How to Answer the 5 Biggest C-Suite Questions About Workplace Giving

At some point, every CSR leader will be asked to justify a program, defend a budget, explain participation rates, or demonstrate business value.

Sometimes those questions come from a CFO reviewing investments. Other times they come from a CHRO evaluating employee experience priorities or an executive team deciding where to allocate
resources.

The challenge is that most executive teams already agree that supporting communities matter. What
they want to understand, is whether a workplace giving program creates meaningful value for employees, communities, and the organization itself.

This guide is designed to help you prepare for those conversations.

Main Takeaways:

• Workplace giving can create value across multiple business priorities at once, including employee engagement, retention, recruitment, brand reputation, and community impact.
• Employees increasingly expect opportunities to create social impact through work, and program design plays a significant role in participation rates.
• The business case extends beyond philanthropy, with research linking purpose-driven strategies to stronger talent outcomes, customer loyalty, and business performance.
• Success should be measured across participation, impact, company investment, and business value rather than donations alone.

Why Should We Invest in Workplace Giving?

Most employee programs are designed to address a single organizational priority. A learning and development program helps employees build skills. A wellness program supports employee wellbeing. A recognition program strengthens culture.

Workplace giving, however, allows organizations to create value in multiple areas through a single investment. It reaches employees through causes they care about, helps organizations strengthen relationships with talent and consumers through shared values, and supports the community by directing much needed resources to nonprofits.

It’s also one of the most established forms of employee social impact with approximately $5 billion donated through workplace giving each year in North America, and 50% of companies reporting that they contribute to charitable causes because it builds strong communities and business success.

For organizations with limited budgets and competing priorities, workplace giving offers a practical way to generate value both inside and outside the organization rather than pursuing those goals through separate initiatives.

What Business Value Does Workplace Giving Actually Create?

One of the challenges with evaluating workplace giving is that many of its benefits can feel intangible at first glance. However, a growing body of research suggests that giving programs can create measurable outcomes across talent, brand, business performance, and community impact.

Improved Employee Engagement

Workplace giving gives employees a tangible way to connect with the causes and communities they care about. Rather than simply hearing about a company’s values, employees have an opportunity to actively participate in them. And when they can see how their actions contribute to society and the communities around them, they are more likely to feel connected to both their work and the organization behind it.

In turn, employees with a strong sense of purpose at work are more than 5x as likely to be engaged in their jobs as those with a low sense of purpose – which is particularly relevant at a time when global engagement is at a 5-year low, costing businesses an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity every year.

Stronger Retention

Employee turnover is expensive, making retention one of the clearest ways to connect giving programs to ROI.

Today, 51% of U.S. employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job, while 2 in 10 Gen Z employees are changing jobs or industries to better align with their values. Corporate giving helps strengthen that alignment by providing employees with a meaningful way to support causes and communities they care about. In fact, nearly 8 in 10 employees at companies with a workplace giving program say their company’s values do align with their personal values, compared to 56% at organizations without one.

Of course, rarely the sole reason employees stay; but values alignment can play an important role in retention.

Among younger employees, 35% of Millennial and Gen Z employees actually cite their workplace giving program as a factor in their decision to stay – and with the average cost of turnover reaching $45,236 per employee (up $10,000 from the previous year), improving retention by even a modest amount can result in significant cost savings, particularly for larger companies.

Example Retention Value by Workforce Size

The following estimates illustrate the potential savings if workplace giving contributes to a 0.5 percentage point improvement in employee retention. Actual outcomes will vary based on turnover rates, compensation levels, industry, and workforce composition.

Estimated savings are calculated using the rounded number of employees retained multiplied by the average turnover cost of $45,236 per employee. This model becomes stronger when companies use their own turnover rate, their own replacement cost, and internal retention data.

How to Calculate Your Retention ROI

To put retention value into terms an executive team can evaluate, companies can use their own workforce data to estimate how much they could save if a giving program contributes to lower turnover.

Companies with strong CSR programs that include giving have been associated with 31% lower turnover rates, so organizations can use 31% as an illustrative reduction when modeling potential savings.

Employee headcount

× company annual turnover rate

× 31% potential reduction in turnover

× average cost per turnover

= estimated savings

Talent Recruitment and Attraction

Workplace giving can also strengthen a company’s ability to attract talent. For example, 75% of Gen Z employees consider an organization’s societal impact before accepting a position, and 44% of Gen Z employees and 40% of millennials have turned down employers that did not align with their values.

This suggests that for younger employees in particular, social impact is increasingly part of how they are evaluating and selecting potential employers.

That doesn’t mean workplace giving should replace competitive pay, career growth, or strong benefits. It just means that giving programs can add another layer to the employee value proposition by showing candidates that the company’s values are visible in practice. Ultimately, this visibility can make giving programs a meaningful differentiator in recruitment, particularly when candidates are comparing organizations with similar roles, compensation, and benefits.

Consumer Loyalty and Brand Reputation

Beyond simply offering giving, customers are also looking at whether a company’s giving feels meaningful, authentic, and connected to its values. A Harvard Business School study found that consumers care more about how companies donate than how much they donate, with people favoring brands that give a larger share of profits even when the total dollar amount is smaller.

Additionally, 46% of consumers overall and 51% of millennials pay attention to a company’s social responsibility efforts when making purchasing decisions, while more than half of consumers aged 18-34 are more likely to buy from brands that support charitable causes.

