Which statement has more impact?

“We donated $300 to a charity who feeds the hungry.”
“We fed a single mother’s family of four children for a week.”

Data and numbers have more meaning when they tell a story. But with hundreds or thousands of employees at your company, it becomes infinitely more difficult to pinpoint the overall social impact.

This post will provide strategies on how to measure your company’s impact with these tips:

• The Importance of Measuring and Sharing Impact
• Starting Simple to Determine Your Impact Area of Focus
• Calculating Your Impact
• Communicating Your Social Impact

It’s important to understand that you don’t need to change the world overnight.

You can begin by simply looking at one program or activity. Understanding what occurs and then tracking and analyzing that data can lead to a better understanding of how your company is positively impacting the world.

The Importance of Measuring and Sharing Impact

Hopefully you agree that tangible results have more meaning than raw numbers, as in the example above.

But I’ll also explain three other reasons why measuring and sharing your social impact is important:

• Impact demonstrates that a company is living up to its values and drives a more positive company image.
• Impact increases employee engagement.
• Impact can highlight a company’s contribution to greater civic engagement programs such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and IMPACT 2030.

Many companies have values but don’t always show with concrete results how they are living up to this mission.

Providing impact results can back up the social responsibility value claims your company makes. This has the added advantage of boosting public perceptions of a company.

Managers go to great lengths to motivate employees, reduce turnover, and increase employees general work ethic and morale. Yet it’s proven that employees engage more with an employer who practices social responsibility.

79% of people prefer to work for a socially conscious company.

Communicating or publishing impact successes can do wonders to boost employee morale which has major impacts on the bottom line.

Sharing impact also illustrates the company’s collaboration with and contribution to larger movements. One organizational effort in particular, IMPACT 2030, which I’ll discuss in a later section, is a great way to get involved in the larger sustainable community.

Most company goals already align with the SDGs — it’s just a matter of discovering yours. It also offers an opportunity to connect with customers or vendors who also share the same goals.

Starting Simple to Determine Your Impact Area of Focus

Before calculating your impact, it’s important to define or determine the social mission. Consider both your company’s and your employees’ social goals to define one specific impact area to focus on at a time.

What does your company already say it cares about? Is community engagement, making a difference in local communities or caring for others or the planet part of your company’s values or culture? Does your company focus on a specific cause or have a history of rallying around one event or non-profit organization?

You could also consider which nonprofits or organizations you already support. Perhaps you could choose your impact measurement based on which non-profit received the most funds from your company. It could be as simple as that.

While the company mission is the guiding rudder, the culture of the employees are the oars that keep the boat rowing.

Where are they donating their money, time, and resources? Use the causes of your employees to appeal to what matters to the people who define your company and culture.

By looking at both your company’s mission and the culture, you’ll find one area of focus to help you calculate and share your impact.

Calculating Your Impact

Next comes the numbers. This section will explain best practices for measuring company effort, as well as give examples for how to determine what kind of real world impact results from the company’s CSR efforts.

Check on a nonprofit organization’s website or reach out to them directly to find out how they calculate dollars into tangible impact.

Nonprofits give estimates to help you total up these numbers. For example, Smile Train estimates they create one “new smile,” or cleft palate surgery, for every $X donated. This makes calculations simple.

But what about other organizations who might focus on more abstract or less measurable goals, like medical research?

This become more difficult to measure. We always recommend reaching out to an organization to develop relationships and work together to determine impact numbers in this case.

If you work with a select charity aligned with a broader company goal, then get those charities engaged to help you measure the specific impact of volunteering or dollars on your combined goals – for example, number of students mentored, increase in test score year over year for same group, or amount of water cleaned.

Your CSR provider should have tools to better track and report on your company’s impact numbers. Here are some additional tips on using CSR software to your advantage: 

• Consider adding a question to the admin panel that gathers impact data for all volunteer events.
• Consider adding a post event survey to gather additional quantitative data, like number of students mentored, read to, or tutored.

Communicating Your Social Impact

By being creative in the way you communicate your company’s impact, you can receive the benefits outlined above. You should communicate this both internally and externally.

Here are some ideas:

Internally:

• Include digital signage on your CSR platform.
• Create a voting campaign to recognize and maybe even reward employees or teams contributing the most to a specific goal. The reward can be a corporate donation or cause card.
• Include the numbers, stories, and recognition in executive all-hands meetings or communications.

