How Busey Bank Boosted Community Impact with YourCause

Busey Bank is a full-service financial institution serving individuals, businesses, and communities across ten states, offering banking, wealth management, and financial services tailored to local needs. With deep roots in the communities it serves, Busey views community investment as a core responsibility, supporting local organizations through volunteerism, charitable giving, and long-standing partnerships.

Empowering Community Engagement with a Centralized Platform

As the organization expanded through growth and acquisition, Busey’s community relations team needed a scalable way to engage associates, improve visibility into volunteer and giving activity, and reduce administrative complexity. Busey adopted YourCause to centralize volunteer opportunities, giving, and impact tracking in one place.

Since launching the platform, Busey Bank associates have recorded more than 59,000 volunteer hours. Before YourCause, volunteer data and participation history were difficult for associates to access, and much of the tracking work sat with administrators in convoluted spreadsheets. As Busey grew from five to ten states, that model became harder to sustain.

“Before implementing Blackbaud’s YourCause, we used a different platform and found a lot of barriers. Associates couldn’t see their volunteer history or how many hours they’d logged, and we hadn’t set up a matching program yet,” said Corinne Dungan.

YourCause streamlined volunteer management and giving, offering user-friendly reports and clear participation trends. “The reporting feature is amazing. We’ve never been able to see data like this or have data like this in such an easy-to-read way,” Dungan added.

Driving Volunteer Engagement and Matching Success

With YourCause, associates can discover volunteer opportunities, sign up for events, record volunteer hours, participate in the matching gift program, and view their upcoming and historic activity. For administrators, centralized dashboards and real-time reporting replace manual spreadsheets and one-off requests for history and totals.

“The biggest positive feedback that we’ve received is that our associates love being able to search for volunteer initiatives around them. They can search by skill and are able to go back and see everything that they’ve recorded year to date and in years past,” Dungan said.

The platform also helped Busey scale event coordination across markets, supporting sign-ups, visibility into who registered, and streamlined hour tracking that reduces follow-up and reconciliation. With deep admin controls, Busey was able to control and configure their program without having to wait on slow-to-respond customer support teams.

That shift to self-service has delivered incredible efficiency gains for Busey’s community relations team. “In the last year, I would say, as a 5-person team we have saved over 500 hours,” Dungan explained.

When Busey introduced donation matching through YourCause, engagement accelerated. During Community Promise Month, its first campaign with matching enabled, Busey recognized the impact of their new platform. “We saw over $25,600 matched, which was a 144% increase from the previous year and a 266% increase from 2024. It was a major increase in engagement,” Dungan said.

Turning Data into Insight and Storytelling

Beyond increasing efficiency and participation, YourCause helps Busey connect measurable results with the stories behind them. “It’s putting qualitative and quantitative data together,” Dungan said. “Before YourCause, we had half of the picture and now we have the full picture.”

Busey uses these insights to support recognition programs such as Volunteer of the Month and Volunteer of the Year, while also strengthening internal storytelling and external reporting with nonprofit partners.

Growing Community Impact at Busey Bank

Building on this momentum, Busey continues to expand engagement across new teams and markets. With 75% of employees active on the platform, the bank aims to increase participation to at least 78% while surpassing 22,000 volunteer hours annually.

To support these goals, the community relations team offers quarterly updates for Busey Way Champions, cause card incentives for new hires, and expanded recognition programs. For Dungan, the impact is reflected in both the data and the personal motivations behind it. “The most rewarding part is hearing all of the associates’ stories. Every time they log in, they’re logging in for a purpose,” she said.