Matching Gifts: How to Tap Into Billions in Unclaimed Corporate Dollars

Mark: Welcome to Elevate Your Event, powered by Handbid, where we share real-world tips to help you raise more and stress less. In this episode, we're talking with Colleen Carroll from Double the Donation about one of the easiest ways to grow your revenue: matching gifts. Learn how to tap into billions of unclaimed dollars, automate reminders, and turn every donation into double the impact.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better, or maybe generate a little bit more revenue, maybe double the revenue. So we have a very special guest. We have Colleen Carroll, Community Events Lead at Double the Donation. Colleen, welcome to the program.

Colleen: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Jeff: So give us some background on Double the Donation, what you guys do. Obviously, that should then lead into what in the heck is a matching gift because I think that's what you're going to tell me you do.

Colleen: I love it. So we are a workplace fundraising and employer matching gift automation software. And what that means is we essentially help nonprofits communicate to their supporters about how they can get their gifts matched by their employers, do payroll giving, volunteer grants, all sorts of topics. So instead of waiting for the companies to remind their employees to get their gifts matched, you as the nonprofit are able to remind your supporters that this might be something they're eligible for. They should check their eligibility and they should actually submit it so you are getting more dollars in the door.

Colleen: So matching gifts, I'm talking about those corporate programs where a company matches the donation their employees make to an eligible nonprofit or school, effectively doubling the contribution to the institution. Or as one of the nonprofits I speak to regularly says, it's free money on the table that you can grab, which is always very exciting.

Colleen: When I say workplace fundraising, that's my umbrella term for employer matching gifts, volunteer grants, volunteer time off, payroll giving, in-kind gifts, corporate partnerships, all the different ways that companies are engaging with your organization and encouraging their employees to engage with your organization.

Jeff: Okay, so matching gifts. One of the things I heard you say, eligible charities, or nonprofits. Obviously, not every corporation wants to give to every type of nonprofit. So what's the process for me to go back and say, the charity I want to support, does my organization align with what they'll match?

Colleen: So this is the big challenge with any of these programs is that every company has their own unique way of dealing with it. If you are an individual working at a company, you can probably go to HR or find it in your employee handbook. But if you don't want to do either of those things, that is where Double the Donation can come in handy. We have a database of over 24,000 plus companies where we've kept track of all these different requirements. And so if you're a nonprofit, you're able to put that search tool on your website so that instead of telling your donors to go to HR, because who really wants to go to HR, you can be like, hey, just fill out this search tool right here and check whether Verizon has a program, Home Depot has a program, wherever they may work.

Jeff: So I've done the research. I've found that my employer will support the type of charity I'm going to support. I assume I should probably know that in advance.

Colleen: It can go either way. I would say from the nonprofit side, it is worth it to start talking to your supporters in advance of the event, getting them starting to think about whether their gifts are going to be eligible for a match because that can increase the size of the gift. People love it. They're reminded, oh, my employer will match my gift. I won't give 25. I'm going to give 50 because then that'll be 100 and I'll feel all nice and warm and fuzzy.

Colleen: But you can also remind people post-donation and post-event that they are eligible. We want to remind people on all sides because we want to do as much as we can to make sure that we're getting those dollars. Again, they're out there, your supporters are eligible for them. The dollars are just not making their way to you.

Jeff: I have one donor every year who emails us and says, my company will match up to $1,000. And you guys are eligible. So I want to buy the $1,000 table. But what I want to do is I'm going to give you a $1,000 donation. I'm going to go get it matched. And then I need you to comp me the table. And I'm like, yeah, I could do that. If you're going to give me $2,000 for the table, yeah. I can make that happen.

Colleen: See, this is where I rely on your expertise with events because that never occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Jeff: But that's the I-need-to-know-in-advance kind of conversation. But let's talk about your software because shameless plug, it does integrate with Handbid. If somebody is on our site and they're filling out a donation, once they're done, there's this do-you-want-to-look-for-a-corporate-match option. Describe what happens.

Colleen: From the donor's perspective, they fill it in. They let us know where they work. We're going to then provide them with the information for their company. So if they told us they worked at Home Depot, we're going to be like, great. Here's Home Depot's program. Do they have a program? What's their minimum? What's their maximum? What form do they need to go fill out? Here's the link to the form so that they don't have to go find it.

Colleen: From a nonprofit perspective, they're going to flow into your Double the Donation account and we would have an automated email stream set up. If they've told us where they work but they have not submitted their match, they're going to get an email reminder within one day of their donation being like, hey, so excited. So glad you donated. Don't you want to see if you can get your gift matched? And then we suggest having a cadence of one day and then maybe three days later and then maybe 30 days later. Because people are busy. They get distracted. We want to give them those extra reminders.

Colleen: The final thing that we'll do with an automated email stream is a thank you email. If people let us know that they submitted their gift, we want to make sure we're thanking them for taking that initiative, filling out the paperwork and doubling their gift and telling them what that means to our organization.

Jeff: I've seen a lot of research saying the three to five reminder range is kind of where you need to get in order to really get somebody to act.

