Methodology: The Integrated CSR Report (2026)

A report about accountability should be able to account for itself. So, before you take the recommendations in our latest report, “The Integrated CSR Report: Creating impact in an era of accountability,” at face value, let’s show our work.

Every claim in Bonterra’s report is built on evidence and, wherever possible, on more than one source of data. Three bodies of evidence anchor our analysis:

1. The Corporate Giving Infrastructure Gaps Study, an independent survey conducted by Hanover Research on Bonterra’s behalf and fielded online in May 2026. After cleaning, it comprised 150 qualified respondents (110 at corporations and 40 at foundations), all full-time, manager-level-or-higher decision-makers at organizations distributing at least $2M in grants annually. Because this report focuses on corporate CSR, survey figures reflect the corporation subgroup (n=110) except where a finding concerns grantmaking common to both groups, which draws on the full base (n=150).
2. CECP’s Giving in Numbers: 2025 Edition, which reflects 2024 data reported by 189 companies. Year-over-year comparisons rely on matched-set data (companies responding in consecutive years), so the base behind a given CECP figure may differ from the full sample.
3. Bonterra platform data* from CyberGrants and Deed, drawn from anonymized transaction- and account-level records across the Bonterra Network. In 2025, 273 CSR teams and grantmakers distributed $9.2B to more than 73,000 nonprofits through CyberGrants. Trends were measured by comparing platform activity across 2023–2025; longitudinal claims reflect the full window of available data. Platform findings describe correlation, not causation, unless stated otherwise.

Two additional Bonterra surveys are referenced where relevant: Meet the Moment: Navigating Funding Disruption (2025) and Bonterra’s 3% by ‘33 impact report (2026).

The following methodology walks through the analyses, calculations, and caveats behind all major claims throughout our report.

Claim 1: CSR investment is holding or on the rise, but the teams and budgets responsible for carrying out initiatives are staying the same or shrinking.

Investment commitment remains strong: The Corporate Giving Infrastructure Gaps Study found that 91% of CSR leaders at corporations report that their company’s CSR investment grew over the past two years (only 5% noted cuts). But that commitment hasn’t been matched with resources: CECP’s matched-set data shows the median CSR team shrank 5% between 2023 and 2024, and median cash community investment per full-time employee fell 35% from 2020 to 2024.

Against that leaner base, 73% of leaders report mounting pressure to prove ROI. The survey figures (Hanover) and the staffing and spending benchmarks (CECP) allude to a similar theme: The mandate CSR teams are expected to fulfill is expanding, while capacity to deliver it is contracting.

Claim 2: Employees who participate in CSR are less likely to leave the organization.

This finding recurs throughout the report and comes from an analysis of Bonterra CyberGrants employee records over a five-year window. Every employee was sorted into one of four fixed groups based on their CSR history: whether they had donated, volunteered, both donated and volunteered, or done neither. To ensure a robust sample, the analysis drew on employees hired between 2010 and 2026. Each group’s size was locked as a fixed denominator. Then, for each “tenure month” (each month following an employee’s hire date, across the first five years), we counted the cumulative share of each group that had terminated and divided by that fixed size.

Employees in the “both donated and volunteered” group showed a consistently lower termination rate than every other group across all five years. Plotting the cumulative termination rates against the no-participation group showed that volunteer-only employees stayed below the non-participant termination rate through roughly the first 37 months, and donor-only employees through roughly 42 months (the basis for the report’s “first three years” language).

Note: Because we are observing platform behavior rather than running a controlled experiment, this is a correlational finding; we do not assert that participation causes retention.

Claim 3: Fragmented systems are the operating baseline.

Most CSR teams run on a patchwork of disconnected tools. In the Corporate Giving Infrastructure Gaps survey, 95% of teams said they manage CSR across four or more separate systems, 51% use seven or more, and no respondents described their systems as “fully integrated” (only 18% said “very integrated”).

The downstream effects surface as the two most-named technology problems: difficulty scaling programs with existing tools (73%) and limited integration between systems (52%). CECP benchmarking adds that stack complexity tends to scale with the organization: Higher-revenue companies with larger community-investment budgets report greater management costs.

Claim 4: Connected reporting changes reporting behavior.

Reporting is both the top-cited obstacle for CSR teams and their heaviest time sink. What’s more, only 13% of teams can produce a comprehensive CSR report in under two weeks, while 60% need three to four weeks, and 27% need one to two months (per Hanover). No respondents to the survey reported working from real-time or self-serve data.

Bonterra’s platform behavior shows what happens when that friction is removed: Average use of reporting features on CyberGrants grew nearly fourfold between 2023 and 2025, from 258 to 1,017 reporting events per account. To build that measure, we counted the average number of reporting-related actions per account each year, defining “reporting-related” as any feature whose name included terms like report, dashboard, insight, or export, and — to keep the year-over-year comparison sound — including only features present in all three years.

Among organizations that use both scheduled and manual reporting, automated runs outpace manual pulls: The median rate was 4.05 scheduled runs versus 2.8 manual pulls per user per month. A reasonable extrapolation of those findings is that teams lean on scheduled runs for recurring needs and reach for manual exports when they need something specific.

