Your Company’s Charity List May Have a Political Screen Built in
Millions of workers in America donate to charities through giving portals set up by their employers, confident that a full range of legitimate nonprofits is just a few clicks away. But this trust, unfortunately, is often misplaced. Many companies turn to third-party platforms such as Benevity, Bonterra and Groundswell to operate their charitable-giving programs. Benevity is the largest of these, processing billions of dollars in donations annually. Though it does not publish a full list of its clients, research by my organization, 1792 Exchange, has identified more than 200 Fortune 1000 companies with Benevity portals, representing millions of employees. Part of the appeal of these services is that experts have done the vetting work. So employees who use them to make donations reasonably assume that if a charity is excluded, it failed some objective test of legal compliance, financial transparency or organizational integrity. In the case of Benevity, however, that assumption is often incorrect. And the problem is not that companies outsource the work of vetting nonprofits to Benevity. The problem is in the process used to decide which organizations to include and which to leave out. The full article can be found in The Washington Post.