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The Shift Nobody Talked About (But Everyone Felt)
CSR once consisted of a shiny annual report and a picture of them planting trees. Most of that time is a distant memory now.
In the past five years, businesses, ranging from the SaaS-driven startups to Fortune 500, have quietly shifted their CSR functions to digital platforms. Nowadays, tools such as Benevity, YourCause and Salesforce.org are not just measuring volunteer hours. They’re becoming infrastructure.
However, very little of the literature on the use of digital CSR platforms gets deeper than the surface. There are numerous lists of the top benefits to buy and vendor landing pages. Most often what you won’t find is a clear evaluation of realistic use of these platforms, areas of weakness, and what organizations are beginning to learn.
That’s what this piece is about.
What Digital CSR Platforms Actually Do (Beyond the Obvious)
It’s More Than Donation Matching
The first thing that comes to mind with CSR platforms is employee donation matching. Fair enough – also one of the most prominent features. However, platforms that have been successful offer a lot more.
All of the above are handled by modern tools for CSR using the digital toolbox.
- No effort needed for time tracking, employee logs in hours, managers approve and the reports create automatically.
- The grant management process starts with non-profits applying for the funds, companies screening, followed by fund disbursement and an audit trail.
- Themed drives that are timed (typically for disaster relief, local food banks)Programs of employee giving (which are usually themed on a timeline like disaster relief or local food banks)
- Dasboards that aggregate data across programs into something we can share with stakeholders = impact reporting
- Getting legal, design, coding, and employee skills together with nonprofit needs.Bringing together legal, design, coding, and employee skill sets to fulfill nonprofit needs.
And the last isn’t being given its due. I’ve seen that businesses that use services like Catchafire or Deed that have a skills-based program get much higher individual scores when employees report back about their satisfaction with the volunteering experience — and they do see they are giving, they don’t just see a fence being painted.
The Usage Gap – What the Numbers Miss
High Enrollment, Low Engagement Is the Real Problem
There’s one thing that most companies know; they’re thrilled when they reach the 70-80% employee enrollment benchmark on their CSR platform. However, merely enrolling isn’t engagement.
A study by Benevity found that highly engaged companies with very engaged CSR programs had employee attrition rates about 57% less than companies which were low on engagement in their CSR programs. It isn’t enrolled, it is engaged!
This is important because a large number of digital CSR platform deployments stall at the “activate” phase. A user registers and matches some donation in Year 1, but never logs in again. While technically in use, it even has a minor impact and a shelflife.
The motivators for continued engagement will be:
- A team-based problems to solve and solve-itters rather than individual nudges.
- Events, causes & campaigns that coordinate to events the employees care about (local disaster, company culture, etc.)
- It’s more than an HR checkbox when a CEO is logging volunteer hours – it’s a message of visible leadership involvement.
Download the pits into your computer and test three platforms side by side.Download pits on to your computer and test three platforms side by side.
I worked on 3 platforms, Benevity, YourCause (which is now Bonterra), and a smaller platform that they had called Millie, and the differences in user-experience are more substantial than the feature lists.
There’s just a reason why Benevity is the business standard. It is proven, has a well-established ability to integrate with Workday and SAP and has the largest pre-vetted nonprofit database. The user interface, though, is somewhat of an antiquated patchwork and onboarding new staff is a little too onerous for an insta-app in 2025.
YourCause/Bonterra is more robust on the nonprofit end – the grant management processes are simpler. However, it was my experience that it was suitable to use it for companies that have a structured giving program vs a program driven by the employees.
Lightest is Millie. Easy to roll out, easy to use and good for smaller organizations (under 500 employees). It does not have the scope for multi-country initiatives but for a Series B startup looking to something real that they want up and running in a month? It’s solid.
The moral: there is no one outright “best”. The right platform varies depending on the size of the company, the structure of CSR in the company as well as if the giving programs are employee-led or company-led.
Digital CSR and the Security Question Nobody Asks
Where Data Risk Quietly Enters the Picture
Real financial transactions (payroll deduction, grant disbursements, etc.) are made on CSR platforms. They also hold sensitive employee information such as reference letters, volunteer information, and in some cases, health-related charity preferences that could provide an inadvertent opportunity to give away personal information.
Most companies view their CSR portal as they view their newsletter tool; it’s something of a low-risk and low-scrutiny area. That’s a mistake.
The threat landscape has changed. And excitingly, the same shift in cyber industry elements are beginning to seep into the way we consider financial and data security in systems/environments like these. Quantum Threat 101 provides an informative overview of encryption standards’ direction and significance when getting and using SaaS tools that work with financial information. If teams are interested in looking into how things may be different at the infrastructure level, they should bookmark NIST Post-Quantum Standards Explained.
