Facilitate charity donations with Bonusly's Custom Rewards feature

Bonusly's Custom Rewards feature is a simple way to diversify your employee reward options. You can easily add donation reward options to your Bonusly Reward Catalog to make it easy for your employees to support local nonprofits and charity organizations responding to world events.

The standard Bonusly Reward Catalog fulfills donations to more than 40 national and international nonprofits in addition to offering digital gift cards, cash-out and prepaid card options, and company swag.

If there are nonprofit organizations your company and your employees want to support that aren't available in the standard Bonusly Reward Catalog, we've got just the thing! 😍 You can use Bonusly's Custom Rewards feature to add charities that are especially meaningful to your employees and the communities you serve.

First, we're going to touch on how custom reward donation options can enhance your company's employee reward offerings by supporting local causes and responding quickly to global events.

Supporting local causes

By and large, the charities listed in the standard Bonusly Reward Catalog operate with a national or international mandate or focus on crisis response. You can use Bonusly's Custom Rewards feature to add donation options for charities that operate in the areas where your company is headquartered or where your employees live. Your employees will appreciate your company for making it easy to support organizations that contribute to the communities where they live and work.

Case in point: Bonusly is headquartered in Boulder, CO, and we've partnered with the Humane Society of Boulder Valley (HSBV) for more than three years. 🐾 HSBV's staff uses Bonusly for employee recognition—they've got some really creative claimable awards!—and our staff has enjoyed several in-person and virtual visits from HSBV foster pups in addition to team volunteer days at the shelter.

Naturally, we created a custom reward HSBV donation option for our rewards catalog! It's a super-easy way to enrich our partnership and facilitate team fundraising for HSBV.

Responding quickly to global events

Work doesn't happen in a bubble. Natural disasters and humanitarian crises impact if, when, how, and even why people show up to work.

Your company can quickly respond to world events by adding custom reward donation options to your Bonusly Reward Catalog. Empowering your employees to donate their Bonusly points to crisis response efforts will both support the work at hand and boost employee morale. As we like to say around these parts, great work supports great work! 🤗💚 

Advice for adding custom reward donation options to your company's Bonusly Reward Catalog

If you're a Bonusly admin or program manager, we encourage you to be realistic about how much administration time you can dedicate to custom reward donations. Fulfilling custom reward donations can quickly become time-consuming, so it's important to research the nonprofits you're considering and decide how you'll handle donation fulfillment before you create a host of new custom rewards.

Check out this Help Center article for step-by-step instructions for adding a donation as a custom reward.

Some donation process questions to keep in mind

• Can you donate online to the organizations you're considering or will you have to write and mail checks?
• Do the nonprofits you're considering have a minimum or maximum donation amount?
• Will you or your Bonusly admins fulfill donations every time an employee redeems a custom reward donation? Alternatively, you can fulfill donations whenever total redemptions reach a certain threshold or on a periodical basis (i.e. monthly or quarterly).

Here at Bonusly, when our employees ask for a donation option that our Reward Catalog doesn't currently support, we solicit input from our teammates, our leadership team, and our employee-led Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Group to create a shortlist of charity organizations for our people operations team to consider. 

Our people ops team checks the organizations on that shortlist against Charity Navigator's rankings to confirm that we're supporting organizations that have earned high marks for transparency, accountability, and impact. We also try to choose non-denominational nonprofit organizations whenever possible. 

Once we've decided on the organization we're going to support, creating a new custom reward takes less than five minutes! Admins with Rewards or Global permissions simply go to the catalog in the rewards admin panel and click the New Custom Reward button at the top right of the page. A modal overlay appears on the screen asking for the following information:

• Name of the reward (we recommend using `the name of the charity` + `Donation`)
• Reward description (we like to include a few sentences about the charity's mission and information about the services that donations support)
• Product URL (adding a link to the charity's website makes it easy for employees who are unfamiliar with the organization to learn more)
• Cost (the value of one redemption in your Bonusly currency, usually between $10 and $25)
• Image (a JPG or PNG file of the nonprofit's logo works well)

And that's it!

Get started

If you want to respond quickly to world events and help your employees support local causes, you have all the tools you need to create custom reward donation options for your organization! Go to your rewards admin panel 👉

About Bonusly

Bonusly's mission is to connect people with each other and their work in meaningful ways. Our employee recognition and rewards platform combines peer-to-peer and 360-degree recognition with real-world monetary value, incentivizing coworkers to support one another and generate trust by celebrating exceptional contributions with praise and gratitude.