Matching Gift Q&A with Workplace Giving Expert Tom Mansmith
Matching gifts hold an incredible yet often untapped potential in the world of nonprofit and educational fundraising. To shed light on this powerful tool, we’re excited to present a matching gift Q&A session with Tom Mansmith, consultant and renowned expert in workplace giving and matching gifts.
With more than 20 years of experience in the field as the former Senior Director of Workplace Giving and Matching Gifts for the American Cancer Society, Tom offers invaluable insights and first-hand experience into how nonprofits can maximize their matching gift revenue, engage donors more effectively, and overcome common challenges to drive success.
Whether you’re a seasoned fundraising professional or new to the concept of matching gifts, this conversation is packed with practical advice and actionable strategies. Feel free to watch the video mini-series and read through the transcript below!
1. What are corporate vendor platforms, and what role do they have in matching gifts?
There are a number of corporate vendors who facilitate employee philanthropic giving. These technology providers work on behalf of businesses to streamline and to integrate the employee giving programs, which can include payroll deduction, matching gifts, volunteer grants, cause cards, and incentive programs.
Generally speaking, these providers supply an online platform where companies are able to manage their employee programs. They allow employees to give to accredited nonprofits, log their volunteer hours, pledge their payroll deductions, etc.
On the backend of these sites, nonprofits are able to verify the original contributions for matching gifts, see donor details, and confirm volunteer hours.
These platforms really are an integral part of the matching gift program. It’s not a company’s core business, but it’s part of their core value in employee engagement, so these corporate matching gift vendors play a vital role in the matching gift process.
| 💡 Recommended Reading: Registering Your Org with CSR Platforms + Key Steps For Each |
2. What is the general processing flow when you receive a matching gift payment?
Most matching gifts your organization receives will come from a corporate matching gift vendor who processes the payments on behalf of a company.
Here’s how it works:
→ You’ll navigate to a third-party corporate vendor platform.
→ Go to the “Giving” section, where you’ll see a section for payments and transactions.
→ Once there, it’s going to give you a list of all of the payments your organization has received. Now, it’s a good idea to have the check number, the amount, and whether it was a check or a direct deposit.
→ When you’re on that page, search with the payment ID or date so you get the exact payment.
→ Once you’ve located the payment, you can go through all the donor details, including which employees the company was matching specifically.
This information can be viewed online, but you also have the option to download the reconciliation sheet. I recommend that you download the reconciliation sheet, as it will allow your finance department or yourself to process the payment accurately.
| 💡 Recommended Reading: Matching Gift Disbursement FAQ: Your Top Questions Answered |
3. What are some common roadblocks for nonprofit organizations trying to earn more matching gifts?
That’s a long list, but let’s try to tackle a couple of them.
Leadership buy-in
You should make a real case to your organization’s leadership that matching gifts is a vital part of their overall revenue strategy.
When it says Double the Donation, it truly means doubling a donation.
So, I would make a strong case to leadership that matching gifts is a vital part of their overall strategy, and what that unlocks for you, hopefully, is additional marketing and FTEs, which are critical for processing and marketing for matching gifts.
Lack of staffing
I think everyone has been struggling with this, but if you’re someone who’s handling all of the matching gifts for your organization, you know what I’m talking about.
As you begin to scale, you’ll likely need additional staff. Without leadership’s buy-in, that’s a tough thing.
However, having the appropriate amount of staff for the scale of your matching gift revenue stream is essential. I don’t know about your organization, but I imagine that for small or medium organizations, one or two people can do the job. And for larger organizations, many are stretched, but I would say that more than three people is appropriate for payroll deductions, volunteer grants, and matching gifts as they continue to grow.
Marketing dollars
I think it’s a real roadblock not to look at this both internally and externally. So, communication dollars should be used to socialize matching gifts internally to development staff that are running peer-to-peer events (gala, golf, other types of fundraising) and your corporate development staff, if you have that.
They really all should know something about matching gifts so that when they see an opportunity, they’re able to talk about matching gifts to the decision-makers in companies.
Lack of employment data
Many organizations hesitate to ask for and retain employment information. If you don’t know that someone works for a corporation that has a matching gift program, however, you miss the opportunity to tie their original contribution to that matching gift.
And I know that you can get pushback from your IT team or your event staff, for instance, that they don’t want something else on the registration page. But I’d argue that because it allows you to actually fundraise for the staff, adding “Who do you work for?” is critical for registrations for peer-to-peer events and on the main URL of your fundraising page.