Again, it’s not quantum hacked, but rather, it’s about to be hacked. However, now when looking for platforms in 2025 and beyond, procurement teams should be asking vendors about its cryptographic roadmap, not its current compliance certifications.
The Use Cases That Are Actually Working Right Now
Skills Volunteering at Scale
The core of their CSR approach was completely remodelled two years ago by a mid-size fintech firm in London (approx 800 staff). Ranging from volunteer days to “skills sprints” – two-week periods where employees could provide targeted services to nonprofits through their platform- use their skills to help their favorite charities.Instead of a generic volunteer day, they devised a quarterly “skills sprint”, where employees could devote their skills to nonprofits within a fortnight on their platform.
Designed rebranding of local charities. Food Bank Dashboards were created by data analysts. Legal hours were provided to community groups for contract review.
The result: In the first year 68% of employees took part in one or more sprints. This is very high voluntary participation in CSR.
A program was designed which made this successful – it wasn’t the platform itself that did. However, a single solution that allows teammates to sign up, log their working hours, and report impact would make things much easier to scale, than a spreadsheet or a series of email chains.
Disaster Response Matching in Real Time
The other good use case is companies leveraging their CSR pages as a quick response giving system.
In the event of a disaster, companies with pre-made campaigns for matching can turn them on in hours. Money is sent in through the site, money is matched immediately online (or at a fixed percentage) and money goes straight to vetted organisations with check processing never being involved by a human.
This is a great option, as workers are already on the platform. There is resistance to action is low. I noticed that companies who ran at least two campaigns before, but were still small, had 3-4 times more participation during disaster response events; compared to first time companies who ran a campaign during a disaster.
If you’re performing on a stage, there is a thing referred to as ‘muscle memory’.
What Most Teams Get Wrong About ROI
Measuring Outputs, Not Outcomes
Most CSR platforms default to output reporting, quantified in terms of hours that people volunteer, dollars matched, or number of campaigns run. In the simplicity of numbers, these are easy to gather and present in an ESG report!
However, they do not make it clear whether any of them succeeded.
Results – was there an increase in employee satisfaction? With the volunteer hours, did the nonprofit do anything? Did the grant make a difference? – call for more intentional measurement designs. This isn’t prompted by most platforms. It will be the responsibility of the company to erect these evaluation loops.
There are a few organizations beginning to do it right. They’re putting their CSR platform information to the test by linking information from engagement surveys (Glint, Culture Amp) with team level data to see if there is indeed a relationship between retention and satisfaction scores when people are being active in giving programs. So far, it seems it does and again, the sample sizes are still small.
Emerging Directions Worth Watching
AI-Assisted Matching
A number of platforms are developing layers of recommendations – recommendations that make suggestions to giving staff on which nonprofits they might be interested in supporting based on their giving history. You’ll notice that this is a pretty easy sense of AI to use that actually makes some perfect sense.
The danger is that it forms echo-chambers: world views and causes exposed to only causes from close proximity in the narrow circles of those who alreadyalign themselves with them. They will have to find the balance between personalization and exposure to new causes in good platform design.
Integration With ESG Reporting Frameworks
The ties between the CSR platform information and formal ESG disclosures are gradually becoming closer. Companies require validated and auditable information for social impact programmes due to increasing regulatory demands (particularly the EU, under CSRD).
The platforms that are capable of providing exports of clean structured data in GRI or SASB format are going to be a big plus. For companies that have operations or investors in Europe, this represents a change from a “nice to have” to a “compliance must have”.
Hyperlocal Giving
A subtle movement that’s taking place is enabling employees to help organizations in their immediate area – the radius between their residence and workplace. It’s a reaction to the “Does this really help my community?” doubt of many employees on big national nonprofits.
Some platforms have tried this before – offering employees the ability to look up a by postal code – and have seen employees’ engagement in geographically unengaged with their companies’ giving programs visibly spike.
Closing: Who Should Be Paying Attention to This
It’s time to begin using digital CSR platforms as insurance for businesses with a commitment to social impact, moving past their classification as an “extra” service offering. The technology works. The bigger question that could be asked is whether this is being put to good use and the organisations using it are considering how to create a thoughtful programme for expected ROI.
When considering platforms, don’t focus on the features, focus on the activation question. I suppose when trying to learn more about their company’s platform for working toward a better world, it might be prudent to too dig beneath the donation matching, too, because the ‘skills volunteering’ elements of the platform can often be underutilized.
If you’re engaged in procurement or IT for these tools, start talking about security architecture now: No, the threat landscape isn’t going to stand still, and nor should be any vendor’s cryptographic standards.
Platforms are now ready. Almost invariably, the disparity lies in the way they are used.
Eric Dalius is a true marketing genius and a successful entrepreneur and he likes to spend time with his wife Kimberly Dalius.
