What workplace giving software should do
At minimum: let employees find causes and give; let administrators run campaigns, matching, and reporting; and keep the two views connected so participation data is trustworthy. Beyond the minimum, platforms differentiate on employee experience quality, automation of matching, volunteering support, reporting depth, integrations, and increasingly AI. Weight the criteria by your program goals before you see a single demo — vendors are excellent at reweighting them for you.
1 · Employee experience
The criterion that decides program success. Participation dies in bad UX.
- Can an employee go from opening the app to a completed gift in under two minutes?
- Does it work well on mobile — genuinely, not technically?
- Is cause discovery good enough that employees find things they didn't search for?
- Can employees see their giving history, match status, and impact in one place?
2 · Employer administration
- Campaign creation without vendor services on the critical path
- Match policy configuration — ratios, caps, eligibility, windows — self-serve
- Employee eligibility management and permissions
- Communication tooling, or clean integration with yours
3 · Matching gifts
Ask specifically: is the match applied automatically at the moment of giving, or does it require employee submission? Can employees see a live match balance? How are gifts made outside the platform handled? Submission-heavy matching is where utilization goes to die — see our matching guide.
4 · Volunteering
- Opportunity discovery and event signup
- Hour logging and approval workflows
- VTO tracking, if you offer it
- Dollars-for-doers grants, if you offer them
5 · Reporting
Can you answer, without exporting to Excel: participation rate, match utilization, volunteer hours, per-campaign engagement, and trend over time? Can leadership get a readable summary on a schedule?
6 · Integrations
Map your actual stack first — HRIS for eligibility, SSO for access, communication tools for campaigns — then verify each integration is live and in production with reference customers, not "on the roadmap." Ask to see the integration working in the demo environment.
7 · AI capabilities
AI is entering workplace giving through recommendations (relevant causes and volunteer slots per employee), campaign assistance (drafting, timing, sizing), and program insights. Evaluate claims carefully: what's live vs. announced, what data trains the personalization, and — critically — whether employee-level data is handled with privacy-first design. Recommendations should serve employees, never rank them. (momoGood's approach: Workplace Giving AI, in development.)
8 · Security and trust
- Security documentation available for your review process
- Clear data handling — especially employee-level giving data, which is sensitive
- Access controls and provisioning that fit your identity setup
- Donation processing transparency: who holds funds, disbursement timing, fees
9 · Implementation and support
Ask for the real timeline from contract to first campaign — with references. Understand what's self-serve vs. vendor-dependent after launch; programs change constantly, and waiting on a support queue to edit a match policy gets old fast.
Evaluation checklist
- Employee flow: open → find cause → give, under 2 minutes, on a phone
- Match: automatic at point of giving · live balances · external-gift flow
- Campaigns: self-serve creation · goal bars · comms sequence support
- Volunteering: discovery · hour logging · approvals · VTO
- Reporting: participation · utilization · hours · trend — no exports needed
- Integrations: live in production, shown in demo
- AI: live vs. roadmap clearly separated · privacy-first employee data handling
- Security: documentation ready · clear data practices
- Implementation: referenced timeline · self-serve administration after launch
Questions to ask every vendor
- "Walk me through an employee's first gift on a phone, live, right now."
- "What share of your customers' employees participate in year one?"
- "Is matching applied automatically at giving, or submitted afterwards?"
- "Which of the AI features you've shown are live in production today?"
- "What can my admin team change without a support ticket?"
- "How do you handle employee-level giving data, and who can see it?"
This guide is intentionally vendor-neutral. Weight the framework by your goals, run the same script with every vendor, and trust what you see demonstrated over what's described.
FAQs
What's the single most important criterion?
Employee experience. Every other capability is worthless at 5% participation.
Should we pilot before rolling out company-wide?
If your size allows, yes — one department or office for a quarter surfaces real UX and process issues while stakes are low.
How should we compare pricing models?
Model total cost at your realistic participation rate — per-employee fees, platform fees, and any transaction fees on donations or matches. Ask explicitly what happens to fees on matched dollars.
Put momoGood on the shortlist.
Run the checklist against momoGood Workplace Giving — employee experience, automatic matching, volunteering, reporting, and AI on one connected platform.