Increase Impact With a Data-Driven Disaster Response
When it comes to disaster relief, urgent needs often emerge overnight. Whether you’re facing a local crisis or you’re responding to an international conflict, time is of the essence. Your company needs to be equipped with tools to respond rapidly and effectively, even before a disaster hits. As a result, preparedness is key to a successful disaster relief and response program.
The best way to prepare your company for the next crisis is to integrate disaster relief into your overall CSR strategy. While you can’t always predict when or where the next crisis will hit, you can ensure you have the programs and technology in place to drive maximum impact. Consider programs you may already have and how they can be scaled or adapted quickly to help those affected by a crisis. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Personal Giving: Consider offering more flexible forms of giving to increase employee participation. Credit card donations are a great way to make it easy and convenient for employees to give, and the option to remove nonprofit matching gift approvals is available.
2. Matching Programs: Employ a dollar-for-dollar matching program for employee donations to double the impact and help more people affected by the crisis.
3. Recurring Giving: Enable automatic, recurring giving for your employees. While disasters call our attention to immediate needs, recovery efforts often take years and go on long after initial contributions have been exhausted.
4. Partner NPOs: When a crisis happens, feature your NPO partners on your CSR platform who need support, donations, or supplies. The increased visibility is sure to encourage participation from your workforce!
5. Employee Assistance Program (EAP): It can be easy to forget that an emerging crisis may affect your very own. Establishing an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) allows your employees to request assistance in a time of need.
Optimize Your Program With Insights
You’ve come up with a disaster relief plan, implemented a program to support affected communities, and rallied your workforce behind the cause, so what now? Data analysis throughout your campaign is key for measuring your program's success and tracking its impact. You’ll also be able to understand best practices and considerations for future campaigns.
We know that while data analysis is crucial to your campaign’s success, it's easier said than done. Building reports that tell your impact story can be time-consuming and are often limited to information you already know. CyberGrants Insights allows you to organize, optimize, adapt, and enable giving programs faster than ever before with a hands-on approach to understanding and exploring your data. And it enables real-time decision-making and rapid response time whenever emerging needs arise. Here’s how:
1. Reduce Your Administrative Burden: Shorten the time spent on report configuration and manual manipulation with at-a-glance monitoring of throughput by status, region, focus area, dollar amount threshold, and more.
2. Take Control of Compliance: Measure and track compliance and funding metrics (i.e., equitable funding) across all of your programs including grants, employee giving, and volunteerism—all in one place.
3. Tell Your Impact Story: Uncover insights and share them in a way that provides deeper context for the support generated.
4. Optimize and Adapt Your Programs: Take a data-driven approach to strategically adapt and optimize your programs by combining traditional CSR data with web and support analytics.
5. Enhance Your Data: Utilize census and demographic data to align matching gift and grant program spend with strategic initiatives, identify emerging trends, and understand deviations quickly for immediate action.
Just as quickly as an administrator can spin up a program within your CyberGrants portal, they can prepare an Insights dashboard for monitoring the program in near real-time. You’ll be able to quickly and easily measure your disaster relief efforts and showcase their impact on affected communities. Here’s how:
- Filter on a specific set of designations, using keywords that would align with your Disaster Relief campaign.
- Set a default date range to only capture activity that has occurred during your specific campaign.
- Quickly identify the top Social Good Organizations based on donor activity during the campaign.
- Easily identify the total amount of donors, the total amount donated or matched, and the average gift amount per employee.
- Easily see data specific to Disaster Relief by program, cause, NTEE category, employee location, or organization location.
But don’t just take our word for it! Some of our incredible Impact Makers have already witnessed how Insights can transform a disaster relief campaign. Take a look!
CVS Health’s Rapid Response to the Ukraine Crisis
On Thursday, February 24, 2022, news broke of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched what he called “a special military operation” from multiple fronts aimed at demilitarizing Ukraine. As a result, civilians were forced to flee their homes and cross into neighboring countries for safety. The UN reports that more than six million people have left Ukraine to take refuge in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Belarus. The invasion of Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis left individuals and corporations alike grappling with how to help.
In collaboration with CyberGrants through their employee giving portal, a disaster relief dashboard was quickly activated to communicate philanthropic efforts to colleagues and offer a match of colleague donations from the CVS Health Foundation for emergency medical support, including:
- $100,000 to the American Red Cross to support emergency services for military families, evacuation support for U.S. Citizens, and humanitarian aid to the citizens of Ukraine and neighboring countries.
- $50,000 to Direct Relief to support medical care for refugees fleeing violence and disruption as well as the donation of pharmaceuticals, medical products, and mental health services to benefit public hospitals and clinics in Ukraine.
- Up to $50,000 in colleague matching donations to support either the American Red Cross or Direct Relief for donations made through the end of March.
Within the first 24 hours of their campaign, CVS Health exceeded its colleague matching goal of $50,000 and was able to deliver on their promise to support affected communities with critical emergency services. By leveraging their dashboards within Insights, CVS Health was able to get a closer look into campaign specifics and better understand colleague participation. After launching their Ukraine response efforts through internal communications, there was a significant increase in the volume and frequency of colleagues leveraging the portal. Nearly 40% (39.5%) of participating colleagues were doing so for the first time, proving that quickly implementing a timely program can increase engagement and participation rates.
With Insights, CVS Health is able to leverage data points across its employee giving platform, beyond donation amounts, and better understand how their colleagues want to give and what causes matter most to them. These key insights will be instrumental in future campaigns and lead to even more engaged colleagues and, in turn, even greater impact.
We applaud CVS Health and its colleagues for their rapid response to the emerging conflict in Ukraine and their dedication to supporting affected communities. Thank you for your unwavering commitment to driving maximum social impact.
Responding rapidly to a disaster or crisis may seem daunting, but it isn’t a task you should have to tackle alone. By leveraging agile CSR technology, you’ll be able to rally your team, respond to urgent needs, and drive maximum social impact. Ready to take your Disaster Relief Programs to the next level? Download our Community Relief Impact Playbook and contact CyberGrants today.
