YourCause and Silicon Valley Community Foundation Release Revolutionary Solution to Transform International Grantmaking

In partnership with Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), YourCause is offering a revolutionary approach for making international grantmaking more accessible to all companies and their employees throughout the world. Employees of companies using YourCause’s CSRconnect platform now have the ability to support all verified nonprofits anywhere in the world. The new solution delivers to employee engagement administrators and programs the most affordable, scalable, and verifiable methods for expanding traditional employee programs internationally.

This groundbreaking platform will make philanthropy accessible to companies of any size and encourage increased philanthropy by corporations and their global workforce. Silicon Valley Community Foundation also will support all U.S.-based grantmaking through the CSRconnect platform, which will include U.S. Department of Education qualified schools. With access to both domestic and international options, companies can now approach their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs more holistically, resulting in a more comprehensive, integrated, and inclusive overall effort. YourCause, through the CSRconnect platform is rolling out the enhanced services using a tiered fixed pricing model, factoring in size of company, expected level of engagement, and market interest to simplify the cost structure.

YourCause chose to partner with Silicon Valley Community Foundation because of its deep expertise in international grantmaking and extensive network of global nonprofit organizations. As one of the most active U.S.-based international grantmakers, SVCF already has an extensive list of global nonprofit organizations. This partnership will help grow the total pool of international approved nonprofits eligible to receive a donation as well as put in place a process whereby employees may identify and request additional organizations to be considered. SVCF’s staff of experts will ensure each new international organization is carefully reviewed and qualifies to receive charitable gifts under United States tax law.

“Consolidating the processing channels for a company’s domestic and international transactions will further streamline the user experience and dramatically expand our ongoing capabilities for the CSRconnect platform,” said Matthew Combs, CEO of YourCause. “We remain excited about the ongoing collaboration with Silicon Valley Community Foundation and will seek to be the consummate leader for innovating and introducing additional methods to garner greater change and overall efficiencies within this space.”

Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D., CEO and President of SVCF commented, “As the comprehensive center of philanthropy, SVCF is delighted with the opportunity to make global philanthropy accessible to all and we hope that as a result more people will give generously to the causes they care about the most locally, nationally and around the world.”

About Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Silicon Valley Community Foundation makes all forms of philanthropy more powerful. We serve as a catalyst and leader for innovative solutions to our region’s most challenging problems and give more money to charities than any other community foundation in the United States. SVCF has $3 billion in assets under management and more than 1,650 philanthropic funds. As Silicon Valley’s center of philanthropy, we provide individuals, families, and corporations with simple and effective ways to give locally and around the world. Find out more at http://www.siliconvalleycf.org

YourCause Website Receives a Makeover

After weeks of planning, creativity, and designing we have finally launched our new YourCause website! As we rolled into our fifth year providing CSRconnect Employee Engagement Platform, we thought simplicity, appealing to the user eye, and a clean website would be appropriate to demonstrate our brand and YourCause personality.

When you visit www.csrconnect.me you will be directed to our new site that provides you with our services and how they can help measure and impact your employee engagement programs, meet our growing team of innovators, view our industry insights, latest news, and much more. This website will allow the visitor to quickly access what they are looking for whether it be our solutions, scheduling a demo, or search for the charity contact in a few simple clicks.

This website is meant to serve two purposes. 1. Educate potential clients and partners on our services and 2. Be a repository for the latest insights coming from both YourCause clients and the industry. Here’s a breakdown of a few tools at your disposal:

– YourCause blog: We’ve migrated our blog from WordPress over to the website to provide a seamless experience. This will be the go-to place for YourCause news, industry insights, announcements, and thought leadership discussions. Feel free to leave a comment and start a discussion, or use the tags to find the article that you’re looking for.
– Industry Insights: We’ve created an entire page dedicated to providing you with the best insights and recommended readings. Visit this page to flip through our gallery of infographics, view the latest reports and studies, or browse our CSRinsights collection.
– Connect with us on your favorite social media channel: You’ll find social sharing links all over the website, so let’s connect and continue the conversations!

The best part is – it’s just the beginning. The new CSRconnect.me will serve as the launch pad for numerous other efforts we have in the works around case studies and industry collaboration. So, now that you’ve heard all about our new site go ahead and visit www.csrconnect.me and see for yourself what our bragging is all about!

Note: Our blog posts will now be published only on http://www.csrconnect.me. Stay connected with us and read what’s on our mind on the new website.

-YourCause Team

YourCause Nominated as “Best Places to Work in North Texas”

We are excited to announce we have been nominated as one of the Best Places to Work in North Texas by Dallas Business Journal! We couldn’t be more thrilled for this opportunity and will anxiously wait for the finalists to be announced.

North Texas companies that earn the Best Places to Work designation — by achieving best practice scores — will be featured in a special Dallas Business Journal publication on Sept. 27, and celebrated at a luncheon on Sept. 26. Best Places to Work honorees will be announced in the Dallas Business Journal and online in early July.

