On April 20th, Jake Wood (Founder & CEO, Groundswell), Erinn Wright O'Donnell (Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships, Kiva), and Kathleen Urbine (Director of IT Applications, Wounded Warrior Project) joined us for a wide-ranging conversation on workplace giving — what it actually encompasses, why it's become impossible to ignore, and what separates organizations that treat it as a strategic revenue stream from those still lumping gifts into a single line item.
Here's what they shared.
Key Takeaways
1. Workplace giving is far bigger than gift matching — and it's no longer optional
Jake traced the history from early corporate philanthropy (Rockefeller, Carnegie) through the Great Depression-era community chests, the rise of United Way — the federated fundraising network that pioneered employer-sponsored payroll deductions — in the mid-20th century, and into today's platform-driven era with Benevity, YourCause, CyberGrants, and newer entrants like Groundswell. Workplace giving has evolved from CEO bragging rights into a core component of corporate benefits and nonprofit fundraising strategy.
Erinn reinforced the shift from the nonprofit side:
"It's not really incremental anymore or just something that's nice to have that you try to figure out on the side. The biggest mindset shift is not just getting the match — it's about the data and the relationships behind it."
Today's workplace giving touches finance, IT, marketing, fundraising, and data teams — sometimes all at once, sometimes all in the same person. That cross-functional complexity is exactly why it's so hard to prioritize, and exactly why alignment across those functions unlocks so much value.
2. The operational burden is massive — and largely invisible
Kathleen walked through what workplace giving processing actually looks like at an organization handling tens of thousands of gifts per month: manually downloading transactions from multiple platforms, uploading them into the CRM, reconciling ACH deposits back to individual transactions, assigning hard and soft credits, and linking employees to employers for proper reporting. Every platform formats data differently. There's virtually no standardization.
"We are the recipients, right? So we only have limited visibility into how these systems function, and little to no control over the transactional data we receive, or the format in which we receive it."
A registrant jumped into the Q&A to say: "Thank you for touching on the ops challenges. I find that it just goes unspoken about how complex and tedious this is." Many organizations don't have the bandwidth to do individual-level processing at all and simplify into just one aggregate record that misses all the individual donor detail.
3. Donors face their own barriers — and it's costing nonprofits relationships
Erinn highlighted a particularly frustrating dynamic: donors who give through workplace platforms often don't realize their contact information isn't being shared. They assume the nonprofit received their details. When they don't hear back, they blame the nonprofit.
"They're like, why haven't I been thanked? I guess they're not a very good nonprofit. And so it's that breakdown that really affects that experience."
Processing delays compound the problem. If it takes months for a gift to reach the nonprofit, even donors who do share their data may not get thanked in time. And on the employee side, Jake pointed to accessibility as a fundamental barrier: if the giving portal only works on desktop, deskless workers — warehouse employees, delivery drivers — are effectively locked out.
"People give when they're inspired. If they can't just reach into their pocket, pull out their phone, open up an app, and with a couple taps of their thumb give, then you're gonna have a massive drop-off."
4. DAFs are becoming a workplace giving benefit
Jake shared Groundswell's thesis: that donor-advised funds will become a standard component of a modern compensation package alongside 401(k)s and HSAs. Groundswell provides individual DAFs to employees through their platform, with their own routing and account numbers, and employees can take the DAF with them when they leave.
With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its new provisions around DAF contributions for non-itemizers, Groundswell re-architected its experience to offer two giving paths — direct donations (which qualify for the new standard charitable deduction) and DAF contributions (which follow the new AGI threshold rules for itemizers) — adapting quickly to keep both options accessible for employees.
Groundswell is one of a growing number of workplace giving platforms, DAF sponsors, and crowdfunding platforms working with Chariot to move funds to nonprofits faster and with better data. Learn more about Chariot Disbursements.
What You Can Try
1. Build a branded donation experience for your corporate supporters
Kathleen's team at WWP created custom, branded donation pages for their closest corporate partners as an alternative to routing everything through third-party platforms. This gives them control over the full donor experience — payment methods, recurring giving, data capture — and plugs directly into their existing CRM integrations.
2. Automate gift processing to unlock individual donor data
Both WWP and Kiva have moved away from manual processing of workplace giving files to implement a gift processing platform. Kathleen's team is working with Chariot's gift processing platform to pull Benevity transactions via API, transform the data according to their business rules, and automatically load it into their CRM.
Erinn described the shift at Kiva: they went from aggregating 50–100 individual gifts into a single CRM line item to seeing every donor individually through Chariot's platform, which enables her team to qualify donors, route them into the right giving tiers, and begin stewardship.
"The pure ability to be able to see that individual data and actually get it uploaded into our CRM is the big, big change that has completely shifted everything for us."
Learn how organizations are transforming their development operations work with the first-ever Gift Processing Platform from Chariot. Reach out to our team.
3. Integrate match reminders into your existing communications
Rather than treating match follow-up as a separate campaign, Erinn recommended weaving it into existing donor touchpoints — thank-you emails, year-end appeals, mid-year check-ins. Only about 10% of employees actually complete their match, often because they simply forget or don't realize their company offers it.
4. Acknowledge delays — don't hide them
One of the session's most practical ideas: when a workplace gift finally arrives after months of processing, mention the delay in your thank-you rather than ignoring it. Erinn's experience is that this actually strengthens the relationship rather than damaging it — donors appreciate the transparency, and it preempts the frustration of wondering why the nonprofit seemed unresponsive.
5. Mine your workplace giving data for corporate partnership leads
Erinn offered a simple but powerful tactic: look at which companies have 20, 30, or 50 employees giving through workplace platforms. That pattern isn't random — it's a conversation starter.
"Find that decision maker at that company, find that impact team, the HR, whoever it is, and say, you already have employees that care about this. How could we build on that?"
Kathleen described the same principle at WWP: gift officers use analytics on workplace giving donors to assess propensity, identify program interests, and build pipelines for mid-level, major gifts, and planned giving. The 360-degree donor view — made possible by bringing all workplace giving data into a unified system — is what enables this.
What This Actually Unlocks
The thread connecting every part of this conversation was the same: when workplace giving data is treated as a strategic asset rather than a processing burden, it transforms the function from a back-office chore into a growth engine.
Kathleen's scenario — a workplace giving donor becoming a mid-level donor, hosting an event, connecting a CEO who makes both a corporate and personal major gift — isn't hypothetical. It's the kind of lifecycle that becomes possible when the data is clean and the systems talk to each other.
Jake captured the spirit of the whole session:
"You're in the business of getting the resources you need to execute your mission, and you need good tactics and strategies to do it."
Workplace giving is one of those strategies — but only if organizations invest in the infrastructure to make it work.
Chariot gift processing helps nonprofits streamline the operational side so teams can focus on the relationships and partnerships that drive real growth.
