Modernizing Cargill’s CSR workstreams with Bonterra CyberGrants

Overview

The challenge

Overcoming technological stagnation and fragmentation

Cargill encountered significant challenges with its previous vendors, limiting its ability to effectively innovate and scale its corporate social responsibility programs. Lack of improvements to technology failed to support the company’s strategic vision, resulting in operational inefficiencies and increasing costs.

A primary issue was the stagnation of their long-time system. The platform saw no meaningful improvements, yet costs were escalating, particularly when the team needed to expand the number of users. The inability to grow their user base without incurring prohibitive costs was a major frustration that limited program accessibility and reach.

The team also struggled with a fragmented technology landscape. Their previous setup required them to manage employee engagement and grants management in two separate systems, creating data silos and inefficient workflows. This separation made it impossible to get a holistic view of their philanthropic efforts. While their previous vendor offered global capabilities, managing worldwide operations proved difficult. The customer service experience was also poor, leaving the Cargill team without adequate support for their complex needs.

Furthermore, a critical gap was the lack of customizable user accessibility on the grants management side. The team could not assign specific permissions for different roles, such as an administrator versus a program manager.

To achieve its goals, Cargill needed a new partner that could provide a consolidated and innovative solution. The ideal platform would unify employee engagement and grants management into a single system, offer robust and flexible user permissioning, and support their global operations with excellent customer service.

The solution

Unifying global impact through innovation

Cargill recognized that its disparate legacy systems were creating administrative bottlenecks and stifling the potential of its global philanthropic efforts. The company sought a comprehensive solution that could streamline complex workflows while ensuring accessibility for its diverse workforce.

By implementing Bonterra CyberGrants, Cargill successfully transformed its grants management operations into a streamlined, data-driven ecosystem. This shift marked a major improvement for the team’s internal workflows, as documents that previously relied on disjointed email chains are now shared and accessible directly within the platform.

The team also began leveraging Insights to meticulously track the duration of grant reviews and payout processes. The platform’s analytics capabilities enabled Cargill to build robust dashboards in a matter of months, a notably quicker timeline than their previous solution.

Insights also plays a key role within Cargill’s integrated program with CAF America for all of the organization’s international grantmaking efforts. This integration allows Cargill to monitor CAF’s processes and track the exact timeline from grant receipt to payout just as they would with their domestic processes, delivering notable time-saving benefits.

CyberGrants modernized Cargill’s employee giving program by switching from a single sign-on (SSO) experience to a flexible, non-SSO signup system. This strategic change proved beneficial for unwired employees, such as those in beef operations plants and other non-desk roles. By providing these employees with login access through a general kiosk, Cargill has effectively streamlined the data entry process. Previously, Stacey manually entered payroll deduction information for all registered employees; new registrations could range between 400 and 1,400 or a handful of plants annually. Now, thanks to the simple non-SSO sign-on, Stacey’s manual workload has been trimmed to less than 100 registrations, saving significant time.

CyberGrants was also instrumental in helping Cargill advance its goals of increasing employee participation and accurately tracking volunteer hours. The Cargill Cares Council leads can now register volunteer hours on behalf of their teams en masse through a bulk hours log. Leads often upload thousands of hours at once through the newly implemented Cargill Cares Team Volunteer site.

“The bulk hours log was really easy to set up,” said Stacey. “We’re now able to capture hours for individual causes in specific regions and across all of our business groups.”

Cargill Council leads have also taken advantage of CyberGrants’ photo upload capabilities when logging volunteer activities in their community. Operational efficiency was further enhanced through features such as the return-to-applicant functionality, which allows grantseekers to adjust proposals and reports directly in the system, as well as automated email reminders for pending impact reports, and duplicate account cleanup capabilities. CyberGrants’ Watchlist Scans also provided immense value to Cargill’s government and legal teams, helping the organization navigate risks and maintain strict compliance controls.

Outcomes

Driving global impact with data-driven efficiency

With CyberGrants, Cargill has optimized its corporate social responsibility workflows, overhauling once-complex processes and empowering team members from across the organization to focus on local impact on a global scale.

The results of this transformation are evident in the sheer scale of Cargill’s giving. The company donated $110 million globally in 2025, with an additional $3 million contributed by employee giving initiatives. Cargill also logged 77,000 volunteer hours from employees across 40 countries, marking an 18% increase in volunteerism year-over-year. The bulk hours log, created within CyberGrants, was instrumental in achieving this increase as it simplified the process for teams to record their contributions collectively. CyberGrants’ approval workflows also helped the grants team reduce grant approval timelines by 15%.

Other strategic initiatives have also flourished. Cargill now creates an “HQ Giving Page” through CyberGrants each year during its giving season at its headquarters, encouraging employees to make contributions to various personal causes. Stacey can run reports across different business units to track funds raised for specific causes during set time periods. This encourages friendly competition between units, challenging each team to see which unit can achieve the highest year-over-year increase in giving performance.

Beyond standard giving, the team has also rolled out its Employee Disaster Relief Fund to support employees impacted by natural disasters. The EDRF fund’s homepage lives within the main navigation of Cargill’s internal communications site. Employees can also navigate to this site to find giving opportunities for various humanitarian efforts. Stacey creates each company-backed giving opportunity in CyberGrants, along with a promotion highlighting Cargill’s 50% donation match to amplify the organization’s impact. Additionally, Cargill has created a dedicated Cargill Gives Volunteering application page, which enables employees to sign up for opportunities tied to specific campaigns run by individual business units.

Insights’ analytics have made it easy to follow up on past-due reports and required reviews. The team is no longer required to manually download and share reports to various team members via email. Today, they simply send links from the dashboards that are accessible across the organization. This shift also eliminated the need for data to be downloaded from Power BI, an additional tool previously used for data visualization.

With CyberGrants implemented, Stacey and her team have reclaimed valuable time to spend on strategy, program expansion, and increasing efficiencies within the employee experience.

“I really appreciate the growth and the continued effort that Bonterra is putting towards CyberGrants. I think it’s great, and we want to be able to use it to its fullest capabilities,” said Stacey.