Stay tuned – we will announce any updates. Also, if you are a company whos headquarters are in the Dallas/FortWoth metroplex and would like to submit a nomination, click here.

Happy Wednesday,
YourCause Team

Silicon Valley Community Foundation and YourCause Announce Partnership to Create CSR Center

Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) and YourCause, LLC announced a new partnership that will integrate SVCF’s domestic and international grantmaking expertise with the employee engagement solutions currently being delivered by YourCause. Additionally, the partnership has committed to the expansion of its capabilities for the small to medium size business market and will be deploying new solutions in 2013 for companies to further expand their existing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs internationally.

In an effort to deliver a more seamless, interactive, and ‘one-stop-shop’ experience for all current and future clients, the partnership has agreed to provide offices to members of the YourCause team within SVCF’s offices. Between the two organizations, the partnership will now have a presence within five offices throughout the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas, Texas.

SVCF and YourCause, both leaders in Corporate Social Responsibility, recognized a need in for a turnkey customer-focused solution for companies interested in implementing and enhancing their local and global employee giving programs. With this relationship, SVCF’s network of over 100 corporate partners will have access to YourCause’s CSRconnect employee engagement platform. CSRconnect is a private-label application that builds internal online communities to support employee engagement and enhance global good through giving, volunteering, disaster response, and other related features. Current YourCause clients will benefit from SVCF’s expertise in international grantmaking as the third largest international grantmaker in the US by number of grants.

“We have extremely high expectations of this partnership, and are excited to work with the entire team at SVCF. The opportunities to deliver more innovative and effective solutions, to all sizes of business, both domestically and abroad, are massive and ones that we truly look forward to tackling through this partnership” commented Matthew Combs, the Founder and CEO of YourCause.

The partnership will provide leading corporate citizens a simplified, customizable and highly responsive matching gifts program. This integrated solution includes domestic and international matching gifts platform, providing companies with a robust employee engagement tool catered to a global workforce.

“SVCF is happy to have found a partner as committed to helping companies make community impact as we are,” said Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D., CEO and President of the community foundation. “Together, SVCF and YourCause will be able to make all companies’ philanthropy more powerful.”

About Silicon Valley Community Foundation

Silicon Valley Community Foundation makes all forms of philanthropy more powerful. We serve as a catalyst and leader for innovative solutions to our region’s most challenging problems. The community foundation has $2.9 billion in assets under management and more than 1,650 philanthropic funds. As Silicon Valley’s center of philanthropy, we provide individuals, families and corporations with simple and effective ways to give locally and around the world. Find out more at http://www.siliconvalleycf.org

YourCause Partners with Versaic to Enhance Delivery of Corporate Grant Management Solutions

Versaic corporate grant tracking solution to be integrated within the CSRconnect platform.

YourCause, LLC announces a partnership with Versaic Inc., enabling companies to more effectively engage with nonprofits through grant administration, sponsorship requests and in-kind donations. The partnership plans to integrate both companies’ respective products and services to offer clients a single solution to seamlessly manage all aspects of their corporate social responsibility programs such as employee engagement, disaster response, dollars-for-doers, and corporate grants.

“Versaic and YourCause share a vision as to how we can leverage technology to improve how enterprises are able to more effectively give back, and our internal cultures are nearly exact copies of one another,” said Matthew Combs, Founder and CEO of YourCause. “For those reasons and many more, we are all very excited about what our organizations can do together.”

YourCause focuses on employee engagement programs while Versaic focuses on external donation and grant requests. Both companies support diverse clients with multiple programs that are often managed by the same corporate teams. The integration delivers value to clients by making it possible to manage employee engagement programs, corporate grants, and consolidate reporting within a single location.

Together, YourCause and Versaic have put forth plans to develop integrated reporting capabilities intended to unify additional elements of each clients’ philanthropic programs. From this, clients will be able to more effectively report and evaluate all corporate grants, matching gifts, employee donations and volunteer hours for charities they are supporting. The partnership further opens the door for clients to select YourCause for the distribution of funds to approved organizations for corporate grants in addition to payroll, matching gifts and volunteer grants payment processing.

“YourCause knows that a company’s greatest asset is its people and has made a name for itself by providing new and compelling ways for clients to engage with their employees,” said Burt Cummings, CEO of Versaic.

“We’re looking forward to teaming with YourCause because our software platforms and high-touch approach to client support are totally aligned,” added Cummings. “As partners, our joint solutions lay the foundation for our clients to “change the game” with the right tools for leadership in corporate responsibility and philanthropy.”

About Versaic, Inc.
Versaic is the leading provider of online Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program management solutions. Versaic combines proven best practices with innovative technology and affordable pricing to simplify processes and improve the ROI/ROO for clients. Whether it’s grants, sponsorship, donations or sustainability programs, Versaic’s best-in-class solutions are easily combined and customized to provide companies of any size a comprehensive solution for managing their CSR programs. Visit http://www.versaic.com to learn more.

