How to Steward Workplace Giving Donors Effectively
Workplace giving donors are some of the most valuable supporters an organization can have, but are also some of the trickiest to steward. Also known as employee giving or workplace philanthropy, workplace giving is the practice of making a charitable donation through a program sponsored by an employer, often through a payroll deduction.
It’s no surprise that these programs are growing in popularity. Employees feel a connection to causes they care about. They appreciate programs that make it easier to support social good organizations, especially when there is an employer match to amplify their impact.
When properly stewarded, workplace giving donors can be ideal prospects for cultivating over time. In this article, we’ll cover the essentials of stewarding workplace donors and the data you need to make it happen:
- The Value of Workplace Giving Donors
- The Challenges of Workplace Philanthropy Data
- How to Steward Corporate Philanthropy Donors
But first, let’s take a look at why these donors are so important.
The Value of Workplace Giving Donors
Several factors make workplace giving donors worth your organization’s attention.
1. Workplace donors are loyal.
Workplace philanthropy platforms and workplace-sponsored programs are designed to encourage donations, especially recurring gifts. They make giving easier by providing a path to give with reminders and incentives. Plus, these programs create a culture of philanthropy where giving is the norm rather than the exception.
Because of corporate programs like payroll deduction, matched donations, or monthly philanthropic stipends, workplace donors are far more likely to donate frequently.
2. Workplace donors are reliable.
Donors who give through workplace programs often represent some of the most consistent supporters a nonprofit can have. Their steady income, along with the convenience of payroll deduction or workplace stipends, makes it easy to sustain recurring gifts, creating a dependable foundation of support year after year.
3. Workplace donors are excellent candidates for larger gifts.
Frequency of giving and wealth capacity are the best indicators of major giving eligibility. It makes sense: if a donor has been making a bi-monthly contribution through their paychecks for years, it is likely they have a strong affinity for your organization and clearly have the capacity to budget for charitable giving. For these reasons, corporate donors can be excellent prospects for major or even principal gifts as they advance in their careers.
4. Workplace giving programs often include a corporate match.
Another important reason to pay attention to workplace giving donors is that their contributions often count for more than (even double!) the listed amount. To incentivize philanthropy, workplace giving programs frequently allow for some amount of an employee’s contribution to be matched by the employer.
If you’re not proactively seeking matched donations, your organization is leaving money on the table. Check out Double the Donation’s technology options to identify and facilitate matched gifts!
The Challenges of Workplace Philanthropy Data
For all their advantages, workplace giving donors pose several core challenges for nonprofit fundraisers. Many organizations struggle to gather the data they need to acknowledge and steward workplace giving donors for long-term support. Here’s why:
Workplace giving data comes at varying times.
Depending on the employer sponsoring the corporate giving program, your organization may receive disbursement files with information about corporate gifts weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at a different interval altogether. Even once you have this gift data, it’s not always clear when it will make its way into your CRM and become available for development and stewardship officers to use.
Workplace giving data arrives in different formats.
Different organizations use different systems for workplace giving programs, including Benevity, YourCause, and Cybergrants, to facilitate gift transactions. Each of these systems formats the information slightly differently, from field names to how it displays street addresses. This causes challenges for moving data into your CRM or general ledger. Not to mention, duplicate records are common. Your organization may have two records for the same donor, one for corporate giving and another for the donor’s personal philanthropy. Without complete corporate philanthropy data, it is difficult to know that both records relate to the same person.
Bad data leads to poor workplace giving stewardship.
Effective donor stewardship hinges on accurate data. Without timely, reliable information on your donors’ giving history, addresses, and communication preferences, it’s hard to thank, update, and develop relationships with donors that foster long-term support.
Moreover, insufficient data holds stewardship back by limiting opportunities for personalization. For example, many organizations find value in thanking first-time donors differently from repeat donors. Sharing a bit about the organization’s mission and current initiatives can make it easier to secure a second gift from a new donor. As a result, flagging new donors depends on having sufficient data on your current donors to ensure they aren’t duplicate records, a struggle for many organizations.
How to Steward Corporate Philanthropy Donors
Now that you understand its importance, as well as potential challenges you may face, let’s dive into a few key strategies nonprofits like yours can implement to effectively steward workplace giving donors.
1. Develop a process for gathering corporate philanthropy donor data.
Investing time in creating a workflow for gathering, transforming, and storing workplace giving donor data will pay off in the future. If your organization relies on manual spreadsheet edits before time-consuming uploads into your CRM, chances are your corporate giving data is plagued with errors, including duplicate records. Luckily, there are solutions for automating workplace giving data imports, so you can spend less time wrangling spreadsheets and more time on the meaningful outreach that will keep your donors engaged.
2. Thank donors promptly.
Once you have a workflow that automates, or at the very least, streamlines moving donor data into your development CRM, create a report that notifies your team about a gift from a corporate donor. Run that report once a week, or have it automatically sent to your inbox.
From there, build a process to thank these donors quickly. Take advantage of email marketing templates and tokens to personalize these notes at scale. A common goal is to let no more than 5 business days pass between receiving a gift and sending an acknowledgement.
Remember to keep automated acknowledgements fresh. Corporate donors are often frequent donors. Sending the same thank-you note to a donor on multiple occasions comes off as insincere, even if well-intentioned. Switch up the images, introductions, subject lines (if applicable), and acknowledgement text at least once a quarter to maintain variety in your content.
3. Personalize your outreach.
Make your acknowledgements meaningful: personalize wherever you can. Using a donor’s preferred name is an obvious starting point. However, we encourage you to get creative and use the data you have at your fingertips. Conduct donor surveys to understand how your donors like to be thanked. Is a phone call, voice mail, email, or text preferred? Think about the areas of interest for your donors. Are there particular initiatives you can provide updates on? Who at your organization is the best person to conduct the outreach? Perhaps a grant recipient, student scholar, researcher, or board member would be best suited for this role. The more you can match your donors’ preferences, the better the effect.
Learn more about building complete donor profiles in a free eBook from Omatic Software.
4. Show impact.
It’s crucial to nail acknowledgments; no donor should go without a proper thank you. Once acknowledgements are in order at your organization, you can move on to another essential aspect of stewardship: impact reporting.
Impact reporting can keep even the most seasoned stewardship officers up at night! Often, the development offices charged with fundraising don’t have much control over how (or when) the organization spends that funding. Reporting on the real-world effects of philanthropy requires tracking gifts and figuring out not only what the gift purchased, but why that matters for your mission. When donors know their funding makes a difference, they’re far more likely to give again.
5. Don’t forget about the “workplace” in workplace giving.
Finally, think about one of the aspects that makes a corporate giving donor unique: the fact that they give through an employer-sponsored program. This is an opportunity to cultivate a relationship with an institution that can make a significant impact on your organization. Find out who organizes this workplace philanthropy program. Learn who the C-suite champions of the programs are. From there, show gratitude and explore options for collaboration.
It’s worth taking the time to discover which programs help with employee retention and how your organization can get involved, as this could lead to a long-term, fruitful partnership.
Wrapping Up: Data Matters
Effective donor stewardship requires accurate data; you can’t properly thank donors if you don’t know who they are or how they want to be acknowledged. Don’t let the challenges of gathering corporate philanthropy data prevent it from happening; losing a workplace giving donor is losing a shot at long-term, sustained support.
Luckily, there are tools at your disposal to streamline workplace giving data and simplify stewardship. Ready to learn more about stewarding workplace giving donors? Join Omatic Software and Double the Donation for a live webinar on the dos and don’ts of workplace philanthropy. Get your questions answered by experts during the Q&A. Save your seat today!