Claim 5: Purpose-aligned metrics correlate with financial performance.

Most large companies (87%, per CECP) have an official corporate purpose statement, but far fewer (67%) have embedded metrics tracking whether day-to-day decisions align with it. That measurement component correlates strongly with financial results: CECP finds companies with purpose-aligned metrics report 25% higher median revenue and 22% higher median pre-tax profit than those without. The advantage compounds over time: Companies closely tracking purpose alignment saw median pre-tax profit growth of 31% between 2023 and 2024, versus just 3% for companies without such metrics.

Claim 6: Impact measurement is incomplete across the three major categories of CSR stakeholders.

CSR’s return shows up across three stakeholders: employees, business, and community. Measurement lags in several notable places across all three categories.

On the employee side, CECP finds that fewer than half of corporate programs (46%) measure the employee-related value of their community investments at all; among those that do, most rely on existing employee surveys (72%), and only 30% use HR data to compare volunteers and non-volunteers on outcomes like retention.

In the context of business impact, 72% of CSR teams measure ROI through alignment to ESG or sustainability goals, while just 45% measure it through direct business outcomes (Hanover, corporation-only respondent data).

On the community side, outcome data depends on nonprofit partners and is often shaky: Thirty-nine percent of CSR leaders cite unreliable data from nonprofit partners as a barrier to measuring effectiveness, and 45% cite inconsistent or incomplete data across their own programs (Hanover, corporation-only respondent data).

Claim 7: Proving business ROI is fundamentally a capacity story.

The single most-cited barrier to measuring CSR’s effectiveness, named by 64% of leaders, is the difficulty of linking activity to business outcomes (Hanover, corporation-only data). Part of that is simply time: Sixty-eight percent of CSR leaders spend between 50–74% of their time on administrative tasks and another 19% spend more than three-quarters, with reporting and data collection (93%), grant application review (59%), and compliance checks (38%) noted as the most time-consuming activities.

Underneath the time problem is a staffing ratio problem. Two-thirds of teams (66%) support 50 or more nonprofit partners and 30% support 100 or more (Hanover), while CECP benchmarks put the median CSR team at 10 full-time employees managing 311 grant recipients. Bonterra platform data reflects the same scale: Across CyberGrants, 273 teams distributed $9.2B to more than 73,000 nonprofits in 2025 (roughly 409 nonprofit relationships per customer, based on the average number of distinct nonprofit tax IDs each grantmaker supported), managed by an average of six system administrators and a median of just two. At that ratio, deep relationship management gives way to triage.

That capacity strain isn’t fixed, though. Median grant review time on CyberGrants fell from 11 days in 2023 to 9 days in 2025, which provides evidence that the right infrastructure can shrink the administrative layer while programs keep growing. (This is the median time between each grant’s last change date and its approval date, after excluding certain legacy records; even a small day-count difference at the median represents a meaningful share of total review time.)

The capacity story shows up in demand too. The number of grants small grantmakers approved rose from 6,331 in 2023 to 8,091 in 2025 (a 28% increase), while administrator counts barely budged. Across the CyberGrants platform, grant funding rates (i.e., total grants funded divided by total requests each year) run between 37–45%, and the average grant size has trended up over time, from roughly $31K in 2018 to $41K in 2025 (both figures per Bonterra grantmaking data). Each of these adds weight to a lean team’s workload.

Claim 8: Willingness to participate is high, but conversion and visibility lag.

There’s clear appetite for greater participation: Sixty-eight percent of CSR leaders consider employee participation very or extremely important, 70% report that at least half of employees take part (Hanover, corporation-only data), and CECP finds employee giving has grown 21% over the past three years. But appetite doesn’t automatically convert. High participation is still rare: Only 1% of organizations report 75%+ employee participation, and 32% report participation in the 25–49% range (Hanover, corporation-only data).

Two barriers stand out, and both point back to program design and infrastructure. On experience: Forty-one percent of leaders cite poor user experience with their tools and 45% cite limited relevance to employee interests as top barriers. On visibility: Forty-eight percent cite limited visibility into the impact of participation, 43% specifically name the difficulty employees have understanding their impact, and fewer than one in five organizations (under 18%) share CSR performance metrics with employees at all (Hanover, corporation-only data).

Claim 9: Average employee donation size is rising.

The average employee donation on CyberGrants rose 47% between 2023 and 2025, from $136.93 to $201.24. Some important context behind this figure: The growth in dollars per donation came alongside a decline in total transaction count and in the number of participating companies. In other words, this reflects deeper giving from employees already engaged rather than broader reach across the workforce.

Claim 10: Participation is episodic and Q4-heavy, but planned programs can sustain it year-round.

Employee giving concentrates at year-end: CyberGrants data finds that, depending on the year, 35–38% of annual employee donations land in Q4 alone (calculated as the count of Q4 employee donations divided by the full year’s total), mirroring charitable giving more broadly.

