As CEOs cut back on DEI and tell young workers to leave their politics at home, charitable giving, with an employer match, has emerged as a way for employees to bring their own values to work.
By Maria Gracia Santillana Linares, Forbes Staff
President-elect Donald Trump and his appointees are promising a war against woke, with employer diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts among their targets. At the same time, with job openings down nearly 40% from their 2022 peak, even unhappy employees are less likely to quit. So it’s no surprise that CEOs, who a few years ago embraced social justice in part to appease young subordinates, are now curtailing DEI programs, staying mum about causes, and demanding employees, too, keep their political views out of the workplace. Just last week, Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, confirmed it was rolling back its DEI efforts.
After protests over the war in Gaza, workers discovered that activism can even get you fired.
But there’s a notable exception to this retreat: charitable giving. In recent years, even as contributions to the United Way have declined, a new type of giving platform has spread that empowers workers to pick their own charitable causes–usually with an employer match.
“Everyone is looking for a way to keep all these young employees who now expect [their employers to speak out] happy, while not putting their organization at legal risk,” says Alison Taylor, a professor of corporate responsibility and business ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “There is this overwhelming sense of caution among senior leaders and C-suite executives about not pissing anyone else off.”
In that context, she adds, “The pivot to giving employees more control over their donations is sensible.”
It’s also a way to accommodate Gen-Z and younger Millennials moved by the human suffering they see on social media and in the news, particularly in places like Gaza.
The dominant player in the giving platform space is Alberta, Calgary-based fintech Benevity, which in 2023 processed $3.2 billion of donations to 265,000 unique causes, from workers at such companies as Adobe, Cisco, Merck, Microsoft, Nike, UPS and Visa. (That total, which was up 14% and is on track to grow again this year by double digits, includes employer matches of workers’ donations. While Benevity has multinational and non-U.S. companies as clients, 84% of 2023 contributions went to U.S. charities.)
In an analysis for Forbes of all employee giving at 826 client companies during the two years ended Oct. 31, 2024, Benevity found the top five recipients were the Red Cross (across all countries and chapters), St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Doctors Without Borders (across all countries), Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
At our request, Jules Dorval, the social data science lead at Benevity, also drilled down on giving by young workers at the subset of 62 companies for which it has data on donors’ age. During the same two year period, the top recipients of money from workers under 30 skewed more heavily to relief groups, particularly international ones. Palestine Red Crescent Society-Al Bireh Branch (serving both Gaza and the West Bank) was No. 1, Islamic Relief No. 3, and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund No. 6, compared to Nos. 11, 14 and 17, respectively, for workers of all ages at those same 62 companies. Rounding out the top 10 for under 30 givers: World Central Kitchen (2), UNICEF (4), Red Cross (5), St. Jude’s (7), Mercy Corps (8), Doctors Without Borders (9) and Save The Children Federation (10).
Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British non-profit providing healthcare services in Gaza and the West Bank, was the 11th most-donated-to charity for employees aged 30 or younger giving through Benevity, though it didn’t break the top 200 charities for all workers.
New York City-based American Friends of Magen David Adom, which acts as Israel’s representative to the International Red Cross and provides disaster relief and emergency services to Israelis, ranked 18th in the top charities younger workers donated to, but just 78th for all employees–further evidence that whatever their views on the Israel-Hamas conflict, the youngest workers are inclined to express them through charitable giving.
“I gave at the office” is a cliche born from a long tradition. In the late 1800s, local elites attempted to rationalize charitable giving by forming charitable societies to act as umbrella organizations that could weed out the undeserving from the deserving. Increased workplace charitable solicitations during World War II led to the first implementations of payroll deductions for donations. After the war, as other deductions for insurance, taxes and the like spread, so did the payroll giving model, with most of the money going to community chests like the now more than 1,100 U.S. chapters of the United Way Worldwide, which in turn directed the majority of their funds to a small group of big name, mainstream charities, including the YMCA, Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
At first, workers didn’t have much choice about what their dollars supported, but under pressure from alternative giving campaigns, in 1990 United Way officially embraced the idea of allowing payroll donors to designate where their dollars would go–even to organizations outside of United Way. Still, the percentage of workers participating in United Way campaigns continued to drop, with donations falling sharply during the Great Recession.
In the year ending in June 2024, just $1 billion of the United Way’s $2.5 billion in private donations came from workplace contributions.
