts we need to empower to do the work. While we want to get a read-out from a recipient organization of the impact of our funding, we should ask the team to tell us, in their words, what they’ve been able to achieve with the funds they’ve been given. This approach, rather than a rigid set of reporting requirements, leads to a truer, more nuanced understanding of the organization’s impact. Additionally, companies can deepen the impact of those dollars by creating partnerships with nonprofits to drive awareness around the mission and help innovate solutions without being overly prescriptive. This is a tricky balance, but I see more and more companies (and I think Bumble is one of them) understanding and striving for that balance.

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