[Infographic] State of Developing Global Good

As a company whose mission is to “Develop Global Good,” we’re excited to see an increase in corporations striving to offer their giving and volunteering programs internationally. International programs are growing at a fast pace, so we put together a nice little infographic that highlights some of the most useful statistics regarding international giving and volunteering programs.

Check out our other infographics below:
Where and Why People Donated Their Time and Money
The Evolution of CSR and the Web
Charitable Payroll Deductions
CSR- The Business Case

YourCause and Dell – A Partnership Delivering True Impact

Today Dell has announced that their employees have volunteered over 700,000 hours in 2012 (which is nearly 70% more than the year prior). This is substantial for making an impact in communities, shaping the CSR industry as a whole and we get to proudly be a part of it.

Dell believed in YourCause when we were still the “new” guys on the block for employee engagement solutions (circa 2009) and vigorously worked with us to get our platform to not only meet their needs – but something that would enable us to develop global good as we establish more partnerships.

Our partnership is only a testament of delivering true impact through collaboration of expert engagement strategy and innovative technology. Our founder and CEO, Matt Combs, said it perfectly in the press release:

“Dell’s results are truly impressive and far exceed what we typically see throughout the industry. By no means does this come as a surprise to our team, as Dell’s programs and ongoing support of their employees continues to be the industry model for how to achieve results from employee engagement.”

So congratulations to Dell, their employees and all the nonprofits that have benefited from their service. Cheers to 2013 and creating limitless opportunity to make a difference.

To read the full press release, click here.

YourCause Big 5

On Monday, February 25th we celebrated our fifth birthday providing CSRconnect to our clients and users. It was a great day that consisted of surprises for us (the employees) and Matt Combs (the man who created it all). Matt surprised us with five events that occurred throughout the day; first being breakfast tacos! Next, we ate a delicious YourCause cake and surprised Matt with a video we made for him. Sadly, event three didn’t take place due to Texas weather (but we guessed it was putt putt). Event four we drove a few minutes back to the past and ate dinner at the infamous Carmines that we all have grown to love. Lastly, headed back to our old office where YourCause began and reminisced on memories. Don’t worry, we managed to get our work done but definitely took in all the moments of these past successful five years.

With that said, we’d like to toast to the past five and cheers to the next!

YourCause Celebrates Five Year Anniversary

YourCause celebrates fifth anniversary of developing and providing CSRconnect employee SaaS engagement platform to multinational corporations.

YourCause, the creator of CSRconnect employee engagement platform, celebrates its fifth anniversary this week. For the past five years, YourCause has provided a private label application that builds internal online communities to support employee engagement and enhance overall global good through giving, volunteering, disaster response, and other related features. Inspired in 2008 by a personal cause, YourCause now supports more than 2.5 million corporate employees, transacts more than $75 million in donations, and tracks greater than 4 million hours of volunteer service.

YourCause continues to execute upon their four core values, which helps create close client partnerships, ensure ongoing flexibility within the operation and application, deploy first class customer service, and employ fun along the way. The company remains ahead of the industry curve by maintaining such values and continues to expand their network through diverse partnerships, ongoing functionality development, and quality employees.

In the past five years, YourCause accomplished the following:

• Supports 2.5 million employees and accessible in 84 countries
• 50% of clients recognized as “Best Corporate Citizens”
• $76.6 million dollars donated
• 4 million hours volunteered
• More than 100% increase in employee headcount year-over year
• More than 100% increase in revenues year-over year

“If anyone were to ask me in 2008 where I saw YourCause in five years, I would have never dreamed of this,” said Matthew Combs, CEO and Founder of YourCause. “I can’t predict what the next five years will look like, but if they are half as successful as these last five years, we are set to see a lot of creativity, an abundance of innovation, and a lot of new developments for our space.”

Dallas Buisness Journal: Taking on Your Cause

Last month Dallas Business Journal stopped by our office to get a feel of who we were, what we stand for, and get a glimpse of a day in the YourCause office. Now, a few weeks later we received the weekly article that was published about how YourCause was created, what our platform currently offers, and admit to our biggest challenges.

The article couldn’t of been released at a better time, our fifth anniversary is in a few days on Monday February 25th and what better way to celebrate then to be recognized by a top Dallas/Fort Worth magazine.

Below is a snippet of what you can expect in the article. To continue reading, visit www.bizjournals.com to purchase your copy!

After hearing the story of 12-year-old Patrick, a child-soldier kidnapped and forced into rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Matthew Combs wanted to step up and make a difference in the world.

At the time, Combs had a 2-year-old daughter and another on the way.

“(Patrick’s story) really moved me to the point where I called everyone I knew,” Combs said. “I wanted to provide tools for people who want to make a difference. How do we empower people to the causes that matter most to them?”

Combs started YourCause in 2008 to use the Internet to motivate himself and others to make a change…

Cheers,
YourCause Team