Employee and Workplace Giving Programs: A Development Director's Guide
Think about the people who already give to your organization. Most of them spend their days working for a company, and a surprising number of those companies have quietly set up ways to help their employees give more, give recurring gifts, and even get their volunteer hours turned into cash for the causes they love. The programs exist. The budgets are funded. And for most small nonprofits, almost none of it is being tapped. It is one of the strangest gaps in fundraising: real money, already set aside, sitting one or two steps away from donors who are eager to use it.
Workplace giving is the umbrella term for all of this, and it is worth understanding as its own body of work rather than a footnote to your individual donor program. What I have learned is that a development director does not need a corporate department or fancy software to start benefiting from it. You need to understand the handful of programs that live under the workplace giving umbrella, and you need to make it easy for the people who already support you to use them.
What Workplace Giving Actually Covers
Workplace giving is not one program. It is a small family of them, and each opens a different door. Payroll giving lets employees donate automatically out of each paycheck, which turns a one-time supporter into a steady, recurring one without them having to think about it again. Matching gifts let a company double a donation an employee already made to you. Volunteer grants, sometimes called "Dollars for Doers," turn an employee's volunteer hours into a cash gift from their employer, often at a rate of $8 to $15 per hour volunteered. And employee engagement campaigns — company-run giving drives, giving days, and volunteer events — rally a whole workforce around causes at once. Each of these can stand alone, but the real strength shows up when a single company relationship opens two or three of them together: the employee who gives through payroll this month may bring a volunteer team next quarter and nominate you for the company's giving day after that.
The scale is larger than most small shops assume. Workplace giving and automated payroll deductions generate an estimated $5 billion a year for the social sector. On the Benevity platform alone, donations through corporate grants and workplace giving reached $3.74 billion in 2025, a 9.2% increase over the year before. This is not a shrinking, old-fashioned corner of philanthropy. It is growing, and it is moving toward exactly the kind of automated, recurring generosity that a small organization can benefit from without adding staff.
Matching gifts deserve their own attention because the unclaimed dollars there are so large, and I have written separately about the matching gift money most nonprofits leave on the table. But payroll giving may be the quietest winner of the group, because it produces the same kind of dependable, month-after-month support that makes a recurring giving program so valuable, only funded through the donor's employer instead of their own bank account.
Why Employees and Their Employers Both Want This
Here is what makes workplace giving different from asking a company for a sponsorship. You are not asking the business to part with money for nothing in return. Workplace giving gives the employer something it genuinely wants, which means the incentives line up in your favor for once.
Employees are asking for it. Roughly 71% of employees say they want a giving culture at work, and companies have noticed. The reason employers invest in these programs is that generosity turns out to be one of the best retention tools they have. Benevity's research found that turnover drops by an average of 57% among employees who take part in workplace giving and volunteering, and that organizations with structured volunteering see 2.6 times higher participation in giving overall. When you help a company's employees give to your mission, you are helping that company keep its people. That is a story a business leader wants to be part of, and it changes the tone of every conversation you have with them.
That reframe is worth carrying into how you approach a company. Rather than arriving as one more organization asking for money, you can come as a partner offering the business a ready-made way to give its employees something they are already asking for. Position your nonprofit as a cause its workforce can rally around, point to the retention and morale benefits, and offer to do the heavy lifting of promotion. A business that would hesitate to write a sponsorship check will often say yes to encouraging its employees to give to a cause they already care about, because the cost is low and the internal goodwill is high.
Turning these programs into a repeatable rhythm — knowing which donors work where, prompting payroll giving, following up on volunteer grants — is the kind of system you can build once and lean on for years, without hiring anyone.
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Why the Money Stays Unclaimed, and How to Capture It
If the programs are funded and employees want them, why does so little of the money reach nonprofits? The answer is not complicated, and it is entirely within your power to fix. The gap is promotion and follow-up.
The participation numbers tell the story. Even where programs exist, the average employee participation rate sits at about 10% for matching gifts and just 3% for volunteer grants. That is not because employees do not care. It is because nobody reminded them, or made it easy. And nonprofits are a big part of the silence: an estimated 70% of organizations never mention payroll giving on their websites, and about half do not promote it at all. After volunteer events, roughly two-thirds of nonprofits fail to follow up, which is precisely when a volunteer grant could have been claimed. The money is not lost to competition. It is lost to quiet.
Breaking the silence is the whole job, and it is genuinely doable for a small shop. Make the programs visible where donors already are: a simple workplace giving page on your site, a line in your thank-you messages, and a question at the point of donation about where the donor works. Then follow up with specifics. When someone volunteers, tell them if their employer offers a volunteer grant and how to submit it. When someone gives, ask whether payroll giving might be an easier way to sustain their support. I know why that follow-up so often does not happen. It comes due in the week after an event, when the thank-you notes are already late and something else is on fire, and it never feels urgent enough to beat the other work sitting on the desk.
What makes it urgent is a clock most donors never see. Matching gift programs almost always carry a submission deadline, and the terms vary widely from one employer to the next — some companies require the request within 90 days of the gift, others allow 180 days or a full year, and many close their books at the end of the calendar year. A donor who fully intends to get around to it can run out of time without ever knowing there was a limit. That is why the reminder has to come from you, close to the gift, with the actual date named. A thank-you note mentioning that the match window closes in March does far more work than a general nudge to check with an employer sometime.
These programs are the natural next layer inside a broader corporate giving program, and they tend to reinforce one another — an employee who sets up payroll giving today is often the same person who advocates for a company match or a sponsorship tomorrow.
Many of these programs trace back to a business owner or executive who cares deeply about generosity — and whose personal giving, structured with a long-term view, can do far more than any single campaign. Helping organizations and their donors build that kind of lasting plan is exactly what we do.
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Where to Start
If workplace giving has felt like something only big organizations do, here is how to begin claiming your share this month.
1. Build one workplace giving page. Create a single, plain page on your site that explains payroll giving, matching gifts, and volunteer grants, and how a supporter can use each. Most nonprofits have nothing like it, so even a simple version puts you ahead.
2. Ask where people work. Add an employer question to your donation form and your volunteer sign-ups. Knowing where your supporters work is the raw material for every workplace giving dollar you will ever claim.
3. Follow up after every volunteer event. Send a short message telling volunteers whether their employer offers a volunteer grant and how to submit their hours. This one habit closes the gap where most of the "Dollars for Doers" money disappears.
4. Offer payroll giving to your most loyal donors. For supporters who give year after year, mention that payroll giving can make their generosity automatic. Recurring, employer-routed gifts are some of the steadiest revenue a small shop can build.
Workplace giving will not replace the individual relationships at the heart of your work, and it rewards patience rather than a single big push. But it is a large, growing, and badly underused source of support, and almost all of it is reachable by an organization with no corporate department at all. Make the programs visible. Ask where people work. Follow up with specifics. The money is already set aside. Your job is simply to help your supporters use it.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.