Externally:

• Generate an engaging end-of-year report (Dell does a great job of this).
• Create a social impact page on your website.
• Write a press release/blog.
• Create branding or stories for conferences, sales meetings, and on the wall at the office.

Conclusion

None of this is possible if you aren’t tracking the efforts of your company and its employees and if you haven’t first considered the impact the activities or dollars create.

Whatever your company size, it’s critical to measure the good that you do.

So whether you’re tracking giving, volunteering, and grants in an excel spreadsheet, or using a powerful CSR software platform, the point remains. Having a CSR tool that makes sense for your company size is critical.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to:

• Prove you’re acting on your sustainable values.
• Build employee morale with engagement.
• Contribute to larger social forces.

For inspiration, check out Double the Donation’s list of 10 Companies Doing Corporate Philanthropy Right.

Blaine McGaffigan is a Content Marketing Specialist who brings over 5 years of digital marketing experience to YourCause. He strives for creativity in all projects, and believes a unique and sincere voice is critical for engagement. In his free time, you can find him kayaking the river, taking photographs, and reading comics.

Simply put, YourCause, LLC is a technology company connecting corporations and their employees with the causes they care most about. Our SaaS-based CSRconnect Platform is a fully hosted and managed solution used to engage employees in volunteering, giving, and sustainability initiatives, along with helping grants administrators manage corporate and foundation philanthropic programs. We currently support over 4.2 million employees in 160+ countries at more than 140 Fortune 1000 companies. Since inception, we’ve processed nearly $1.5B to charities and tracked over 23M volunteer hours – that’s 2,625 years! The companies partnering with us are joining the YourCause Global Good Network, representing some of the most committed corporate citizens and dedicated nonprofits around the world.

Are employees more motivated to donate to nonprofits if their employer is willing to match their gift?

Thousands of companies across the United States offer this incentive to employees through “matching gift programs.” In fact, two-thirds of employers surveyed in America’s Charities’ 2015 Snapshot Report indicate they match employee payroll contributions. That’s a 62% increase since 2006. Yet, $6-$10 billion of corporate matching gift money goes unclaimed each year.

Why the gap? That is one thing America’s Charities is trying to figure out with the Snapshot 2017 survey – and that’s where you come in!

America’s Charities’ Snapshot Series reports on trends, attitudes and perceptions in employee workplace giving. Having explored these trends from the perspective of employers (Snapshot 2015 and Snapshot 2013) and nonprofits (Snapshot 2014), Snapshot 2017 will offer a first-ever look at trends in employee giving from the perspective of donors. Our researchers are surveying employee donors to learn about what they value, how they make decisions about giving, and how giving through the workplace impacts their overall charitable endeavors.

Consisting of just 10 multiple choice questions, here’s how you can participate in the Snapshot 2017 survey:

Donors:

This is your chance to share your giving preferences and what role you expect employers to play in supporting your ability to give time, talent, and/or money to nonprofits and causes inside and outside the workplace. Click the following link to take the survey now http://impact.ac/2ljOkdy. Your feedback will be used to help employers and nonprofits shape the future of workplace giving, volunteering, and other corporate philanthropic initiatives. Responses will be confidential and anonymous and shared later this year in America’s Charities’ Snapshot 2017 report.

Employers:

This survey is an opportunity to gain a better understanding of what your employees value and expect through employee giving, matching gifts, volunteering and other corporate giving initiatives. You can share this link with your employees http://impact.ac/2ljOkdy or, upon your request, we will give you a unique survey URL to distribute to your employees, so you’ll have your organization’s full dataset to benchmark against the larger field’s response, which will be available this fall.

Nonprofits:

This survey can be used as a listening tool to help you gain a better understanding of what your donors value about giving and volunteering programs. You can share this link with your donors http://impact.ac/2ljOkdy or, upon your request, we will give you a unique survey URL to distribute to your donors, so you’ll have your organization’s full dataset to benchmark against the larger field’s response, which will be available this fall. For your convenience, we’ve created a promotional toolkit to assist with your donor communications, complete with content for social media, donor emails and your website.

Interested in a unique survey URL or have a question about the survey?

Please email Lindsay Nichols, America’s Charities VP, Marketing and Communications, at lnichols@charities.org. She can provide your with a unique survey link and answer your Snapshot 2017 survey questions.

Over the years, fundraising has improved dramatically by embracing technology improvements in every aspect of the fundraising process.

More and more nonprofits and individual fundraisers are taking advantage of the amazing tools and strategies now available to them, but there is still much room to grow.

