When looking for a CSR platform, companies are increasingly looking to Groundswell as an alternative to Cybergrants. This article will outline why Groundswell’s innovative approach, faster donation distribution timelines, lower fees, and mobile capability are winning over some of the most iconic companies in the Fortune 500.
A brief background on CyberGrants
Founded in 1999, CyberGrants is a legacy platform that offers a suite of features in their enterprise plans such as giving, volunteering, grant management, and more.
They market themselves as providing innovative software solutions to streamline philanthropic efforts and enhance transparency.
However, there have been complaints about the complexity and limited functionality of their software, making it difficult for organizations to effectively manage their giving and grant-making processes. Some users have found the platform to be clunky and unintuitive, resulting in frustration and inefficiency.
CyberGrants is now owned by private equity, who have been significantly cutting headcount, particularly impacting areas around customer service and support.
Groundswell - your top CyberGrants alternative
Groundswell was founded as an all-in-one platform for everything social impact. After raising $15 million in venture capital, led by Google Ventures (GV), Groundswell launched its platform in 2021. The Groundswell platform makes it easy and fun to run employee engagement programs like donation matching, volunteering, and employee assistance funds.
Groundswell has been built utilizing the latest technology, making the administrative experience fast, frictionless, and scalable. This is just one of the many reasons why Groundswell is able to effortlessly serve customers from 50 to 50,000 employees.
More facts about Groundswell:
- Groundswell is the highest rated CSR and corporate volunteering platform on G2
- Groundswell also topped the G2 list of CSR platforms that are the Easiest to Use, Most Implementable, and Easiest to do Business With
- Groundswell’s mobile app is the highest rated CSR app on iOS and Android
- Groundswell is the first corporate giving platform that provides employees with individual donor-advised funds (DAFs)– a massive leap forward in employee giving.
- Groundswell is founded by a team with deep experience in the nonprofit sector. CEO Jake Wood previously founded and led one of the nation’s leading disaster response organizations, Team Rubicon, from 2010 through 2011, and has received numerous awards for his work in the social impact sector.
- Groundswell’s investors include GV (Google Ventures), Human Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Moonshots Ventures, with prominent angel investors that include the CEOs of major banks, insurance companies, and wealth management firms.
How expensive is CyberGrants compared to Groundswell?
Groundswell and Cybergrants both charge annual licensing fees for access to their platform. However, beyond the annual fee, our approaches begin to diverge.
One key difference is with fees for distributing donations
- Cybergrant's distribution fees: 2.9% minimum
- Groundswell's distribution fee: 1.0%
Additionally, CyberGrants will often assess ad hoc fees to customers for incremental services. Want to send an off-cycle donation to a charity? There’s a fee for that. Want to add volunteer rewards? There’s a fee for that. Want to get support from your client success manager during a campaign? There’s a fee for that.
Bottom line: there’s no cost-certainty with CyberGrants.
Alternatively, Groundswell’s fees are straightforward, transparent, and predictable. Want to add a nonprofit to our database? There's no fee for that. Want to chat with our customer success team or head of impact? There’s no fee for that.
And if you want to eliminate the distribution fee so that 100% of your employees’ donations go to charity, we will negotiate a fair, flat annual fee that takes your distribution fee from 1% to 0%
How long does it take to implement CyberGrants?
CyberGrants takes about 20 weeks (4 months) or more to implement. Making matters worse, there are often delays in getting your company slotted into CyberGrants’ implementation pipeline, further delaying your launch.
Alternatively, Groundswell can get a company up and running in just a few weeks – sometimes even days. Our implementation team is here to help you launch a successful social impact program, whether you're starting from scratch or moving over from Cybergrants.
Bottom line: Groundswell was built to be easy to implement and easy to run.
How effective is CyberGrants at distributing funds to charity?
Where CyberGrants fails its customers, its employee-users, and most importantly, the nonprofits it is sending funds to, is the length of time it takes for an employee’s matching donation to reach charity.
Let’s dive into this for greater clarity. First, it’s important to understand that CyberGrants aggregates all user donations made to a charity throughout a month and sends those aggregated donations as a single payment. So, as an example, imagine one hundred employees across ten different companies donate to the Red Cross in January, and the aggregate total of these donations is $10,000. Here is what CyberGrants’ rough distribution timeline looks like:
- January: 100 employees across 10 companies donate $10,000 to the Red Cross
- Late February: CyberGrants sends the employees’ $10,000 to the Red Cross and sends an invoice to the 10 companies for their respective share of the match for their employees. Note that each company will have different invoice payment terms, typically no less than net-30 days, but often stretching to net-60 or worse.
- Late March or April: CyberGrants begins receiving the matching funds from the 10 companies, but is delayed in distributing them to the charity until all companies have remitted payment.
- Late April or May: CyberGrants initiates payment of the matching funds to the Red Cross, a full 3-4 months after the employee made the donation.
