Workplace giving
Workplace giving programs are initiatives that allow employees to donate to charitable organizations through their employer. These programs provide a convenient way for employees to support causes they care about while also encouraging a sense of community and social responsibility within the workplace. Workplace giving can take many forms, including payroll deductions, employer matching programs, and volunteer opportunities. By participating in workplace giving, employees can make a positive impact on their communities and beyond.
In this use case we'll explore some of the options for businesses or software providers to build workplace giving solutions on top of Goodstack's platform.
Looking for a workplace giving solution without any engineering requirements? Get in touch to discuss your requirements.
Managing giving opportunities​
In your giving platform, you'll want to present options to your employees for which good causes they can donate to, whether those are nominated by your team members or championed by your workplace.
Goodstack has a database of 8m+ nonprofits, which you can use to present a search UI for your users to select their chosen recipient.
Read the Search Organisations API documentation to see how to implement search in your platform. We recommend adding a filter by country code in your search interface to improve the relevancy of search results.
If you want to offer a fixed list of supported causes then you can identify which charities should be in your portal and only offer those in your donation flow. The key identifier that you'll need to trigger a donation to the cause is the organisationId: Goodstack's unique ID for a nonprofit. You can use the search API above to retrieve the organisationId. If you know the official registry ID of the nonprofit (e.g. the EIN in the United States or local equivalent) then you can also filter results using the registryId field to make sure you've got the right one.
You may also want to group nonprofits into categories according to your internal criteria, for example those that are relevant to a particular impact metric for your company. Once you've identified the relevant nonprofits, you can use our Categories API to build your list of categories and assign nonprofits to them for easy retrieval in your platform. You can also assign images to categories so you can fetch relevant assets in your UI without needing to hard-code them.
Ways for employees to donate​
Once you've defined which nonprofits your employees can donate to, there are different approaches in how to collect donations and specify which nonprofit should receive them.
Direct donation​
The most straightforward way is to use our hosted donation gateway to take a direct donation from an employee for a given nonprofit. To generate a donation session, you'll need the organisation ID above for the chosen nonprofit.
Read more about using our Hosted Donation Gateway.
Spend donation credits​
You may wish to offer donation credits as a benefit for your employees. In this case, the enterprise would be responsible for the transfer of funds, but the employee would choose the recipient nonprofit.
For this case, we would recommend that you create a donation request for your employee via our Donation API. This creates a record of an intention to donate to the chosen nonprofit and we will issue a donation request to you to reconcile the payment.
You will need to manage the balance of any donation credits that your employees have and update them each time they make a donation. You can retrieve the paid out status of the donation from our API.
Support a workplace fundraiser​
If you are running a targeted fundraising campaign, you can attach a metadata value to your donations to mark them as being part of that campaign. Metadata is supported for both hosted gateway donations and donation requests via the API.
Matched donations​
Matched donations help your employees to increase the impact of their donations by matching them with funds from your business. To implement a matched funding option for your staff, you can create additional donation requests for each direct donation that they make.
You may want to set specific policies or limits on which donations are eligible for matched funding, for example:
- A matched funding limit per employee
- A total matched funding limit
- Matched funding limited to specific nonprofits or campaigns