Share your employer matching gifts program

Teresa Woods

Hello everyone,



I am in the process of exploring how other non-profits have planned out and executed their employer matching gifts program. I already have a rough framework in mind, but would like your perspective. Please feel free to pass this around to other folks in your network—all perspectives welcome!



If you wouldn’t mind sharing, how does your shop do it? 



Soup to nuts, walk me through your program. For example:

• What has worked well, what was a disaster, and what would you tweak slightly to make the program even better?
• Which organizations did you look to for inspiration for your program?
• What were your numbers before and after the program was put in place, roughly; what was the ROI?
• How do you promote the program?
• Do you have a dedicated matching gifts email box, and is it worth it to maintain or is it a time suck?
• Do you have a matching gifts FAQ page on your website, or a list of standard responses to FAQs?

Visual examples of your website, promotional pieces, project briefs, etc. greatly appreciated.

 

Jessica Taylor

Ditto. I would be very interested as well. Great question.

Stacie Dennis

So I can give you some insight to how we have managed the program in the past, but can't 100% tell you the ROI as it was a very fast and loose system. And as with most non-profits, we had multiple staff taking on pieces so there wasn't a centralized reporting system in place to track the ROI.



But basically, we would weave in the MG information into all areas of fundraising - for our signature events, we place MG forms into the packets that we hand out, we add a slide into every presentation, and send out emails that are specifically mapped out to talk about the MG programs. We had a dedicated email address and in-box so that we could keep track of all on-line requests and also if there was more than one staffer handling the processing they didn't have to worry about switching back and forth for logging in. We also sent out thank you letters once we received the matching gift from the company letting the original donor know that it had been received and thanking them for taking the time to process the original paperwork.



Pie in the sky, I would have loved to have a tracking sheet so that we could have had annual follow ups and make sure that donors who matched gifts in the past were continuing to match gifts in the future. I also was working on pulling employer reports to match up individuals who worked at companies where another person had processed a matching gift, and was going to start creating targeted marketing to those folks. 



Hopefully this is somewhat helpful to you. There were several areas that we could have improved on, but this gives you a very basic overview of the process. 

Nicole S

YOu can also check out this webinar



https://hello.blackbaud.com/Target_10975_Analytics_MatchFinderRelease_WSEM_06-02-15_Registration-LP.html?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRomrfCcI63Em2iQPJWpsrB0B/DC18kX3RUvJbieYQfind1SFJk7a8C6XFJFQN1M+CYVS7PE