We’ve written before about the importance of corporate giving vendors in nonprofit fundraising. One such platform is POINT. In this guide, we’re going to dive deeper into that solution and see what you, as a nonprofit fundraising professional, should know about it.
Specifically, we’ll cover the following key points (no pun intended!):
- What is the POINT app?
- POINT for Nonprofits
- POINT for Companies
- Standout Feature — Matching Gift Auto-Submission with Double the Donation
Ready to find out how you can optimize your organization’s corporate fundraising strategy by making the most of the corporate giving platforms your supporters will interact with? Let’s begin!
What is POINT?
POINT is a leading volunteer management platform and corporate giving technology solution. One Forbes article described the platform as “making volunteering as easy as getting an Uber.” And in recent years, POINT has branched out to incorporate tools for online giving, corporate giving partnerships, and more.
POINT describes the solutions as the starting point to doing something good —whether that’s a volunteer looking for a cause to support, a nonprofit recruiting volunteers for its upcoming event, or a company offering workplace philanthropy programs to its employees.
There are two core components of the POINT solution, which can be divided into tools for nonprofits (and their volunteers) and tools for companies (and their employees). Here, we’ll dive into both and see exactly what POINT has to offer.
POINT for Nonprofits
POINT offers a ton of helpful features for nonprofits and schools looking to best mobilize their supporters to make an impact on their overall mission. Key software functionality for this solution includes:
- Volunteer recruitment — Easily attract new volunteers to support your cause with POINT’s digital volunteer hub, mobile app, website integration, and more. Plus, enable supporters to quickly and easily sign up for events and shifts online!
- Volunteer management and engagement — POINT’s volunteer database allows organizations to effectively organize an unlimited number of volunteers, events, and programs. Keep in touch with your contacts with email communications, automated reminders, and more.
- Online giving— Use POINT’s built-in donation platform to accept donations of all sizes online, as well as manage an in-kind gift registry for volunteers and other supporters.
- Detailed reporting — Automatic reporting with POINT gives you volunteerism reports to leverage birds-eye and detailed activity, trends, and analysis of your organization’s impact. Reports can be exported by PDF to share with your team, and your data can be exported by CSV at any time.
- Nonprofit and corporate partnerships — Because POINT also has a corporate-facing component of the platform, it’s an excellent place to look for potential corporate partnerships. Through the platform, you can plan co-hosted events with businesses in your community, as well as manage matching gifts, volunteer grants, and other forms of workplace giving.
Best of all? These tools are free for nonprofit organizations to use!
Fundraisers and volunteer coordinators can make the most of the POINT app for their cause without ever having to dip into their overhead funds.
POINT for Companies
POINT also has a platform designed specifically for mission-driven, philanthropic-minded companies looking to make an impact on their communities. Also called POINT for work, this side of the company enables businesses to partner with nonprofit organizations to do good.
This is often done by facilitating workplace giving programs like corporate matching gifts and employee volunteer grants. Key features offered to companies include:
- Easy-to-use platform and app — POINT is easy to use for a company’s facilitators and its employees. And because it’s available on iOS, Android, and the web, anyone can use it to support the nonprofits they care about. Additionally, POINT’s volunteer hub can be customized and integrated into your corporate website or intranet for easy employee access.
- In-person and virtual volunteer management — Volunteerism is POINT’s top specialty, as they provide a full volunteer management platform to both nonprofits and companies. Employees can quickly search for local, in-person opportunities, participate in digital volunteer events, or plan their own dedicated initiatives to get involved with hundreds of thousands of opportunities in the United States. Nonprofit and corporate admin volunteer coordination is simple on POINT with their event co-hosting features. With co-hosting, admins cut time on email communication for both admins and the employee volunteer signup process.
- Giving (both monetary and in-kind) — Companies looking to give directly to nonprofits are able to do so with ease using the POINT online donation tools—whether they choose to send monetary gifts or purchase off in-kind registries. In-kind registries are similar to wedding registries that companies and nonprofits can create to display needed items. For example, a back-to-school drive would contain backpacks, shoes, lunch boxes, and things that employees could fund or purchase in support.
- Group and program management — Encourage ESG, affinity groups, office locations, and teams to volunteer together. With POINT, you can create specific and separate volunteer hub webpages, separate admin permissions/notifications, and create private volunteer events for different groups.
- Streamlined employee donation matching — A significant portion of corporate donations are made through employee giving programs such as matching gifts. With POINT, employees can make their donations and request matches, where companies can quickly review and approve the submissions and disburse funding to the organizations their team members support.
- Personal and corporate impact tracking — Businesses that support social good should have the tools they need to track and report on their efforts—and POINT makes sure to equip its users with those tools. Individual employees can access data surrounding their personal impact, while facilitators can view company-wide, automatically generated data reports and share them in an instant with PDF export.
Not to mention, companies using POINT can feel good about their subscription purchase, knowing that their support enables POINT to gift its nonprofit management platform to registered 501(c)(3) organizations for free.
Standout Feature — Matching Gift Auto-Submission with Double the Donation
One feature we really wanted to highlight here is a new capability made possible by POINT’s partnership with Double the Donation. Through this technology integration, nonprofit donors now have access to matching gift auto-submission functionality.
Previously, nonprofit donors were typically informed about matching gift opportunities through Double the Donation’s donation page search tool and confirmation screen plugin. Then, they were required to navigate to their employers’ online request form or corporate giving portal to request their matching gift. From there, they’d be prompted to provide detailed information about their initial donation and the organization to which they gave.
POINT is one of the first platforms to engage in the integration with the solution, which recently exited its beta period. Now, all donors who work for companies that utilize POINT’s innovative corporate giving solution have to do to request a match is simply provide their email address. The rest of the submission process is done for them!
Auto-submission is by far the most effective way to aid donors in navigating the workplace giving process—which can certainly become confusing or overwhelming. This simplicity will ultimately lead to an increasing number of match requests and, subsequently, increasing corporate funding for nonprofits like yours. And the POINT app is one of the first CSR solutions to offer the functionality!
Corporate fundraising is an underutilized powerhouse for nonprofit organizations—especially those that know how to make the most of their available opportunities. Luckily, technology like POINT is there to help make effective corporate partnerships attainable for nonprofits of all shapes, sizes, and missions.
Nonprofits, get started with POINT to manage your volunteering (for both your regular volunteers and corporate volunteers) and streamline the matching donation process for corporate donations. Join for free here.