In order to highlight the improvements that have been made over the years and to provide some helpful hints on how to incorporate new technology into your next fundraising effort, we’ve put together a comparison of fundraising of the past to fundraising now.

For this post, we’ll focus specifically on:

1. General Fundraising Campaigns
2. Silent Auctions and Raffles

Fundraising Then: General Fundraising Campaigns

In the past, fundraising campaigns supporting a nonprofit or annual fund focused heavily on direct mail, email, phone solicitation, and in-person asks. While these methods are still effective, they have inherent flaws that limit the potential of a fundraising campaign.

In general, we find that these outreach methods are significantly limited by their cost, reliance on resources, and the reach they can achieve:

• High Cost. Methods like direct mail can quickly become expensive, considering the cost of postage, the physical cost of your mailer, and any design or creative work that goes into the production of a direct mail ask. Phone and in-person solicitation can have even bigger cost implications because they require having a volunteer or staff member making the calls or the direct asks, taking valuable resources that could be focused elsewhere.

• Resource-Intensive. Traditional fundraising methods are often resource-intensive, meaning many people are needed to make the effort worthwhile. Having one person calling potential donors will never reach its tipping point. Instead, you will most likely need an entire team making calls in order to see donations increase. Again, this can be an effective method of fundraising, but it becomes costly as more and more resources are needed.

• Limited Reach. One of the biggest flaws of these traditional outreach methods is the reach associated with each. While direct mailers can be sent to a large number of people, it is nothing compared to the large numbers that can be engaged with some of the methods we will discuss later in this post! Additionally, phone and in-person solicitation often will have higher conversion rates than mail, but are extremely limited in reach. As new fundraising technology is being embraced, a major benefit is the substantial increase in reach from the same or fewer resources.

As your cause or nonprofit embarks on its next fundraising campaign, keep in mind that the above methods still have a place in helping support your cause. Our recommendation is to continue using these methods (perhaps to a lesser extent), while beginning to shift your focus to some of the new methods we will discuss below.

Fundraising Now: General Fundraising Campaigns

As we learn from traditional fundraising methods and begin incorporating new technology into our fundraising campaigns, it is important to focus on the trade-off between cost, resources required, and reach generated. As we discussed above, traditional methods are often resource- and cost-intensive, with generally low reach.

Shifting to what fundraising looks like now, you’ll find multiple tools available that allow for exponential increase in reach with minimal costs and resources needed.

What does this mean for your fundraising campaign? A larger potential donor audience, lower costs, and higher overall proceeds!

Now, we will focus on three of our favorite fundraising tools for fundraising campaigns: online fundraising pages, peer-to-peer Campaigns, and text-to-give.

Online Fundraising Pages

Online fundraising pages have become extremely popular over the years and are used for many (if not most) existing fundraising campaigns.

An online fundraising page acts as a central location for your cause or nonprofit to tell its story and collect donations from supporters. There are a few factors that are crucial to the success of a fundraising page:

• Be Personal. A personalized story is vital to the success of your campaign. When choosing an online fundraising service, be sure there is functionality to add your own description and story. As you create this story, make it as personal as possible in order to truly connect with your supporters and create a lasting relationship between your organization and your donors.

• Use Visuals. A visual fundraising page will always perform better! When creating your page, be sure to include any images that are applicable. These could be photos of patients who have been affected by the funds your nonprofit has raised, or fun pictures from a recent volunteer or community event.

Once an online fundraising page is created, the benefits will immediately be visible. To start, these pages are not resource-intensive at all, often requiring only one person to set them up, with very reasonable costs.

Even more importantly, online fundraising pages have an endless reach. Based on the story you tell, your page could easily go viral and reach a significantly higher number of people than that of your traditional fundraising efforts.

As more and more people donate, they are able to share their experience via social media, increasing your campaign’s reach with each donation submitted!

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaigns

Another popular and effective fundraising strategy of late is the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fundraising involves leveraging your organization’s supporters in order to expand your mission’s reach, donor base, and proceeds. P2P fundraising is a multi-tiered approach where donors are asked to raise money in addition to donating.

P2P fundraising empowers an organization’s supporters to become its best fundraising advocates, harnessing the collective giving power of a much larger audience in the process. All of this comes as a result of motivating your initial supporters to become fundraising advocates, inspiring their own networks of friends and family.

