Bonterra Corporate Social Responsibility 2023 roadmap update

We’ve been hard at work identifying ways we can improve our Bonterra Corporate Social Responsibility (formerly CyberGrants) products and services to help our corporate customers do more good. We’re eager to share our exciting product investments that continue to help you drive deeper employee engagement, streamline and simplify processes, and report impact across stakeholder groups. 

There are exciting product updates and investments coming, and we aren’t stopping there. We are focused on improving reliability, support, and security so that your teams can focus their time and resources on what matters most: delivering impact to meaningful causes. 

Below, we’ve outlined questions we’ve received from customers and how we’re making strides to address them through innovative feature updates and product launches.  

How will WeSpire help Bonterra customers enhance employee engagement and social impact initiatives? 

Recently, we announced that WeSpire joined Bonterra to expand our corporate social responsibility (CSR) offerings, a strategic acquisition that marks a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to supporting and evolving employee engagement and powering those who power social impact. 

WeSpire brings a wealth of capabilities, programs, and expertise to our engagement offerings. Its suite of integrated solutions includes hundreds of customizable engagement programs focused on giving and volunteering, employee well-being, sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Together, these solutions enable customers to automate, track, and measure programs that were traditionally managed manually. 

By welcoming WeSpire into the Bonterra family, we:

• Immediately expand and accelerate our offerings and presence in the large and mid-sized CSR market.
• Give our customers a broader portfolio of offerings to expand their focus on CSR and environmental, social, and governance (ESG).
• Provide even greater value to our joint customers.  

We are confident that bringing together Bonterra and WeSpire will enable more employees and organizations to participate in impactful initiatives that foster an inclusive culture, improve business performance, and drive positive CSR and ESG outcomes. Our shared goal is to create a better working world, and together, we will efficiently power programs that drive lasting change. 

How can Bonterra CSR help me drive deeper engagement in workplace programs?  

We’re constantly looking for new ways to make it easier for your workforce to get involved in corporate giving, and we have several exciting new product features and updates to support these efforts.

Matching gift integration

Matching gift programs offer a powerful opportunity to incentivize workplace giving by amplifying the impact of employee donations. To increase the likelihood that your employees will take advantage of these programs, use an integration that captures employees’ interest in matching their donations directly on nonprofits’ online donation forms. 

We have leveraged Bonterra Donor Engagement (formerly EveryAction) to enable a matching gift integration that will increase employee participation and drive nonprofit revenue. 

Additional donation methods 

Last year, 49% of e-commerce transactions used digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and these payment methods are becoming increasingly popular for donations. Based on this data, it’s clear that speed and ease of giving are influential factors as to whether someone will donate and that your employees expect flexible ways to pay.  

With Bonterra CSR, employees can now make donations using Apple Pay or Google Pay, allowing your organization to reduce friction and increase the likelihood that employees complete donations.  

Employee Resource Group module

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are voluntary, employee-led groups that aim to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace and build a greater sense of community. Usually, an ERG aligns with a shared identity, background, or experience as they work to lead programming that informs and amplifies the histories of their community. ERGs play an important role in CSR and wield the power to boost employee engagement when paired with workplace giving and volunteering.  

We’re currently collaborating with a select group of customers to create a new module that allows users to conduct ERG activities through a central CSR platform. With the ERG module, members can find, join, and participate in group activities. Plus, leaders can create and promote ERG events and report on group activity.  

Global giving and international employees 

Many Bonterra CSR customers have a global presence and employ workers around the world. As a result, support for global giving and international employees is a priority for us. We currently offer:

• Portal translations in 25 languages
• Client-provided translations for custom content
• Support for 200 currencies 

To build on these offerings, we’re working to identify partnerships and opportunities to provide a more equitable employee engagement experience for non-U.S. employees. In the future, Bonterra aims to expand the ability to accept and disburse payments in even more countries across the globe.

Can I expect feature updates to meet financial institutions’ needs?  

Bonterra CSR supports nine out of the top 10 U.S. banks. With this experience, we recognize the importance of identifying and tracking Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)-eligible activities and reporting impact across low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. Many of our customers currently rely on gathering and validating their CRA data through external resources and want a better way to track CRA eligibility. 

To meet the needs of our commercial banking customers, we've:

• Updated Insights to add census-based fields to supplement geocoding. This will enable you to report on CRA-qualifying activities and provide additional information on your initiatives that may have influenced local LMI communities. By integrating census-based fields with geocoding, Insights will enhance the precision, speed, and depth of your CRA activity reports. 
• Added a set of Community Impact dashboards. Aggregate and visualize CRA-qualifying activities at the community level across grantmaking and volunteering programs. These dashboards aim to simplify the process of gathering and analyzing CRA data by allowing users to layer their own custom CRA fields and filters into the dashboards and track progress against their CRA goals. 

These new features will improve CRA data tracking and allow your financial institution to save time on exam preparation.

How can Bonterra CSR help me take advantage of best practices through standard product offerings? 

Bonterra CSR provides sophisticated and flexible capabilities for managing CSR programs. That said, we have also heard your feedback that flexibility can come with challenges to efficiently managing programs. We have assessed the areas of our platform that could benefit from increased standardization and will roll out standard capabilities that can be configured by your program administrators without the involvement of our services teams. 

We are currently focused on standardization in two areas:

Matching gift logic enhancements 

When a disaster or crisis strikes, one of the easiest ways to quickly respond is by implementing a matching gift program. However, many of our customers rely on matching gift customizations, which makes it challenging for administrators to implement program changes when the need to pivot arises.  

The Bonterra CSR team is working to develop out-of-the-box best practices that empower administrators to make program changes themselves. Once these capabilities are available, you’ll be able to update your matching gift program with the help of in-platform guidance, ultimately decreasing the time it takes to respond to a disaster or crisis.  

Standardized eSignature integration 

Through Bonterra CSR, users can integrate their system with eSignature providers (like DocuSign) to sign and execute agreements while complying with industry and region-specific standards for electronic signatures and ID verification. While this feature is key for customers concerned with maintaining regulatory compliance, making changes to the content sometimes relies on the Bonterra CSR team. 

To improve the grants management process, we’re adding flexibility to when an agreement can be sent for signature and empowering administrators to set up and make changes themselves. This fills the product gap that drives customizations, amplifies the workflow status feature, and encourages self-sufficiency.  

How can Bonterra CSR help me improve my relationship with grantees and nonprofit partners?  

To increase collaboration between grantmakers and grantees, we’ve invested in product enhancements to Bonterra Donor Engagement’s FrontDoor solution. These improvements make it easier for stakeholders to both securely share information and determine program eligibility.  

Corporate customers

For our corporate customers, we’ve:

• Worked to eliminate the overhead that administrators spend on managing organizations.
• Added the ability for users to search and add FrontDoor organizations internally.
• Improved data confidence and accuracy.
• Added robust tools to test the nonprofit experience against your programs. 

Through these product improvements, we’ll be able to expand giving efficiencies by increasing FrontDoor adoptions. 

Nonprofit partners

For nonprofits, we’re adding expanded profile fields, including the ability to:

• Select industry-standard certifications.
• Report diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statistics.
• Leverage data to control program eligibility. 

When a nonprofit’s data is stored in one platform, they’ll spend less time inputting organizational information multiple times in various forms. 

These enhancements allow nonprofits and grantmakers to determine eligibility more quickly, saving everyone time and energy.   

Discover why we're better together

While we’re eager to see these product investments make it easier for your business to deliver social impact, they’re only the tip of the iceberg for what we can accomplish together as Bonterra. 

We are better together through collaboration and innovation, and we’re so excited to continue this journey with you.