Since reputation and trust influence everything from customer acquisition to long-term loyalty, giving programs can deliver value far beyond the donation itself. When customers see a company’s actions align with its stated values, they gain additional reasons to choose that brand, remain loyal to it, and recommend it to others. And in a market where products and services can be difficult to differentiate, that trust can become a meaningful competitive advantage.

Increased Profitability

The important thing to remember is that giving programs should not be viewed as direct drivers of revenue or profit. Instead, they can help strengthen broader CSR and purpose-alignment strategies that have been linked to stronger business performance.

CECP’s Giving in Numbers report found that companies aligning business practices with corporate purpose reported 25% higher revenue and 22% higher pre-tax profit. In the same report, companies with purpose-alignment metrics saw median pre-tax profit rise 31% from 2023 to 2024, compared with 3% among companies without those metrics.

Workplace giving supports those broader efforts by turning social impact into something people can actively participate in. Furthermore, it provides measurable proof points around employee participation, company investment, nonprofit funding, and community reach, giving leaders a more tangible way to demonstrate progress against social impact commitments.

And when combined with other CSR activities such as volunteering and grantmaking, those efforts can contribute to stronger CSR programs which have the proven potential to raise profitability by as much as 21%, boost B2B and B2C sales by up to 20%, increase market value by up to 6%, and improve employee productivity by up to 21%.

Will Employees Actually Participate? And How Do We Make Sure They Do?

The short answer is yes. Employees increasingly expect opportunities to create social impact through work. In fact, due to positive trends in giving, 94% of major US companies plan to heighten or maintain their corporate philanthropy over the next few years.

That said, participation does not happen automatically. While every workforce is different, findings from the latest YourCause Global CSR Industry Review suggests that successful workplace giving programs focus on specific program elements to drive stronger results:

• Make giving simple and flexible. The fewer steps required to donate, the more likely employees are to participate. For example, payroll giving consistently achieves the highest participation rate of any donation method suggesting convenience plays a major role in engagement.

• Keep giving visible throughout the year. Visible calls to action, reminders, and campaign promotion often help turn awareness into participation. For example, companies using Engagement Elements within the YourCause platform to promote giving opportunities achieved a 9.7% giving engagement rate, compared to 7.5% for organizations that did not use them.

• Use targeted campaigns to create momentum. Organizations running pledge campaigns reported a 10.9% engagement rate versus 8.3% for year-round programs alone. These campaigns also generated higher average and median donation amounts, showing the value of focused giving moments.

• Leverage employee networks. Companies using Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to raise awareness and encourage participation reported an 8.5% giving engagement rate and higher overall engagement levels.

• Offer incentives that encourage employees to take part. Many organizations use incentives like matching gifts and volunteer reward programs to encourage initial participation and keep employees engaged over time. In fact, 46% of all donation dollars in 2025 were funded by company contributions, demonstrating the important role employers play in encouraging giving.

• Ensure leadership are actively participating. When executives and managers actively engage in campaigns, employees are more likely to view giving as part of company culture rather than a one-time initiative. Leadership participation helps signal that community impact is something the organization genuinely values, not simply another program competing for attention.

• Provide employees with clear insights into their impact. Participation often increases when people understand where funds are going and what those donations are accomplishing. Many companies use dashboards and AI to synthesize complex information to make results to make impact easier to understand and share.

• Combine giving with other social impact activities. Organizations offering both giving and volunteering programs see a higher engagement rate (16.5%), compared to those offering giving only (5%).

Small improvements in each of these areas can help create a stronger culture of giving over time and increase the likelihood that employees not only participate once but continue engaging year after year.

What Tangible Scale of Impact Can a Giving Program Create?

The exact impact a program creates will depend on participation levels, company investment, and program design. However, leading workplace giving programs demonstrate how employee donations, company contributions, and targeted campaigns can direct meaningful resources toward nonprofits and communities.

For example, Cencora used its giving program to support more than 840 charities worldwide, raise more than $1.6 million for charitable causes, and direct $300,000+ in disaster relief funding following Hurricanes Helene and Milton. These results show how workplace giving can support both long-term charitable priorities and urgent community needs.

YourCause’s network of purpose-driven companies further demonstrates the scale that employee giving programs can achieve collectively. In 2025 alone, organizations using YourCause’s employee engagement and grantmaking platforms engaged more than 7 million employees in social impact initiatives across 193 countries. Employer-funded contributions such as matching gifts, rewards, and incentives accounted for 46% of all donation dollars, the average gift reached $1,127 per donor when company contributions were included, and more than $652 million in grants were distributed.

While individual program results depend on workforce size, participation rates, and company investment, these examples illustrate the role workplace giving plays in nonprofit funding and community investment. Particularly as corporate giving programs generate an estimated $2.86 billion for nonprofits each year, making them an important source of charitable revenue.

For executives, the value of giving programs thus lies in the ability to direct measurable funding toward causes that align with corporate priorities while providing employees with a direct role in creating that impact. Every donation, match, grant, and campaign creates a record of where resources were allocated and what outcomes they helped support, making workplace giving one of the more visible and measurable forms of corporate social impact.

How Will We Know If Our Giving Program Is Working?

A workplace giving program should be measured across three areas: employee participation, community impact, and business value. As a result, no single metric can tell the whole story. Instead, leaders should evaluate performance across participation, impact, investment, and business value to understand whether the program is achieving its intended goals.

Workplace Giving Measurement Framework

The metrics that matter most will vary by organization and program goals. However, the strongest executive dashboards typically showcase participation data, impact metrics, and business indicators to provide a balanced view of performance. By tracking both activity and outcomes over time, leaders can better understand how workplace giving contributes to employees, communities, and the organization as a whole.