Planned, well-communicated campaigns sustain markedly higher participation than reactive ones: CECP finds workplace-giving campaigns reach 24% matching-gift participation versus just 4% for episodic disaster-relief efforts. Disaster-relief donors are also less likely to stick: Bonterra data found their 12-month retention runs around 24%, compared with 38–47% for regular-channel donors, though 54% of those who do stay go on to give through regular programs. This suggests that disaster relief can be a viable entry point, so long as programs build a bridge to sustained giving.

Claim 11: Participation compounds once accessible infrastructure is in place.

Bonterra’s Deed data shows participation building over time rather than spiking and fading. Working from an employee-engagement dataset, we measured, for each organization, the first year in which it crossed a given engagement threshold, then averaged across all organizations that reached it: Companies reach 10% employee engagement in an average of 1.14 years and 25% engagement in about 1.5 years. Pooling every organization’s engagement by year and taking the top quartile, top-quartile programs sustain roughly 25–31% participation year over year. And engagement keeps climbing past the launch year: The average change from an organization’s first year to its second was +5% for programs that started in 2023 and +10% for those that started in 2024.

Claim 12: Few companies run formal champion programs, though the structure measurably lifts engagement.

Only about a third of companies (34%, per CECP) run a formal ambassador or champion program, implying that nearly two-thirds have no structured way to distribute advocacy or develop the employees driving it. Where formal programs exist, they help: CECP finds companies with a formal ambassador program average 27% volunteer participation versus 24% without, and leadership encouragement ranks as a top-four driver of participation, cited by 43% of leaders (Hanover, corporation-only data).

Platform data points to where champion behavior can be spotted: On Deed, user-published Deeds (events and fundraisers employees create and post themselves, rather than admin-launched activity) show a 1.81x engagement multiplier over admin-published activity.

Claim 13: Partnerships are a top resilience tactic, and dollars are flowing toward relationship-based giving.

When philanthropic leaders name their top tactics for navigating policy and funding uncertainty, strengthening corporate-nonprofit relationships is among the most common, cited by 65% in Bonterra’s 2025 Meet the Moment survey. Spending patterns reinforce this: CECP finds median Total Community Investment in Community & Economic Development rose 22% between 2022 and 2024 (the fastest-growing program area), suggesting resources are flowing toward relationship-based, locally focused giving.

Claim 14: Partnerships default to the familiar.

The most-cited partnership difficulty is simply finding the right partners: A quarter of corporate CSR leaders (25%) name difficulty identifying the right collaborations as their single biggest challenge (Hanover, corporation-only data). Paired with economic pressure, this concentrates dollars among known entities. CECP finds the median company now directs 44% of its total community investment to its top four strategic programs, a share that rose 10 percentage points between 2022 and 2024. CyberGrants data bears this out at the dollar level: Grouping receiving nonprofits by size, large nonprofits ($5M+ in revenue) receive 78–81% of total grant dollars, meaning the bulk of corporate funding continues to flow to the most established organizations.

Claim 15: Partnerships deepen with platform tenure, and discovery tools aid retention.

Bonterra data indicates partnerships strengthen the longer they’re managed on connected infrastructure. Grantmakers on CyberGrants issue markedly more grants over time, rising from an average of 89 in year one to 219 by year three. Repeat relationships follow the same arc: On Deed, the ratio of repeat to new donors rose from 0.35 to 0.51 between an organization’s first two years on the platform. (Note: A “repeat” donor in a given year is one who gave to any nonprofit they had also supported the prior year; a “new” donor is anyone else, including first-time and previously lapsed donors. The ratio is repeat donors divided by new donors within the year, and it correlated strongly with total donation count: 0.90 for 2023-cohort organizations and 0.94 for 2024-cohort organizations, both statistically significant.)

Discovery tools also appear to play a role in retention: Grantmakers who used CyberGrants’ org-search feature retained repeat grantees at a 61% rate, compared with 55% for those who didn’t. For each grantmaker, we found their org-search feature usage and their repeat-grantee rate (i.e., the share of 2025 grantees who had also been funded in 2024.).

Claim 16: Effective partnership now demands more than funding.

The bar has risen both in terms of what funding partners measure and how they collaborate. On measurement, a mid-2025 Bonterra survey found the metrics that most drive funding decisions are program impact (95%), evidence-based outcomes (90%), and mission alignment (90%). On collaboration, the forms corporate partners rate most effective include capacity-building support (68%) and joint program design (57%). Yet staying aligned remains a challenge: Twenty-three percent of CSR leaders cite inconsistent communication or reporting as their biggest partnership hurdle (Hanover, corporation-only data).

The payoff for deeper investment can be substantial. Bonterra’s Jumpstart program, which equips nonprofits with tools and training to fundraise more effectively, generated $7.8M in nonprofit revenue from roughly $1.05M invested across 214 organizations, a 7.4x philanthropic return. Even gift matching adds more than half a billion dollars to the ecosystem each year on top of direct giving: Totaling matched employee donations across both CyberGrants and Deed comes to $520M in corporate match on $842M in employee giving in 2025.

---

*A note on how our platform analysis was conducted: Unless otherwise stated, all CyberGrants and Deed figures draw on data from 2023 through 2025, exclude internal test data, and count only transactions or grant amounts above $0. Where a specific claim relied on a different window or a non-standard method, we note it alongside that claim.