As governments try to balance their books, austerity programmes are spreading across the world, almost inevitably large multi-national corporations and their employees are increasingly involved in Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, e.g volunteering time or making gifts to charities. So the need to support CSR programmes is growing.

The demand is also growing because younger employees in many countries are now much more interested in giving some of their time and/or income to support their local community and other causes. Another factor is that companies are trying to position themselves to both their customers and employees as being a caring and responsible company.

In North America, MicroEdge, founded in 1985 and providing Corporate Social Responsibility solutions since 2011 to support such programmes, have found the demand for their services is booming as the pressures for more CSR programmes grows. Demand is typically coming from companies with 5,000 and above employees where the CSR activities and admin overhead often become unmanageable.

AngelPoints from MicroEdge

The MicroEdge AngelPoints platform AP2015.3, see figure below, supports the administration and management of both employees volunteering their time and giving monies direct to different charities and causes.

AngelPoints platform structure

Source & Copyright©2015 - MicroEdge 

To ensure that the tax exemption is granted for the donations collected, MicroEdge leverages a partnership with Network for Good, a non-profit organization that processes the payments that go through the AngelPoints platform, ensuring that they are securely and efficiently distributed to legitimate charities. 

AngelPoints also provides a comprehensive volunteer management solution with specific functionality for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The secure CRA module provides the tools and data needed to boost CRA ratings, manage compliance, and receive recognition from regulators. Specifically, AngelPoints allows organizations to create CRA-eligible volunteer opportunities, use custom surveys to qualify activities for CRA and approve, edit, or reject CRA activities.

MicroEdge has approximately 150 clients using AngelPoints. They charge their clients a subscription for each employee using the online platform + other charges.  

The main benefits for companies using CSR platforms such as AngelPoints, MicroEdge’s Product Manager, Andrew Troup, believes are, “Taking much of the admin work out of CSR programs; helping organizations with vetting non-profits and with compliance; tracking and reporting on volunteer time and the flow of donated money; and measuring the impact of their philanthropic contributions. For employees, AngelPoints gives them an opportunity to see and control their charity efforts. There is an interface that allows employees to make decisions on where to direct their donated money and their volunteer time, and it allows them to see the impact that they are making. Our clients are always telling us how rewarding it is for both the employee and the organization to see the impact that they are making.”  

Expanding internationally

MicroEdge are finding an increasing interest in CSR solutions in other countries, particularly from large multi-national companies. To cater to these demands and interest, MicroEdge will be refreshing its international offering to provide a more robust experience in second half of 2016.  The main features of the new offering will be international charity vetting and donation processing capabilities in local currencies.  

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CTMfile take: The pressure for expansion of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes is going to be felt by companies world-wide. MNCs will not be able to ignore this pressure, offering decent CSR programmes is going to become a hygiene factor in successful companies. Corporate treasury departments have a responsibility here too