3 strategies to unlock your CSR participation potential
- Corporate social responsibility
- Employee giving
- Employee volunteering
- Corporations
- Corporate Social Responsibility
A successful workplace giving program should be a win-win-win, benefiting your business, employees, nonprofit partners. Companies with strong CSR commitments see higher retention rates, better market value, and greater revenue than their competitors. Employees involved in giving feel a stronger sense of purpose, belonging, and satisfaction. And for nonprofits, workplace giving provides a steady revenue stream, which can double or even triple with an employer match.
But all these benefits hinge on one thing: employee participation — and right now, it’s lagging. The CECP 2022 report found that participation dropped from 29% in 2019 to just 17% in 2022, with no signs of bouncing back. Plus, matching gift dollars continue to go unclaimed with $4–7 billion left on the table each year.
So, what’s getting in the way? In this blog, we’ll delve into the biggest roadblocks to maximum participation and share expert tips for overcoming them, including how Bonterra’s Employee Engagement software can help.
Want even more tips on building an engaged workforce? Download our full guide.
Without a central hub for your giving and volunteering efforts, managing these programs and boosting participation can become a real challenge.
When employees have to jump between different systems to log volunteer hours, donate, or request a company match, the process gets frustrating fast — and that can lead to drop-offs. This is especially true for matching gifts, where having a simple, straightforward process for submitting match requests is key. If it’s too complicated, potential donations could get left on the table, reducing nonprofit funding and your company’s overall impact.
For program admins, launching new campaigns becomes a time-consuming task when you’re managing updates across multiple platforms. And if vendor support or technical expertise is required to make changes, it can cause further delays, making it even tougher to quickly activate programs — especially during a disaster or crisis when time is critical.
To make it simple and easy for employees to participate as well as cut down administrative work, it's best to create a central platform for all your programs — from matching gifts to volunteer time off. Bonterra’s Employee Engagement software unites corporate giving initiatives and offers key benefits for both CSR leaders and employees.
Benefits for CSR teams:
Benefits for employees:
Corporate giving programs can pose significant reputational and regulatory risks, especially if they unintentionally fund the wrong nonprofit. These risks grow even more with international giving, where sanctions, complex regulations, and limited data make vetting nonprofits extremely difficult.
But here’s the catch: not offering international giving options can hurt your engagement efforts, affecting your company’s productivity, retention, and profitability.
Today, the lack of global giving is already impacting CSR, with non-U.S. employees being 30% less engaged than their domestic counterparts. Similarly, 30% of employees won’t donate through company initiatives if the nonprofits they care about aren’t included, and 97% of U.S.-based workers want to give to international causes. So, leaving out global employees and causes from your programs puts participation rates and overall employee engagement at risk.
Your company needs a corporate giving solution that allows you to offload the legal risk and administrative work associated with international giving. As a result, you’ll be able to confidently expand your programs to international employees and global nonprofits.
With Bonterra Employee Engagement, you’ll gain access to our international credit card giving capability which allows CSR teams to tap into three key benefits:
Employees want to see what happens after a donation has been made and its impact on communities. If you can’t provide that information, you risk losing their trust and decreasing the likelihood of future participation. Impact data is also critical for program admins who rely on it to see top causes supported, participation trends, and more. Without these insights, it’s difficult to leverage findings from past campaigns to optimize future ones for maximum participation and impact.
But measuring program outcomes and leveraging the data effectively is easier said than done. CSR leaders need a purpose-built tool that offers real-time updates, customizable dashboards, and data visualizations. By extracting insights from key data points, your teams can more easily identify trends, measure effectiveness, and determine the true impact of your efforts.
Bonterra’s native reporting tool, Insights, provides CSR teams with real-time updates, allowing them to optimize programs along the way and gives employees visibility into the immediate impact of their efforts. With access to turn-key dashboards, automated reports, and support from Bonterra’s team of industry experts, you’ll have everything you need to report true program outcomes and optimize your engagement programs.
Here’s how Insights helps transform your initiatives for maximum participation:
The best workplace giving programs make participation easy, accessible, and rewarding for everyone involved. By simplifying donation forms and event sign ups, enhancing global giving options, and reporting program outcomes, you can deliver a CSR strategy that benefits your business, employees, and nonprofit partners.
Ready to elevate your CSR strategy and boost participation like never before? Discover how Bonterra Employee Engagement can make a real impact. Schedule a demo with one of our experts today and unlock the full potential of your giving programs.
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