As you might have gathered, a P2P campaign’s success is increased tenfold when it is used in conjunction with online fundraising technology. There are many peer-to-peer providers that equip fundraisers with online fundraising pages, social tools, and email campaigns to ensure the success of your campaign.

Staying on top of the most up-to-date technology is vital because of how rapidly P2P fundraising is evolving. Did you know that, for example, peer-to-peer lending allows people to receive loans even when they’re burdened with a bad credit score? As P2P models develop, people will become more familiar with P2P fundraising in their everyday lives (like with the aforementioned lending).

As such, they’ll be more comfortable using P2P software and advocating for your nonprofit, too!

Text-to-Give Campaigns

Just like the name sounds, text-to-give campaigns allow your supporters to donate to your cause via text message.

Donors simply text a keyword or phrase to a specified phone number with their desired donation amount, and are then sent a link to complete checkout. The simplicity of these campaigns makes it extremely easy for supporters to donate to your cause without stopping what they are doing. This leads to high participation and support for your cause!

Social Media and Email

All of the tools  we’ve mentioned can be effective in isolation, but their true power can be observed when combined with social media and email campaigns.

Once an online fundraising page or peer-to-peer campaign is live, social media and email promotion will help the program gain instant support and make it easy to seamlessly share the giving experience and story of your cause to the masses. The results will be a much higher reach, a larger donor base, and higher proceeds!

Fundraising Then: Silent Auctions & Raffles

Two more fundraising methods that have seen dramatic improvements over the last few years are the silent auction and raffle. Both of these methods have always been extremely popular and are a fun and engaging way to raise funds, most frequently during a special event.

However, the traditional versions of both silent auctions and raffles are somewhat inefficient and typically create more barriers for your donors to support your cause.

Silent Auctions

We can all agree that silent auctions can be very effective fundraising tools. Unfortunately, their traditional format limits engagement, reach, and funds raised. The main culprit here? Paper bid sheets!

Printed bid sheets create a major barrier for silent auctions, as they not only limit participation to those attending a physical event, but also to those present at the silent auction prize table.

This, of course, negatively impacts your overall reach and participation. Furthermore, because traditional silent auctions are physical in nature, their timing typically only runs during the course of a special event, meaning that your cause/nonprofit is missing out on an extended fundraising time period.

Raffles

Similar to paper bid sheets, raffles traditionally require paper tickets. We all know how annoying it is to fill out multiple tickets and then track the numbers on each while raffle winners are announced. This process is inefficient and limits participation just as traditional silent auctions do.

Additionally, both silent auctions and raffles typically involve long and arduous checkout processes to ensure that donors make their payments and receive the correct prize. A poor checkout experience can alienate donors and limit further support.

Fundraising Now: Silent Auctions & Raffles

Luckily, silent auctions and raffles have been drastically improved through the use of online and mobile technology. Mobile and online silent auctions and raffles utilize online bidding and ticket purchase, text messaging functionality, and credit card processing in order to make donating through a silent auction or raffle seamless.

Some of the major areas that technology has improved for silent auctions and raffles include:

• Reach. Because silent auctions and raffles can now have their own online page and phone number for online and text message bidding and ticket purchase, your audience is limitless. Just as with online fundraising pages, your silent auctions and raffles can now reach anyone with a phone or internet connection! This means more bidders and higher proceeds.

• Timing. Similarly, because your mobile silent auction or raffle will not be bound physically, you can open bidding and raffle ticket purchase prior to your physical event. This means you can give your supporters a longer window of time to support your cause and submit bids or buy tickets.

• Engagement. Modernized mobile silent auctions and raffles have the opportunity to majorly increase donor engagement. No longer will your donors need to hold on to paper tickets or hover around a prize table. Instead, they will receive instant notifications if they have been outbid or won an item, whether they are at your event or not!

Luckily, there are many great charity auction tools available – we recommend finding one that balances functionality with cost in order to allow your program to raise as much as possible.

Conclusion

After reading this post, we hope that you’ve been able to realize the major changes that have taken place in the fundraising space due to the enhancement of technology. We encourage you to explore these new options in order to find the right balance for your next fundraising endeavor!

Thank you to Zach Hagopian for contributing this informative post! Zach is the co-founder and COO of Accelevents, a mobile fundraising platform that powers silent auctions and raffles through online and text-message bidding. An active member in the Boston fundraising scene, Zach focuses on improving traditional fundraising methods and increasing fundraiser proceeds through the use of the Accelevents platform and similar products.