By: Bethany Avery, Aaren Ballinger, and Selena Fowler
When you hear the term “Workplace Giving” what do you think of? In its essence, it is a way to make donations through a payroll contribution, but in practice, there are a few types of “Workplace Giving” that we see over and over.
United Way - This staple of the workplace giving world allows employees and corporations to give back to their local communities by raising funds for local organizations, their local United Way, by participating in special events, volunteerism, and more.
Nonprofit “Internal” Campaigns - These campaigns can be annual or ongoing, and target the nonprofit organization’s very own employee base, providing employees the opportunity to contribute a portion of their paycheck to the cause they “go to work” for daily
Corporate Workplace Giving - Platforms such as Benevity, YourCause, Bright Funds, and others are leveraged across companies large and small, to provide employees a full-stop solution for employee giving, corporate matching, grant making and volunteerism. These platforms serve the double purpose of increasing employee engagement, while also assisting the corporation in meeting and tracking their corporate social responsibility goals.
Here at BrightVine, we’ve assisted numerous Blackbaud CRM™ customers with setting up automation for their various workplace giving sources. With our BrightVine Data Loader, it’s easy to set up an import that honors all of the special rules and treatments these scenarios entail.
For instance:
Creating Employee to Employer relationships
Creating Matching Gift Claims
Adding Employee / Employer Recognition Credits
Adding unique solicit code and/or mail preference handling
Properly entering and maintaining this data is crucial for an organization’s ability to fully maximize the value of this unique donor sub-set. In times of crisis such as what we’re all living through presently with COVID-19, the convenience of smaller, more regular contributions can certainly be easier to sustain than even a more traditional recurring gift, or one-off responses to repeated requests for donations. Over time, it is amazing what it can add up to, and not just financially. More often than not these workplace relationships can stretch years, giving you unique opportunities to not only engage and retain the individual donors but perhaps opening the door to a relationship with the corporation’s philanthropy team themselves.
Have you taken a look at the average lifetime value of your workplace givers recently? To do so, you’ll first need to code and track them, which, believe it not, is sometimes pushed to the backburner for this valuable group! Starting here can help put perspective on the time and investment that should go into properly storing and maintaining this data.
We also tend to see this group excluded from general marketing campaigns. Although this is often for good reason (for example, the workplace giving platform may have a non-solicitation agreement), you should have a targeted communication and stewardship plan within the bounds of what is allowed.
So, what are you leaving on the table data and engagement wise? The time is now to ensure you’re making the most of these valuable donors. For help getting started with your workplace giving data needs, reach out to our team of experts today.