Monica Grant Cohen
Director of Community Investment
DRW Community Investment
Employer match programs can be powerful and popular tools for embedding giving into company culture, yet offering a generous match does not automatically translate to high rates of employee participation. ACCP recently reported that while 94% of companies offer donation matching programs, only approximately 20% of employees participate.
At DRW, our team (Community Investment) designs and facilitates the Global Giving Challenge, an annual tradition occurring during year-end that encourages employees to make use of their employer match before the program resets in the new year. In 2025, 46% of employees participated in the giving challenge and raised $1,545,000, representing a 143% year-over-year increase in dollars raised and flying far past the firm’s goal to raise $750,000.
We designed a framework for companies to use in creating giving campaigns that invite meaningful participation.
This framework includes answering the following questions:
1) What are unique elements of your organizational culture?
2) What motivates employees at your company?
3) What is the data telling you?
4) Beyond your CSR Team, who at your company champions social impact initiatives?
Organizational Culture
At the heart of this framework is the need to understand and tap into existing cultural strengths. What works at DRW, a global proprietary trading firm, may not work at a regional manufacturing company. Ultimately, understanding and leveraging your unique organizational culture allows for a giving campaign to feel like an authentic extension of your company, and not separate from it.
At DRW, we know that employees thrive off competition, and our team believed embedding competition into the campaign would unlock the greatest collective impact. Trading teams operate in environments where goals are clear and results are continuously measured – performance metrics are both familiar and motivating. We hypothesized that designing a giving campaign that built upon behaviors already present in our culture and tied to our success could increase engagement and motivate more employees to participate.
While the giving challenge continues to be a firmwide effort, employees are placed onto randomized, cross-functional teams and compete against one another to reach the highest participation rates. We collaborated with our third-party CSR platform to design a leaderboard feature that is viewable to all employees and updates campaign stats in real-time.
Employee Motivation
Participation incentives can be highly effective when they align to organizational culture. At DRW, creative incentives often create conversation and invite visibility. Employees enjoy making connections with and supporting colleagues both in their local office and afar, and value the opportunity to hear directly from leadership, especially as our firm continues to grow. Additionally, incentives with monetary value can also drive participation. Our team designed some incentives to respond to each of these motivations.
- Colleague Connections:
- Each day of the three-week giving challenge, we feature a video from an employee talking about an organization that is personally meaningful to them. We hear incredibly positive feedback from employees that they love learning more about what their colleagues care about, and we see donations to these organizations come through during the campaign.
- Each team has a slack channel. Slack is the primary way employees communicate with one another at DRW, and by integrating facets of the giving challenge onto slack (including giving challenge specific emojis!), the challenge leverages the culture of connection.
- Creative Incentives:
- We collaborated with our workplace and events colleagues to bring to life their vision for an event modeled after the viral YouTube series, “Hot Ones.” Captains of teams that reached a 50% participation rate participated in “Hot Takes”, DRW’s version of a spicy wing challenge.
- Exposure to Leadership:
- If the firm reached our overall donation goal, both our Founder/CEO and President would participate in Hot Takes. Employees loved the opportunity to hear from leadership in a more informal setting.
- Monetary Value:
- All employees who participate are entered into a raffle for $1,000 in travel credits and $1,000 to donate to any nonprofit of their choosing.
- DRW unlocks a bonus match during the challenge, in addition to the existing annual employer match.
Historical Data
Designing an effective campaign necessitates understanding the current state of employee engagement. Organizations should consider the current percentage of employees that currently use the employer match program, and if these participation rates are consistent across factors such as business area and location.
For example, in reviewing giving challenge data, we noted that in iterations of the campaign where teams were decided based on geographic location/office, the smallest offices had higher participation rates than the largest, and remote employees were not engaged. We correctly hypothesized that with randomized, global teams, the overall participation rate would increase, and remote employees would feel more connected to the firmwide initiative.
Internal Champions
Many CSR teams are small but mighty, and identifying employees who can influence and champion the challenge at every level is critical. At DRW, we partner with community champions (ambassadors across the firm who help to spread the word and influence participation). We also connect with ERGs and invite ERG leaders to design a cause portfolio that their members can access for inspiration of organizations to donate to. We thoughtfully select team captains by identifying employees with leadership presence, authentic belief in community investment, and strong internal networks, because we know this is especially critical in generating excitement within their teams.
Over time, we have made incremental changes and constantly evolved this challenge in an effort to build a culture of giving. As CSR professionals, we all aspire to create momentum for our giving programs, and we know that employer match programs are a meaningful avenue for employees to contribute to their broader communities. Campaigns that align with organizational culture, recognize employee motivations, incorporate historical data, and invite collaboration with internal champions can become a meaningful catalyst for engagement.