Not taking advantage of technology
For the best matching gift results, you want to really take advantage of all the technology that Double the Donation has to offer in matching gifts.
What I mean by this, one, is that you have a matching gift activation on all of your fundraising pages. And, secondarily, that you’re utilizing 360MatchPro to data-mine contributions that hadn’t been matched, but you find meet the criteria for matching.
| 💡 Recommended Reading: How Donor Employer Information Boosts Fundraising + Workplace Giving |
4. How can I earn more matching gifts?
There are probably three things that I’d tell you. Here’s the first:
Socialize the impact of matching gifts with your developmental team.
Show them the impact and the dollars that donors are leaving on the table by not matching gifts. In fact, I’d even point out some key donors who didn’t take advantage of their matching gift program. That’s a really powerful motivator.
One of the best ways to do so is by providing your team with access to the Matching Gift Academy, which is free for Double the Donation clients to use ($199/year value).
Take full advantage of Double the Donation’s technology.
Make sure all of your donation pages have the DTD matching gift activation on them so employees can take full advantage of that.
Note: Double the Donation integrates with nearly all leading fundraising solutions, donation tools, and CRMs to make it increasingly easy to do so! Check out our integration partners here to see if you can connect your platform!
Regularly check your database through 360MatchPro.
Look for those donors who were eligible for matching gifts but didn’t take advantage of it in the first round. That’s a goldmine for your organization to be receiving additional revenue!
| 💡 Recommended Reading: 360MatchPro Overview: Scale Up Your Matching Gifts |
5. How do you recommend getting matching gift buy-in from your team?
Making an internal business case with different stakeholders will advance matching gifts across your organization. Here are three teams you should consider engaging and getting on board with matching gifts.
Corporate development staff
Those are the individuals who go out and talk to corporations about grants and cause marketing. The third area that they really ought to be talking about is employee engagement, whether that’s payroll deductions, matching gifts, or other programs.
One of the things that matching gifts does is provide specific corporate information about employee engagement. Usually, the decision-makers don’t have a good idea of the level of affinity or employee participation in your cause.
What matching gifts will do is provide that corporate development staff member with some very specific talking points about your organization and the affinity of their employees.
It’ll show increased employee affinity, corporate engagement, and more. There’ll even be some great impact stories that you can research and provide for your corporate development team. Whether those are specific or anecdotal, that storytelling can be a huge part of your corporate development meeting.
And then finally, it provides an opportunity for your corporate development team to upsell. If there’s a big engagement with that company’s employee base, the company is going to be more likely to consider corporate grants or even a cause marketing deal.
Peer-to-peer staff
Whether you’re hosting a golf event, a gala, or a fundraising walk, all of those gifts are matchable for the participants who work for corporations that have matching programs. We’re talking about 65% of Fortune 500 companies.
And so, what does that do for peer-to-peer? Well, #1, it’s a lower cost of fundraising.
That doubled dollar, that second dollar you receive, lowers their overall event fundraising cost. And for most organizations, that’s a metric that leadership is looking at, so matching gifts is the way to do that.
You can even show the dollars that are left on the table. So, a good project is to do a little deep dive on those participants who were eligible for matching gifts. Then, show the potential dollars that could have been collected had matching gifts been presented. Those are dollars that are left on the table, and that’s probably the biggest motivator for peer-to-peer teams: to see what they could have had. And, of course, you’re offering what they can have, so that’s super important.
Then the final thing with peer-to-peer is that matching gifts allows for a deeper dive into that donor or employee profile. Now that you know who they work for, that can lead to more teams coming to support your cause from that corporation, maybe not just localized but a national team.
IT staff
For a lot of organizations, that main donation page URL is managed by the IT staff, so one of the things that I found when we had point of contribution activations for matching gifts is that we saw a greater conversion rate because when individual donors who work for companies think about the fact that their company would double that donation, they’re more likely to give.
We saw an increase in the original contribution, which was great. We also saw people going back in and raising their contribution, then going forward with the matching gift.