Now the spread of online giving platforms is breathing new life into the old tradition of workplace giving–and turning it into an employee benefit, part of a broader package offered by companies to keep workers engaged and satisfied. Some 78% of employees who have workplace giving programs available say that their companies’ values align with their personal ones, compared to just 56% where workplace giving isn’t offered, according to research by Artemis Strategy group for Fidelity Charitable, an affiliate of Fidelity Investments. (In 2019, Fidelity Charitable and the big employee benefits division of Fidelity Investments teamed up to start the Giving Marketplace, a competitor to Benevity.)
Moreover, in the same Artemis survey of 1500 workers, 89% who have workplace giving programs available said they were satisfied with their current employer, 12 percentage points higher than the satisfaction rate for those without workplace giving schemes. Artemis’ findings don’t necessarily show that charitable giving is why more employees are satisfied, but it does suggest that it’s part of a benefits package found at happier workplaces. That’s something employers can’t ignore, since according to Gallup, Millennial and Gen Z workers in particular report feeling more disengaged and stuck in their jobs these days–a reflection of a tougher market for job-hunters that has transformed the “Big Quit” into the “The Great Stay.”
Further evidence that giving is now an employee benefit: 70% of employers who use Benevity match 100% of an employee’s contributions (up to a set amount), Dorval reports. In total, he calculates, 65% of all dollars given through the platform get a match. Companies can also use the platform to track days off given to workers for volunteering, or even to make contributions to a worker’s charity account to reward them for volunteering on their own time. Workers can donate through payroll deduction, fund their giving with a credit card donation, or do both. Employees can designate in advance the charities their money will support or accumulate cash in a giving account, and then direct individual donations from that account—just as someone would when using a donor-advised fund. (Benevity uses a master donor-advised fund to hold all the donations.)
The flexibility of the Benevity platform accommodates special fundraising drives and events like Giving Tuesday–the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Charities have pushed Giving Tuesday since 2012 as a way to goose donations at a time when Americans’ wallets are relatively open. During 2023’s Giving Tuesday, Benevity logged $150 million in donations made through its platform, a 22% increase from the year before.
Workplace giving is still just a drop in the charitable bucket–but is growing faster than other giving channels.. The Blackbaud Giving Fund estimates $5 billion a year is given at U.S. workplaces. That’s just 1% of the $557 billion in total contributions made in the U.S. in 2023. according to Giving USA’s annual tally. But individual giving was up only 1.6% (in nominal dollars, not inflation adjusted ones) in 2023, according to that report, compared to Benevity’s 14% increase.
By contrast, giving to donor-advised funds, run by community foundations and non-profit affiliates of such financial services powerhouses as Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab, dropped a surprising 22% last year to $59 billion. (To maximize their tax benefits, wealthy donors will typically contribute highly appreciated stock to DAFs in a lump when they have big gains, then dribble out contributions to specific operating charities over time. That can lead to more volatility from year to year.)
While Benevity does provide U.S. workers the documentation needed to claim tax deductions, donations by rank and file workers aren’t usually driven by tax considerations–the 2017 Trump tax overhaul reduced the percentage of U.S. filers who itemize their deductions (and thus can claim tax benefits) to less than 8%. In fact, contributions to foreign charities are typically not deductible at all, but Benevity reports that 67% of its clients allow for international giving. (Benevity has a roster of more than two million eligible organizations, though companies can exclude certain categories–for example, religious organizations–from their match.)
Workplace giving now seems poised to expand further, even as DEI and social activism by CEOs shrink. A new survey of 219 big companies by Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP) found that between 2021 and 2023, 53% decreased their own community investments (which include direct cash gifts and donations of products and services, including employee time). At the same time, 94% of the companies (up by four percentage points from 2021) offered some sort of charitable matching gift program to employees. Matching programs include year-round matches, matching during annual giving campaigns, donations to reward employees’ volunteer work and the fastest growing category, special drives for disaster relief.
Here’s the kicker: At companies responding to the CECP survey, only 20% of employees, on average, participated in their companies’ employer matches, up one percentage point from 2021. Double Your Donation, which maintains a database of employers’ match programs for its clients (who are charities), calculates 27 million workers now have match programs available and estimates they could be leaving $4 to $7 billion in matching money unclaimed annually. Room to grow.