Colleen: Absolutely. We see that sending that second email increases dramatically the number of matches that you're actually going to receive. These are people that already care about your mission. They've already made the donation. You are giving them the opportunity to double their impact with just filling out some paperwork. So don't be scared.

Jeff: Let's talk about why this is important. How many of those checks aren't written every year?

Colleen: So this is the big number: four to seven billion dollars worth of matching gift funds alone is going unclaimed each year. That's a problem not only because we're not getting it into the hands of nonprofits that could do really amazing things with these dollars, but I have a little bit of a fear that if we don't access these funds they might go away. Companies might stop dedicating as much money to their matching gift programs. I see it as a big group project with all of us in the nonprofit space being like, it is in all of our best interest that we get these dollars actually into the hands of nonprofits.

Colleen: It's 10% of the U.S. workforce that is eligible for an employer match. There are going to be people within your roster, within your CRM that are eligible and likely are just unaware of their eligibility or unaware of what they're supposed to do. They need those reminders.

Jeff: What is this going to cost me to use a service like this?

Colleen: Our pricing model is based on your organization. How many individual contributions are you getting in? Our standard packages start at about $1,000 a year, but there is a huge range and some of them are smaller than that. I really recommend reaching out to our team.

Jeff: But the ROI, even at $1,000 a year, to me, that's one or two matching gifts, right? You're going to recover your investment with just one or two matching gifts, and there's way more than that out there. What did you say it was, 10% of the workforce?

Colleen: 10% of the U.S. workforce, yep. So 10% of your attendees or your donors are more likely to have this. And it might even be higher than that.

Jeff: Do you recommend that your nonprofits do some sort of survey to see how many of their constituents or their donors have matching gift programs?

Colleen: I don't think we've ever particularly said put out an extra survey, but I think we often talk about, look at what you know. Do you know where some of your donors already work? Have you gathered that information in the past? Let's start putting that into our search tool. The other thing you can really do is think about your regions. If you know that your donor base is centered in a particular city, let's start looking at what the big companies in that city are and what their programs are.

Jeff: I should survey all of my constituents and just ask them what company they work for and then cross-reference that against the Double the Donation list. Because this came up at a board meeting and there was a little bit of pushback. And finally, one of the board members says, well, I work for Cisco and I know they match. And we looked it up and I want to say it was $2,000 or $3,000. And he's like, well, I'm going to give that anyway. And now it becomes more purposeful giving, more structured giving.

Colleen: Or just have a calendar notification before the end of the calendar year. Remember to submit my match because these matches do sometimes expire and every company has a different program. We want to make sure we're not missing that valuable window.

Jeff: The more we educate our supporters, the more tools we give them to say, let's get this taken care of at the beginning of the year.

Colleen: There is just always so much more you can do. If you hear all this and you're like, I can't possibly do what you just talked about, it's okay. Phase by phase, step by step, no one is doing all of the things. Let's start with the basics. Let's start by asking on your donation form for employer information. Start gathering. That's going to give you such a window into your supporter base.

Jeff: So what other advice do you have for the folks that are listening as it relates to corporate matching?

Colleen: There's so much you can do related to your event. You can build excitement in advance of your event. Do you send out a postcard being like, hey, so excited that you're coming, reminder to check your eligibility. One in three donors will give a larger donation than originally planned if a match is offered.

Colleen: If we're talking about during the event, see if you can give matching gifts a moment center stage. Can you have someone speak for two minutes at the podium about what these are and why they matter? And bonus points if you get a donor themselves to talk about it. People absolutely prefer to hear from their peers on this topic.

Jeff: It's all about being a little bit more proactive than reactive. Post event, I think, is important as pre-event because post-event becomes next year's pre-event.

Colleen: Absolutely. Post-event, maybe we go a little bit more targeted. Can we look at what are the top donations we received, see which ones are eligible, and maybe give them a phone call? If someone has a three or four thousand dollar gift that is eligible for a match, maybe we want to call them.

Jeff: Everybody who's listening is probably thinking, I don't have time to manage this. I get that. This is free money, but it's not free in the sense that you have to work for it.

Colleen: So true. And again, we don't have to do it all at once. Pare it back. Which one of these has been most relevant to your organization? Which of them feels accessible? And if you can't figure that out, please feel free to reach out to me. I talk with nonprofit professionals about this every week.

Jeff: I would recommend that you reach out to Colleen and Double the Donation. So how do they do that?

Colleen: There's a few different ways. You can find me on LinkedIn. I spend way too much time on LinkedIn. Colleen Carroll there. You can also reach out to me at partners at doublethedonation.com. Or if you just generally reach out through one of the forms on the Double the Donation website, you will get connected with the right person.

Jeff: There's dollars there, guys, under the table. You got to go find it.

Colleen: It's the big group project we can all work on together.

Jeff: All right. Colleen, thank you so much for your time. And I hope anybody listening to the podcast reaches out to you and they get going on this. Until next time, happy fundraising.

Mark: If you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can find us on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe for more great content. And if you're a fan of video, check us out on YouTube. Until next time, happy fundraising.