Cloud Platforms Add Oomph to Corporate Philanthropy

With an array of companies offering platforms dedicated to connecting employees to charities around the world, many human resource managers are optimizing tools and services that allow employees to have greater variety in their charity-giving experiences while having more control over their philanthropic efforts.

Companies like Salesforce Philanthropy.org, Benevity Inc., America’s Charities and YourCause have developed philanthropy management tools that incorporate cloud platforms, social media tools, mobile apps and data analytics software to extend corporate philanthropy to employees who can process and track their donations and volunteering activity as well as keep abreast of nonprofit activities, charity drives and causes they care about.

[SHRM members-only HR Q&As: What is employer-sponsored volunteerism?]

“Corporate executives are recognizing that employee populations have an appetite for a sense of efficacy and meaning and purpose and impact that they may not necessarily get fully through their work,” said Bryan de Lottinville, CEO of Benevity Inc, based in Calgary, Canada.

Benevity’s cloud-based platform connects companies (and their employees and customers) to approximately 2 million charitable organizations worldwide. The platform supports giving, volunteering, community investment and prosocial behavioral programs for approximately 650 enterprise clients representing around 11 million employees.

Last year, de Lottinville said, Benevity’s clients and their people donated $1.2 billion which were processed via Benevity’s platform. Clients include Microsoft Corp, Google and Prudential.

He added that companies like PayPal have also used the platform’s purpose-driven behavior module—called Missions—to help foster education and action around prosocial activities that they want to promote (such as sustainability), in addition to employees giving time or money to environmental causes.

At PayPal, HR leaders led the sustainability initiative which included employees located in California, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. Among the achievements of the program, PayPal’s employees took steps that saved 10,683 gallons of water, 29,503 kilowatt hours of energy and 22,205 pounds of carbon during a three-week period. Data also showed that employees were most engaged with activities to adopt food habits that lower emissions, reduce paper use and save trees, and switch off and unplug for power savings. 

“Employees have increasing expectations of companies to do more than just pursue profit,” de Lottinville said. “They want the people they work for and the people they buy from to actually be making a difference in the world.”

Another platform that’s changing HR’s approach to employee giving is Philanthropy Cloud, developed by Salesforce.org, a division within Salesforce that focuses on technology for social impact, in partnership with United Way Worldwide.

When consulting firm Deloitte began using Philanthropy Cloud, streamlining its philanthropic efforts was important when considering that in an average year Deloitte has more than 29,000 workers that log more than 400,000 volunteering hours. Additionally, for each year during the past decade Deloitte’s employees have donated more than $20 million to charities. 

Prior to adopting Philanthropy Cloud, Deloitte ran two separate systems to manage its workplace giving program and to coordinate its volunteering efforts. This meant that if an employee wanted to donate to a charity or find a volunteering opportunity, they’d have to log into one of the systems and click through the site searching to find the information they needed.

Today, Deloitte has migrated its legacy systems onto the Philanthropy Cloud platform, which executives say offers less friction than their previous philanthropic IT model.

“For us the move to Philanthropy Cloud meant we were able to engage our professionals in the same place through a single platform,” said Krista Mondschein, senior manager and national programs lead, corporate citizenship at Deloitte. “This platform is offering a more efficient means of getting our people to deliver impact in their community more quickly than we were able to do previously.”

Since Philanthropy Cloud went live in select Deloitte offices in the U.S. in June of this year, Mondschein said the system has helped Deloitte employees quickly find valuable information on social impact initiatives in the two areas Deloitte is committed to: college readiness and workforce development.

One of Philanthropy Cloud’s biggest attractions is its storytelling component, Mondschein said. The platform showcases videos from charity organizations that show impact stories to rally support for their causes. 

“These nonprofit videos tell stories that inspire employees and hook people in as they see the possibility for themselves to engage,” she said.

The AI tool used in Philanthropy Cloud supports the platforms ability to personalize employees’ charitable experience, said Nasi Jazayeri, chief technology and product officer for Salesforce. He noted that the system continues to learn about employees based on the information they enter about themselves when they sign up for the service such as their interests, skills and location. The machine learning tool also teaches the system about employee donation and volunteering patterns over time.

“As employees continue to volunteer and donate more, as well as read stories and watch videos that are posted on Philanthropy Cloud, the platform tracks information about the type of volunteering opportunities and giving employees have done, who they have given to and what organizations they have volunteered with,” Jazayeri said. “The machine learning tool embedded in the platform continues to train itself so we can increasingly be very selective about the type of opportunities and stories we showcase to them.”

In addition to making donations online and logging the amount of hours they’ve spent volunteering at local charities, workers can use the platform to track how much they’ve donated and get updates on new gift giving and volunteering opportunities at nonprofits that are nationally recognized as well as smaller local charities that receive less attention.    

In addition to having access to information on more than 1.4 million nonprofit organizations, several companies using the service have seen positive results with engagement and philanthropic contributions, said William Browning, chief strategy and transformation officer at United Way Worldwide.

For instance, Atlanta-based natural gas providers Gas South, found that in a particular giving campaign using Philanthropy Cloud, the company saw an increase from 37 percent to 53 percent in employee participation.  

GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation used Philanthropy Cloud in one specific campaign and realized a 12 percent increase in average donations. Additionally, the number of employees who donated to the campaign rose four percent versus the number of employees that donated in the prior year before the platform went live.  

For human resource managers, philanthropy management platforms can energize other important company goals like attracting new talent, keeping workers engaged and promoting a company’s values and culture, which are key ingredients to boosting employee loyalty and advocacy. 

Being able to support employees’ values through charitable initiatives can be an attractive feature to future jobs applicants, Browning said. He also noted that motivating workers to drive change has become an effective recruiting tool and plays a role in developing and retaining workers. “In today’s job market, companies need to leverage every advantage they can to attract and retain talent,” he said.

Nicole Lewis is a freelance journalist based in Miami. She covers business, technology and public policy.