Beyond the Basics – Employee Giving Programs
We’re back with another installment of our Beyond the Basics blog series where we dive into features from the YourCause solutions that help level-up customer programs through unique and powerful functionality. Today’s spotlight – employee giving!
Curious about other features we offer that help you go Beyond the Basics? Check out previous posts from this series, spotlights on Volunteering, Customer Support, Disaster Relief, Engagement Elements, and Segmentation.
Many Ways to Give
Through YourCause’s CSRconnect solution, you can create an employee giving program that is reflective of your programmatic goals while still supporting employee choice. Our global vetted nonprofit database (with 1.65M+ charities available for giving) means you can engage employees around the world and enable them to donate to the causes they are most passionate about. Flexible functionality like Splash Modals, Engagement Elements, and Giving Campaigns also lets you highlight focused giving opportunities, like seasonal campaigns or key charity partners.
In our latest CSR Industry Report, we saw that combined giving and volunteering engagement jumped 4% last year! Download it now to dive into more engagement trends and benchmarking data.
YourCause puts our CSR admins in the driver’s seat. As a client, you’ll have access to a wide range of configurations and settings that equip you to make changes to programs quickly and independently. This includes the ability to spin up specialized matching gift programs, and even run concurrent match programs, a feature that our customers love to leverage for focused giving moments like disaster relief fundraising.
Read about Portland General Electric’s 10:1 Match for Wildfire Protection
In addition to traditional giving methods like credit card, payroll, and matching gift programs, we support a wide range of incentives that amplify participation. This includes the ability to give employees funds that they can gift to the nonprofit of their choice. One popular way to deploy these includes as a new hire welcome gift, which can get employees engaged in your CSR efforts right from the start, or even as a celebratory work anniversary gesture!
Transparency and Trust, for Everyone
Beyond robust giving modalities, we pride ourselves in an end-to-end giving process that is transparent for all stakeholders involved.
Employee Donors: Employees benefit from clear information on whether fees have been assessed on their donation or if your company has covered fees, the tracking of donation status, and the ability to easily access their giving history.
CSR Admins: Flexibility in fee coverage allows your organization to cover donation fees, and, coming soon, our new Processing Portal will give you unparalleled insights into your charitable disbursements, providing clarity and control where other vendors fall short.
Nonprofit Beneficiaries: Our free nonprofit portal gives your charity partners clear insights into donor details, information on upcoming disbursements, and will soon provide direct integrations into their donor management systems.
Product Management Insights with Terry Goldin
Terry has been with Blackbaud for a year and is based out of Saint Paul, MN. Volunteerism and corporate social responsibility are passions that she’s cultivated for years, notably through her active involvement as a parent mentor, and treasurer, for local travel soccer teams. Causes that are near to her heart are human rights and animal welfare.
YourCause is working hard to transform corporate giving. What are some of the big projects your team is working on?
Customer feedback and market research has sent strong signals that there is a need for faster donation processing timelines across the CSR and nonprofit industries, especially in times of disaster or around critical programmatic moments throughout the year.
We are excited to deliver several pieces of product innovation this year that will speed up donation delivery to nonprofits. By early 2026, our goal is to reduce processing timelines for the majority of non-payroll, U.S. domestic donations by 90-95%, getting donations to charities in just 2-5 days.
The nonprofit experience is so important. How are you accounting for that in these innovations?
We are working to ensure this new speed for our disbursements won’t disrupt nonprofits’ donation reconciliation processes and unintentionally create an administrative burden. This includes creating flexible disbursement options for them, such as disbursing directly to their Blackbaud Integrated Payments (BBIP) account without incurring BBIP fees, and seamless integrations into Blackbaud donor management solutions like Raiser’s Edge NXT and Blackbaud CRM.
We’ve consistently sought out nonprofit input into our product development for all of these exciting processing enhancements. We are working hard to ensure that the improvements we make for employees and CSR program admins are also translated into improvements for your nonprofit partners!
How will these innovations impact employee donors and program admins?
In addition to speeding up donations to nonprofits by 90-95%, we are building a customer-facing charitable Processing Portal. Think about this like the portal you access from your own personal bank. Our goal is to create a modern financial-technology experience for our customers that increases visibility into the charitable processing timeline. This will help them uncover opportunities to speed up action on their side, helping to reduce the time it takes to fund donations.
We are also building out several new payment modalities for employees, including recurring credit and debit card giving, which will unlock recurring participation. Additional payment modalities like Venmo, PayPal, and Google Pay will also modernize our giving experience and engage all generations of employee donors.