Matching Gifts: The Fundraising Money Most Nonprofits Leave on the Table
Picture a donor who gives your organization $200. She believes in your work, she gives gladly, and she moves on with her day. What she does not know is that her employer would have written you a second check for that same $200 if anyone had asked. That second gift never arrives. Not because the company changed its mind, and not because your donor is unwilling. It simply slips through a gap that almost no one is watching. Now multiply that quiet miss across a year of gifts, and you start to see the size of what is sitting there, unclaimed.
Matching gifts are the closest thing fundraising has to free money, and they are also the money most nonprofits leave on the table. The frustrating part, and also the hopeful part, is how little it takes to start claiming it. This is not a new campaign or a new donor you have to go find. It is revenue already attached to the donors you have. What I have learned is that once you understand where this money hides and why it stays hidden, capturing a meaningful share of it becomes one of the simplest wins available to a small development shop.
The Money Sitting in Plain Sight
Start with the scale. Roughly 65% of Fortune 500 companies offer matching gift programs, and more than 26 million people work for a company that will match their charitable gifts. Those employees are already scattered across your donor list. Every year, about $2.86 billion actually gets matched and sent to nonprofits through these programs. And every year, an estimated $4 to $7 billion in matching funds goes unclaimed, quietly expiring because no one submitted the request.
The reason the money stays on the table is not corporate stinginess. It is a simple, fixable awareness gap. Studies find that 78% of donors do not know whether their employer offers a match at all, and only about 8% know that they are eligible and understand how to submit the request. Your donors are not refusing to double their gifts. They have no idea the option exists, and no one has told them.
Here is the number that should get every development director's attention. Even though an estimated 10% of individual donations are eligible for a corporate match, only about 1.31% of donations actually get matched at the average nonprofit. That gap between what is eligible and what is claimed is the whole story. It is not a market you have to create. It is a market you already have and are simply not collecting on.
None of this is new or fringe, either, which is part of why it is so easy to overlook. General Electric launched the first corporate matching gift program back in 1954 and has since contributed more than $1.1 billion through employee matches. Microsoft matched $53.2 million in employee donations in a single recent year. These are mature, well-funded programs that companies genuinely want their employees to use. And they are getting easier to qualify for: over the last three years, the share of programs that will match a gift to any nonprofit grew by 48%, while narrowly restricted programs shrank. The odds that a given donor's employer will match a gift to your mission are better now than they have ever been.
The Easiest Money You Are Not Raising
What makes matching gifts different from almost every other fundraising tactic is that claiming them does not require asking your donor for another dollar. The donor has already decided to give. You are just helping them route a gift their employer has already agreed to make. That changes the emotional weight of the ask entirely, for you and for them.
And the presence of a match does not only recover a second gift. It makes the first one bigger. When donors know a match is available, 84% say they are more likely to give, and roughly one in three say they will increase the size of their gift. The effect on your appeals is measurable: simply mentioning matching gifts in a fundraising appeal has been shown to lift response rates by 71% and average donation amounts by 51%. One study even found the average matched gift ran 1.5 to 2 times the size of the average unmatched one. That is why a single line about matching belongs in your year-end appeal and on your donation page, not buried in a resource nobody visits. The match is not a back-office detail. It is one of the most persuasive things you can put in front of a donor at the moment they are deciding.
Turning "ask every donor whether their employer matches" into a dependable system — the right appeal language, the search step at checkout, and the follow-up emails — is exactly the kind of workflow you can build once and lean on for every gift that comes in.
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How to Actually Claim It
The good news for a small shop is that you do not need a corporate giving department to capture matching gifts. More than 65% of nonprofits have no dedicated staff for matching gift marketing, so the organizations winning here are not out-staffing you. They have simply built a few small habits. Here is what those habits look like in practice.
It begins with one question, asked everywhere a donor interacts with you: does your employer match charitable gifts? Put it on the donation form, in the thank-you email, and in your appeals. Then, when a donor gives, follow up specifically about matching. The follow-up is where the money is actually recovered, and the data on email cadence is striking. Organizations that send a single matching gift reminder see about 31% of eligible donations submitted; a second reminder adds another 45%, and a third brings the total to 54% of eligible gifts claimed. Most shops send zero. Going from none to two or three simple, friendly reminders is the difference between leaving the money on the table and putting it in your budget.
It helps to know how much is realistically in play, so the effort feels worth it. The vast majority of companies, around 91%, match at a straightforward one-to-one ratio, and the average annual maximum a company will match sits near $3,728 per employee. That means a single committed donor who works for a matching company could double several gifts across a year before ever hitting a cap. A handful of those add up quickly. [EXPERIENCE — a real number from C.J. here would land hard: matching-gift dollars you have seen a shop recover in a year simply by adding the question and a follow-up, or a donor whose gift you watched double. If nothing specific fits, cut this bracket.]
Matching gifts sit right alongside the rest of your workplace giving work, so it is worth folding them into how you approach employee and workplace giving generally, and into the wider corporate giving program you are building. The same donor who matches a gift this year may work for a company that also offers volunteer grants or a sponsorship, and one good habit tends to open the door to the next.
Behind many of these matching programs is a business owner or executive who genuinely cares about generosity — and whose own giving, structured with a long-term view, can do far more than an annual match ever will. Helping organizations and their donors build that kind of lasting plan is exactly what we do.
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Where to Start
If matching gifts have been an afterthought at your organization, here is how to change that this month, without new staff or new software.
1. Add the question everywhere. Put "Does your employer match charitable gifts?" on your donation form, your thank-you message, and your next appeal. This one change costs nothing and starts surfacing eligible donors immediately.
2. Build a two-email follow-up. Draft two short, warm reminders that go out after a gift, pointing donors to how they can submit a match. Two reminders capture the large majority of what a full sequence would.
3. Name the match in your appeals. Add a single sentence about matching to your year-end and campaign appeals. It lifts both how many people give and how much they give.
4. Start a simple list. Track which donors work for matching companies as you learn it. Over time that list becomes one of the most valuable pieces of donor data you own.
Matching gifts will not replace the individual donors who form the heart of your support, and they are not a shortcut around doing the real work of fundraising well. But they are revenue you have already earned and simply have not collected. A donor who loves your mission, an employer who has already said yes, and one question standing between you and a doubled gift. Ask it. Follow up. You will be surprised how much of that money on the table is still yours to claim.
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.