“Benevity fails for me and my fundraisers” – why non-profits are calling on the platform to provide more timely donation data

This independent journalism on data, digital transformation and technology for social impact is made possible by the Future of Good editorial fellowship on digital transformation, supported by Mastercard Changeworks™. Read our editorial ethics and standards here.

At Pathways to Education, a national charity helping young people from low-income communities access higher education or employment, the director of fundraising operations, Liz Rejman, is having to deal with an administrative challenge that she and her team hadn’t accounted for: cleaning the donation data they receive from corporate donation platform Benevity. “Hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies” use Benevity to allow employees to make micro-donations through payroll and employee engagement programs, according to the platform itself. 

“When we started off receiving donations [from Benevity] in 2017, it sometimes took two staff members a week to prepare the data,” Rejman says. Since employees who make donations through corporate donation programs are likely to give small amounts frequently, the spreadsheet is not only huge, but also full of duplicates and triplicates, she adds. While she says the manual time taken to clean the dataset has now been reduced from a week down to half a day, it’s still a significant additional process that requires staff’s attention, skills and time.

Rejman took to LinkedIn to ask whether other non-profits were experiencing a similar challenge with the platform, in what she described as “a love/hate relationship”. Among those who responded in agreement was Dan Kershaw, executive director at Furniture Bank.

“It’s a bit of a disservice to say they’re helping charities while creating an administrative burden,” Kershaw later added in an interview with Future of Good. 

According to both Rejman and Kershaw, non-profits who receive donations through the Benevity platform receive a spreadsheet of donations on a monthly basis. However, the duplicate and triplicate entries then artificially inflate the number of donors the non-profit is connecting with – in other words, if an individual donor has made a small donation to a charity every week, each donation will show up as a separate entry when the charity receives its monthly disbursement statement, rather than a consolidated monthly donation amount. At Pathways to Education, the team ended up having to invest in additional software that can decipher, identify and consolidate duplicate donations in this spreadsheet. 

And even if external software is able to pool those donations together to identify one single donor, the donor themselves has often opted out of providing personal information that the non-profit can then use to communicate with or thank them. While it’s normal for donors to opt out of sharing their personal information, it doesn’t allow non-profits to build long-term relationships and prospects that can guarantee future donations, Rejman says. 

Rejman stresses that the dollar amount of the donation is not as significant as deepening the relationship itself – people who donate could also become volunteers or mentors in the Pathways program, for example. 

For Kershaw, the relative lack of data – and relevant data analytics and insights – from Benevity is just one problem. When Future of Good spoke to Kershaw in early February, he was still waiting for donation information from December. “Benevity fails for me and my fundraisers. We probably have donors who gave in December or early January, and think that Furniture Bank didn’t even take the time to talk to me. It’s the timeliness [of the data] and giving charities insight to reach out [to donors]. 

He adds that while Benevity sends non-profits a settlement – a document outlining total donation amounts – once a month, other third-party donor management platforms are sending non-profits these statements on a much more regular basis. For instance, CanadaHelps sends such notices daily, which has a knock-on positive effect on the charity’s accounting processes. 

“If I flip it around, is Benevity waiting a whole month to give statements to corporate customers?” he questions. Rejman echoes this: “Benevity gives us data at the end of the month, but the money then hits the bank a few days later.” That, she says, has consequences for funding applications, if the organization can’t accurately state how much money is in their bank account at any given time.  

The result, Kershaw adds, is that at Furniture Bank, the team ends up ignoring all Benevity data when it comes to fundraising operations. “It’s never timely, nor rich enough for any ongoing stewardship or campaigns.” The situation is the same at Pathways to Education: “The burden on staff time and resources means there is a net-zero gain in terms of assessing the impact of the donations received,” Rejman says. “You’re panning for gold, and have to have a lot of patience and perseverance, and those pain points end up making you feel dismissive of the data. But it does count and there are gems in there, but they end up not being on the radar.”

“If Benevity just had a conversation with us, we could share ideal timing and they could adjust. But they’re working on timing that works best for them and it’s inconvenient,” Rejman adds. “Organizations like Benevity aren’t going to go away. We’d like them to work with us as partners rather than data dumpers.”

Who, then, is Benevity accountable to? 

Although non-profits aren’t necessarily on the receiving end of robust data from Benevity, Kershaw doesn’t think this is the case for Benevity’s corporate clients, the organizations that collect donations through employee engagement programs. “Benevity have cornered the business market, but they don’t see charities as a customer – we’re an ingredient to their product,” he says. Rejman echoes this: “I’ve never been able to have a conversation with Benevity. I’ve always had standard responses, or been redirected to their FAQs.”

Future of Good spoke to Benevity’s chief impact officer Sona Khosla on this issue. “The goal is to reduce duplicative data entry,” Khosla says. “If we can centralize that, we can create more of a destination for employees and companies to elevate [fundraising], especially smaller grassroots organizations that may not have the money to spend on advertising.” 