And then again also, those donor profiles, knowing who the individual works for, is very important for establishing a good CRM. Not to mention, increased security and API transfers is important to your IT staff, and Double the Dontion’s technology is highly secure with seamless data integrations, too.
| 💡 Recommended Reading: Matching Gift Buy-In: How to Spark Team-Wide Engagement |
6. What are your top 3 tips for communicating matching gifts to your donors?
Communicating the matching gift opportunity is essential for fundraisers such as yourself. Here’s what I recommend doing to get the message across in the most impactful way possible.
Storytelling
I’m a big proponent of storytelling, and I think this is both true for pre-donation and post-donation. A very concise story about the impact of matching gifts should be provided, where the employer acknowledges the donor’s original contribution and recognizes the philanthropic choices of their employees. That’s a great partnership inside of that company, and I think you can tell a story about what those partnerships do to advance your cause. Be concise; I don’t think you have to be too specific but tell the story about their impact.
Generational appropriateness
I’m a Baby Boomer, and I consume information in a way that might be, or is, different from Millennials or Gen Z. I think that you ought to take the time to learn about generational communication differences. What do I mean by that? When you’re creating communications, you should do something more than just send an email, a flyer, or a leave-behind. Instead, you ought to, for example, do TikTok. Maybe you have Instagram or social media posts that can tell that story but in a generationally appropriate way.
Acknowledge the employee-employer partnership
The final thing, and I talked about this a little in the storytelling section, and this may be more true for your development staff that are engaging with corporate decision-makers, but making sure that they have the information available to them to acknowledge the partnership and the impact that it made on your cause.
In this sense, I think that you can be specific, so look at total matching gift dollars raised by employees, total matching gift dollars raised by that employer. Then, put that information in the hands of staff going out to corporations so that they can tell a story about the impact.
| 💡 Recommended Reading: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Matching Gifts |
7. What other fundraising opportunities can matching gifts uncover?
I think there’s probably three, maybe four. So, let’s take a look at those.
Corporate teams
My guess is that most of you have peer-to-peer fundraising. I would look for an individual who’s on a team, maybe it’s not a corporate team, but you have their employment information. Let’s say they work for a Fortune 1000 company, or that they donated online on your main web page. When they ask to have their gift matched, you uncover that they work for a major corporation.
Those are leads for developing teams within corporations. They obviously have an affinity toward your organization, and I wouldn’t shy away from recruiting from that pool of matching gift donors. Maybe they weren’t on a corporate team, but I would ask them next year to form one for your next big peer-to-peer fundraising event.
Cause marketing and corporate grants
I know this can seem like a stretch; you got a matching gift for $25 or $100, and now you’re going to go ask for a cause marketing deal or a corporate grant. But hear me out—in scale, let’s say you had 50 employees who contributed to your organization, perhaps through a peer-to-peer event, and they all matched. Maybe they’ve even been doing it for a couple of years.
What you have in that organization is a group of employees who have an affinity for your cause. And I think it’s safe to say that the people who make the decisions within the company’s community development or corporate citizenship teams don’t have any idea that that’s going on. So, raising that with those decision-makers is the first step to start talking about other things that the corporation can do. It’s their corporate dollars that make a matching gift. It may not be the meeting, but it’s the knock on the door for upselling in corporate grants and in cause marketing.
Because you can show the affinity of their employees, which, by the way, companies hold very highly, you can begin to hold conversations about how else your organization could partner with a corporation.
Major gifts
How does a $100 matching gift get a major giver? Well, I think you’ll find that if you look in your database, you may have people who are giving much more than $100. Anyone who gives a $500 gift and has asked to match it could be a candidate for a major gift—certainly to pursue it or to investigate it. One of the things I would do is, in your database, look at not just single donations but total annual giving.
If you have people who are giving more than $1,000, and then having that gift matched, I think that those are good candidates for larger gifts. They are obviously people who work for corporations, they may or may not have higher incomes, and those could be pursued by your major gift staff.”
| 💡 Recommended Reading: How to Identify Corporate Partnerships [With 360MatchPro] |
Ready to get started? Schedule a personalized demo with our matching gift experts to see if 360MatchPro is right for you.
Wrapping Up
Tom’s expertise underscores the immense value that matching gifts can bring to any organization or fundraising strategy. By understanding the nuances of these programs and effectively communicating them to donors, teams like yours can unlock a significant source of additional funding.
We hope this matching gift Q&A has provided you with the knowledge and inspiration needed to enhance your matching gift fundraising efforts. By implementing these insights, your organization can not only boost its success but also deepen its connection with donors who are eager to maximize their impact.
Good luck!
