Double the Donation Through Employer

A donation matching program is a perk of your job: you give to a qualifying nonprofit, submit a matching request through your employer’s portal, and the company sends the same amount to the same organization. Three mechanics decide whether you actually collect. Programs cap the annual match (commonly $1,000 to $10,000, much higher at some firms), the deadline to submit often falls in the first quarter of the following year — expired match requests are the main leak — and the match is the employer’s deduction, not yours; your deduction covers only what you personally gave. A widely cited 2018 Benevity study of 2.1 million employees across 118 companies found turnover 57% lower among staff who both gave and volunteered through company programs than among those who did neither. Treat that as correlation, not cause — it was published by the vendor selling the software, and engaged employees are more likely to volunteer in the first place — but the direction is unsurprising, and it is why these programs exist and why yours is probably underused.