There are two major issues with this timeline. First, the employee would likely be very disappointed if they knew that their match was going to take four months to reach their nonprofit. The thrill of thinking their donation was having twice as much impact would be significantly diminished – especially if they’re donating in response to an emergent event like a natural disaster. Second, this timeline exacerbates cash flow issues that already hamper nonprofits in need of funds to execute their mission.
Groundswell has gone to great lengths to resolve this delayed distribution standard. With Groundswell, an employee’s contribution to their Groundswell account is matched instantly, and 90% of charities receive their funds (both donations and matches) within 24 hours.
Bottom line: Groundswell distributes money to charities within 24 hours of donation, compared to 2-4 months with Cybergrants.
Does CyberGrants effectively reduce a company’s administrative burden?
If you're moving from a fully manual employee matching program, wherein requests are tracked on excel spreadsheets and employees are submitting PDF requests for their match and a company’s accounts payable team is sending individual matching checks – Cybergrants may reduce some of your administrative burden. However, when compared to Groundswell, CyberGrants simply cannot compare.
With CyberGrants, companies can still anticipate multiple monthly invoices, payment auditing and reconciliations with payroll departments - all administrative tasks that will significantly add time to your program management. And don't forget the complex and recurring data management that's required to support payroll giving deductions, among other things.
Groundswell customers see a marked reduction in their administrative burden. Companies deal with only a single annual invoice for their licensing fees. And our platform’s design has eliminated:
- Monthly invoices for employee matches
- Monthly data management for recurring payroll giving deductions
- Payment auditing and reconciliations
- Complex data exporting for management reports
Bottom line: Groundswell removes up to 99% of the admin burden that comes with traditional social impact programs.
Does CyberGrants provide employees with donor-advised funds?
No, CyberGrants does not offer employees an individual donor-advised fund. Cybergrants’ platform simply automates the donation matching process – it does not provide employees with a tax-advantaged vehicle to set aside funds for charitable giving.
Groundswell’s vision of democratizing philanthropy is in part rooted in its drive to make donor-advised funds a ubiquitous part of employee benefit packages. Just as 401(k)s and health savings accounts have financially empowered employees over the past several decades, Groundswell believes that donor-advised funds will be the key to empowering employees to become modern philanthropists.
Groundswell is proud to be the only enterprise corporate giving platform that provides employees with donor-advised funds. These accounts are critical to Groundswell’s key differentiating features, including:
- The ability to instantly match employee donations
- The ability for employees to take their giving account with them if they leave the company, just like a 401(k)
- The ability to centralize all of their personal giving into a single end of year tax receipt for deduction purposes
- The ability to donate stock instead of cash, thereby avoiding capital gains taxes on appreciation
Bottom line: With a DAF, employees can centralize all their giving and give easily.
How effective is CyberGrants at increasing employee engagement?
While CyberGrants offers giving and volunteering features, their lack of privacy features and poor UX/UI can impact a good employee experience.
Why care about privacy on donations? For many people, their philanthropy is deeply personal and inspired by lived experiences. For that reason, some employees don’t participate in giving programs via CyberGrants because administrators have full visibility into their personal giving history. This can make them feel that the program isn’t inclusive and equitable.
Here are some reasons why employees might want privacy in their giving:
- As mentioned, their giving could be deeply personal – for example, a recovered alcoholic may support Alcoholics Anonymous, but not want someone in HR to know about their struggles with addiction.
- In today’s hyper-polarized world, employees within larger companies likely fall on both sides of emotionally charged issues. An employee may sense a risk of retaliation or alienation for submitting a donation related to a nonprofit they sense is not aligned to the particular values of the CyberGrants administrator at their company.
In addition to a lack of privacy features, CyberGrants has no mobile experience. A significant product deficiency if your workforce is deskless, on the move, or heavily populated with Millennial and Gen-Z workers.
Meanwhile, Groundswell's top-rated mobile app offers a wonderful alternative to its employee web experience. Today’s workforce expects a rich native-mobile experience, and research indicates that most people today do the majority of their financial transactions via their mobile device. Our mobile app has over 300 reviews in the first year, with an average 4.95 star rating in the Apple store.
Bottom line: Hard-to-use interfaces, no mobile app, and no privacy will keep employees from engaging with your social impact program.
So, is CyberGrants a good fit for you?
In summary, CyberGrants is:
- Expensive and full of surprise fees
- Difficult and costly to implement
- Challenging to administer
- An automation tool, not a donor-advised fund
- Clunky to use and not mobile friendly
- Slow to distribute funds to charity
Groundswell, a better alternative
Our platform is simple and easy. We provide:
- Admin-free burden. Admin teams can manage their giving program in one platform and don’t have to collect any receipts.
- A mobile-friendly experience for employees. Whether they're on their phone or sitting at a desk, employees can save, donate, and track all their donations in one place. See the employee experience here.
- Tax-advantaged Personal Employee Giving Accounts. Groundswell provides accounts powered by Donor-Advised Funds (DAF).
We also think it shouldn’t take months to have your company start giving. We can get you live within a few weeks. Ready to see what we can do? Book a demo today.