Double the Donation
and Volunteer Shift Manager

A surprising number of companies will give money to a nonprofit simply because one of their employees volunteered there. Some pay a set amount per hour served. Others offer paid time off for volunteering. The programs are real, they're often generous, and an enormous amount of that money goes unclaimed every year for one dull reason: the volunteer had no idea their employer offered it.

They're not going to go looking. Nobody reads their benefits handbook for fun. The only moment they might plausibly find out is the moment they're already thinking about volunteering, which is when they're filling in your signup form.

How it works

When you connect Double the Donation and turn on the employer question for a program, three things happen.

On the signup form, volunteers get an optional question asking where they work, with autocomplete from Double the Donation's company database. That autocomplete matters: it resolves "BofA" and "Bank of America Corp" to the same company record rather than leaving you with free text nobody can match later.

On the confirmation screen, if their employer has a volunteer grant or paid-time-off program, the volunteer sees what it offers. Right there, seconds after signing up, while they're still feeling good about the decision.

In the background, the signup is logged to your Double the Donation Volunteering account automatically, so your records there stay current without anyone re-keying anything.

That last piece happens for every signup on a program that asks the question, whether or not the volunteer named an employer. An unanswered question is still a data point, and it keeps your registration counts honest.

What we do and don't handle

Being precise about this saves disappointment later.

We do: ask the question, resolve the employer to a real company record, show the volunteer their employer's policy, and log the registration to your account.

We don't: claim the grant, process the money, chase the employer, or track what was paid. None of that happens in Volunteer Shift Manager, and matched amounts don't come back into your volunteer records here. That side of it lives in Double the Donation and with the company's own giving programme, which is where it belongs.

So the honest framing is that this integration handles discovery and record-keeping. It puts the opportunity in front of the person who can act on it, and keeps your registration data tidy. Converting that into received funds is still work, and it's work that happens elsewhere.

Ask gently, or not at all

The employer question is optional for volunteers, and it should stay that way. A good chunk of any volunteer base is retired, in school, between jobs, or self-employed. For them the question ranges from irrelevant to mildly uncomfortable, and a signup form that appears to demand an answer is a signup form some people abandon.

The arithmetic is simple. A volunteer grant might be worth a few hundred dollars. A volunteer who gave up on your form is worth more than that over a year, and you never even find out you lost them.

It's also a per-program setting for good reason. Asking on a corporate volunteering day makes complete sense, since everyone there arrived through their employer anyway. Asking on a program that serves people in your community who are themselves going through a hard time is a different proposition. Our guide to corporate volunteer programs goes into where that line usually sits.

Setting it up

Three steps, and the third is the one people forget.

1. Get your public and private keys from your Double the Donation account.
2. Paste both into the Double the Donation card on the Integrations page. We verify the pair immediately, so you'll know straight away if something's wrong.
3. Turn on "Ask where volunteers work" for at least one program. Nothing happens until you do. The card lists which programs are currently asking, so you can see at a glance whether this step is done.

If you don't have a Double the Donation account, the card links their request form. They're a separate company and you deal with them directly.

Where this helps most

This is at its best for organizations that already run corporate volunteering, or want to. If you host company groups, onboard corporate volunteers regularly, or find yourself writing up impact for a company partner afterwards, the employer data is useful well beyond the grants themselves. It tells you which companies your volunteers actually work for, which is the beginning of a conversation about a formal partnership.

It's less useful if your volunteers are mostly retired, students, or local community members without corporate employers. The question will mostly come back blank, and you'll have added a field to your form for very little. There's no harm in it, but be realistic about the return. If you're building the corporate side of your program from scratch, making the case to a company comes before any of this, and keeping annual corporate groups engaged matters more than the match.

Double the Donation is one of the integrations included in Engage, at $19 a month, on top of your own Double the Donation account. If corporate volunteering is part of your plan, this is the piece that makes sure the money on the table gets noticed.