How Redefine's Red Thread Fridays Hit 80% Participation

—Mashadi Letwaba, Business Development Director, forgood

Redefine didn't build a bigger volunteering programme. They built a simpler one - a Friday slot that changed everything.

In May 2025, Redefine launched Red Thread Fridays on top of their existing Red Thread volunteering platform, which already connected employees to 500+ vetted causes and 1 000+ opportunities. But this addition changed the participation trajectory entirely.

The concept was deceptively simple. Every Friday, employees could spend 10 minutes volunteering. Not whenever they felt like it. Not when they "found time." Every Friday, there was a slot open, and the company had already curated what needed doing that week.

In one afternoon, we saw 52 connections from 17 users in a tight window (Redefine’s total staff count is 400). The activity wasn't a spike from a big push email. It was rhythm and habit- employees showing up on Friday the way they show up for stand-ups or team lunches.

Redefine made deliberate design choices that stacked on top of each other.

• They communicated the dedicated calendar slot for Red Thread Fridays to team leaders, not just individual employees. That permission in corporate environments where time-scarcity is the operating condition opens everything else.
• Instead of asking employees to choose from hundreds of opportunities, Red Thread Fridays said: "Here's what needs doing this Friday." Each week, there was access to 10-minute jobs that delivered real value.
• Redefine also deployed "Red Champions" - employees trained to support the initiative on Fridays, identifiable by branded Red Thread t-shirts. They were present. Colleagues saw them. The informal network did what corporate comms never can: spread the culture of volunteering through word of mouth and aspiration. The visibility moved participation from a system feature to a social signal.

What started as an experiment became rhythm. The participation rate hit 80%+ among Redefine employees who knew about the initiative. Week to week, the same employees returned. They didn't sign up once and disappear. Friday became part of their cadence.

The consistency showed up in the data as much as the volume. For Redefine's CSI reporting, this translated into documented hours that could feed directly into B-BBEE scorecards and annual impact narratives. Every employee was recorded as participating in the company's social investment strategy.

But the real test of any volunteering programme isn't participation rate. It's whether Causes actually benefit. For the NPOs on the volunteering platform, Red Thread Fridays solved a different problem. They had needs - data entry, design feedback, social media help. But they couldn't predict when volunteers would show up or whether they'd have the right people for the job. Red Thread Fridays changed that equation. Causes didn't just get more volunteers. They got reliable volunteers, and that's a different resource entirely.

I'm writing this 1 year in. Redefine is still running Red Thread Fridays. The participation hasn't dropped. It has held its consistency. The design worked because Redefine removed friction at every point - consistency of time, curation over choice, team-level adoption, visibility, and a clear connection to corporate purpose. Those deliberate choices stacked up to create sustained participation that became habit.