Khosla adds that Benevity is working on “optimizing reporting” — for instance by adding more filtering options and allowing the data to interface with other systems that a non-profit might use, such as a customer relationship management or CRM system. The Benevity team also plans to add more data points around online engagement, so that non-profits can assess which communications and campaigns are driving the most action. 

Benevity is also looking to add a method for non-profits to capture their impact and outcomes data within the platform itself – in other words, data that shows exactly how the funding has been used by the non-profit in the communities they serve. “Non-profits can share impact and outcomes data with corporations, with the goal of attracting more grants or donations,” Khosla adds. “A donor will choose to donate to an organization that can show more impact and outcomes data, which will drive more frequency in donations.”

The Benevity team shared 23 data points with Future of Good, which non-profits receiving donations through the platform have access to at present. That includes the company the donor works at and the donation date, and if the donor chooses to share it, personal identifiable information. Benevity also provides non-profits with a transaction ID, donation frequency if the donor makes regular payments, and a reason for the donation, if the donor has provided one. 

However, as Kershaw adds, this is low in comparison to other third-party donor management platforms. According to his own research, CanadaHelps provides 67 data points, while Fundraise Up has 300 data points for non-profits to access. 

In a follow-up email interview, the Benevity team added the following: “Although we understand that causes would like more granular insights about their corporate and individual supports, as we see high rates of donors choosing to give anonymously, we prioritize donors’ information sharing preferences and clients’ PII [personal identifiable information] sharing policies and cannot compel donors to share their contact information.” They added that this is not a problem that is exclusive to Benevity. “We are, however, looking at ways to innovate to improve cause / donor connections, including improving the volunteering experience for causes so they may better engage with corporate donors and develop richer impact data.”

As for a lack of engagement with non-profits themselves, Khosla says that “every time we’re looking for enhancements for non-profits, we bring them into research initiatives and user testing. We have deeper connections with some non-profits, which is going to be increasing over the next few years as we expand our data strategy.” Benevity also currently has a non-profit council, made up of 12 to 15 organizations, and there is a broader set of 30 to 40 non-profit organizations that Benevity works with to understand particular pain points. These include both large and grassroots organizations, Khosla adds. “For instance, when we see a spike in donations, we reach out to them to see what might be driving their popularity and donations.”

Benevity also added that they’re “currently looking at the value of increased disbursement cycles,” following feedback from some non-profits about only receiving donation statements once a month. “The desire for increased disbursement frequency is largely split in our cause community, with only 40% of causes wanting payments more than once a month,” the team said. 

Why is timely and accurate data so important to fundraising?

Although data is becoming increasingly vital to fundraising and philanthropy, “there is an inevitable data loss that happens when you pool information from donors,” says Celeste Barron Waterman, a partner at Toronto-based non-profit consultancy KCI Philanthropy. In the context of third-party donor management platforms, there’s also always an added step between the donor and the non-profit. While that does mean that a donor is able to remain anonymous if they want to, the downsides are for the charitable sector because they’re missing out on a potential donor relationship. 

“Charities are constantly pushed to be lean and reduce administration,” Barron Waterman adds, which often leads them to outsource certain operations.

“Having a good database and your own giving portal, as opposed to looking to another organization to help you, can help with your own fundraising programs.”

However, she also notes that non-profits often don’t have the internal capacity to manage this work, which is becoming increasingly crucial to fundraising – hence the need to outsource it in the first place. 

Without complete donor data, non-profits can’t thank or build relationships with their donors, which in turn, turns people off from philanthropy altogether, Barron Waterman says. She calls it the “non-profit starvation cycle.” She adds: “People increasingly expect customization and good service, but charities don’t always have the capacity to meet donors’ expectations”

That’s why a dedicated data specialist is increasingly critical to have on a non-profit staff team, adds Dane Bland, the director of philanthropy at Rainbow Railroad, and a member of the Greater Toronto Chapter Board of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). And he specifies that the individual in the role should be able to do more than just enter data into a spreadsheet: “Non-profits need analysis and research that is informed from their databases. Where are we doing well, and where are we not? How can we then use these trends and data?”

Bland suggests that fundraisers who aren’t skilled in data could learn from people who have business intelligence skills as well, who can help with simple analysis skills. That can then help fundraisers to identify trends: an example would be if the average amount in donations was increasing, but the number of donors was decreasing, which suggests that more people are giving larger gifts. 

However, Bland also warns against relying too heavily on data and numbers: “If you look at lists of thousands, rather than two or three people, something is lost in thinking of them as ‘trend analysis’ rather than human beings.” 

“We forget that philanthropy is deeply personal and beautiful – it’s human beings being very generous and giving away money to affect social change,” he says. “Philanthropy is people-driven, whether it’s for fundraisers or donors. And in a world in which privacy is increasingly encroached upon, it’s vital to maintain ethical practice in data-driven fundraising.”

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error