You’re ready to launch a new corporate social responsibility initiative or campaign – but before you can begin, you need the right tools. A corporate donation and matching platform can help you easily set up giving and volunteer campaigns, find amazing nonprofit organizations to support, remove a lot of the manual administrative tasks, and personalize your employees’ experiences. But how do you decide which software is right for you? We’re here to help you consider your options so you can make the right call for your organization.
Considering Benevity vs. YourCause vs. Other Options
Corporate Donation Matching Platform Showdown
Groundswell
Benevity
YourCause
Cybergrants
Deed
What is the Best Corporate Donation Matching Software
Legacy players like Benevity and YourCause are often the two corporate social responsibility platforms that people know about, but they’re not the only players on the field. Below, we’ll examine five CSR tools and discuss how each one can work for your team:
Features, pricing, and ease-of-use: these are just a few considerations we kept in mind as we analyzed some of the best CSR platforms out there. Let’s dive into what we discovered and how it applies to you.
Groundswell is an all-in-one social impact platform designed to help CSR teams simplify their giving and volunteering programs. In other words, Groundswell was built to make managing CSR efforts faster and easier.
With access to a comprehensive platform and smart automations, CSR teams can reduce admin tasks by up to 99%, saving time and precious resources without minimizing your organization’s impact.
Groundswell’s corporate social responsibility platform includes everything you need to plan, track, and reflect on activities like:
Groundswell is a mobile-first platform – in fact, it’s the only one of its kind on the market. But what does that mean? Instead of navigating clunky and outdated software tools on a desktop computer, your team members can choose whether to access your social impact programs via the web or use our 5-star mobile app to record their donations, volunteer work, and more.
Groundswell was designed with the admin in mind, and any program can be set up in under two minutes. All you’ll have to do is log into our platform, set up your giving and volunteering campaigns, and you’ll have programs running in minutes. Programs can include:
Unlike Benevity, YourCause, and many other CSR platforms, Groundswell was built as one simple platform to manage all CSR efforts, including employee giving, volunteering, Employee Assistance Funds (EAF), corporate grants, and more. Our mobile app and software solutions are powerful but simple to understand, and employees get the same experience whether they’re on a desktop or a mobile device. And we’re the only platform dedicated to CSR above all else.
Benevity is a legacy platform that helps companies manage donations, volunteering efforts, and grants. Benevity has grown largely through acquisitions of smaller companies, for example, Grantstream in 2015 and Alaya in 2020, and has reportedly had difficulty integrating these disparate platforms into a single, coherent technology stack. This is likely a leading contributor to a frequent customer complaint that the Benevity platform feels disjointed in the admin experience and that program data is challenging to extract.
Benevity often tops the list with the highest costs in the market, including a high implementation fee, and a variety of ad hoc fees that get assessed to customers. Want to send an off-cycle donation to a charity? There’s a fee for that. Want to add volunteer rewards? There’s a fee for that. Want to get support from your client success manager during a campaign? There’s a fee for that.
Where Benevity fails its customers, its employee-users, and most importantly, the nonprofits it is sending funds to, is the length of time it takes for an employee’s matching donation to reach charity. While the original donation may take 20-50 days to reach the charity, the match may take 60-90 days due to their prolonged processing time.
Benevity’s platform is massive, but that also means it can be overwhelming and complicated to use and administer. Teams looking to manage CSR might find Benevity’s various tools confusing, especially since there are so many plans to choose from. For employees, the UX/UI is not easy to use, and there is no privacy in giving choices. Benevity allows administrators to have full visibility into employee personal giving history. This can discourage employees from donating through the program, and make employees feel that the program isn’t inclusive and equitable.
Now powered by Blackbaud, its parent organization, YourCause is another legacy platform sometimes used by CSR teams. However, YourCause is often described as difficult to navigate and manage, leading to significant time spent on administrative tasks. The set up and management of CSR campaigns can be cumbersome and inefficient.
YourCause is not a single platform but a source for several software solutions, each with a different focus. This collection of platforms is clunky and causes frustration for both administrators and employees. Finding and using features is difficult and reduces the overall engagement and satisfaction of the platform. The number of platforms also creates difficulties when integrating YourCause with other enterprise systems such as HR or payroll.
Tracking donations and overall impact can be tricky due to inadequate reporting tools and the spread of information across platforms. YourCause offers limited flexibility to tailor features and reports to the unique needs of different companies. Users often complain that they feel constrained by the platform’s rigid structure.
The platform’s rigid structure also creates a steep learning curve, and users have reported slow response times and lack of effective support from the YourCause team.
With YourCause, there is no all-in-one solution that brings each piece of the CSR puzzle together. While you may choose to use each software tool and integrate them, many teams will probably find themselves using one over the others.
What was previously known as CyberGrants is now called Bonterra, a software company that offers – you guessed it – tools for CSR teams and grantmakers.
Bonterra’s software targets grants management, employee giving, and employee volunteering. However, instead of accessing a single platform that grants you access to each of these capabilities, you’ll have to select and pay for each as a separate product. Bonterra’s software is often described as outdated, unintuitive, and challenging to navigate. Both administrators and employees often struggle with the complexity, leading to frustration and low engagement.
Much like YourCause, Bonterra is built on different modules that you can access depending on your plan. Its recent shift from CyberGrants to Bonterra has placed it among dozens of other software tools, which makes finding the right program for your needs tricky.
Deed is a newer entrant into the CSR space, claiming to be a people-first workplace giving and volunteering platform, focused on the user experience above all else. While the platform is designed to be easy for employees to understand and utilize, it also lacks the advanced features needed for complex CSR programs, such as detailed impact measurement tools or comprehensive reporting capabilities.
Limited customization options can prevent organizations from tailoring the platform to their specific CSR goals and employee preferences. And while Deed may be a good fit for smaller organizations, it may not scale effectively to meet the needs of larger organizations with extensive or global CSR programs.
Deed uses an all-in-one platform to manage employee resource groups, fundraising, volunteering, and social engagement, but lacks the advanced features needed for complex CSR programs. Fun, colorful, and eye-grabbing visuals are Deed’s specialty, but it doesn’t offer the same features or robust backend capabilities as some other options on the market.
There’s no shortage of corporate donation matching tools out there, and many of them overlap in terms of services and use cases. What matters most, then, is which software is designed to fit your needs, not just in terms of what it can do, but how it does those things.
Groundswell is the only corporate social responsibility platform created for the modern philanthropist. Groundswell makes it easy and fun to run employee engagement programs and it was built utilizing the latest technology, making the administrative experience fast, frictionless, and scalable.
With no ad hoc fees, the lowest transaction fees in the space, and the fastest implementation timelines, Groundswell is here to help you get your program up and running without the stress of a typical implementation. On top of that, Groundswell prides itself on its ability to send donations and matches to charities within 24 hours - versus the 2-4 months seen by competitors.
The best part? We’re here to grow with you. Our team is approachable, attentive, and always passionate about making your CSR goals a reality. Schedule a demo to see our software in action and discover how Groundswell powers more efficient, impactful corporate giving.
