Corporate Matched Giving: The Missing Double Most Charities Forget

There is a second cheque sitting next to most regular gifts your charity receives. It is written by the donor’s employer, it costs the donor nothing, and in a large number of UK cases it is simply never claimed. The reason is rarely apathy. The reason is that no one ever asked.

US fundraisers built matched giving into their muscle memory a decade ago. UK fundraising shops, by contrast, tend to treat it as a curiosity that lives in payroll giving paperwork. The result is a quiet leakage: research from Double the Donation and Benevity consistently puts unclaimed employer match in the billions globally, with UK recovery rates trailing US peers by a wide margin.

How matched giving actually works in the UK

A UK employer with a matched giving policy will top up an employee’s personal donation to a registered charity, usually pound for pound, sometimes two for one, up to an annual cap per employee. The donor submits the gift through their employer’s portal (most large employers use Benevity, a few use Bright Funds, some still use CAF Give As You Earn), the employer verifies the charity, and the match lands in your bank account a few weeks later as a separate transaction from a corporate foundation or CAF.

The list of reliable matchers in the UK is shorter than people assume but it covers an enormous payroll. HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and Standard Chartered all run programmes. Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG match across their UK offices. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Apple and Adobe match generously, often at two-to-one with high annual caps. A meaningful share of your warm supporter base almost certainly works for one of these employers.

The donor is willing. The employer is willing. The only missing ingredient is the prompt.

Why UK charities recover a fraction of what is available

Three reasons turn up in almost every audit we run.

• Payroll giving and matched giving sit in finance, not fundraising, so the supporter team rarely sees the data.
• The CRM has no flag for "employer matches", which means there is no follow-up trigger and no segment to report on.
• Fundraisers feel awkward raising it on a thank-you call, so the conversation never happens.

None of these are strategy problems. They are plumbing problems, and plumbing is fixable in a fortnight.

The four moves that shift the number

1. Clean up payroll giving as the foundation

Before you chase one-off matches, make sure your charity is correctly listed with CAF, Benevity and Bright Funds, and that your bank details on each platform are current. A surprising number of charities discover unclaimed funds sitting in a Benevity disbursement queue because the platform could not verify them. Twenty minutes of admin recovers real money.

2. Build a one-page "ask your employer to match" resource

This is the single highest-return asset you can make. It should fit on one side of A4 and include: your registered charity number, the exact legal name HR systems expect, a short paragraph the donor can paste into their employer portal, and a screenshot of where to find the matching giving section in Benevity. Make it downloadable from a short URL the fundraising team can read out on a call.

3. Add a CRM flag and a follow-up trigger

In your CRM, add two fields: "employer" (free text, captured at any opportunity) and "employer matches" (yes, no, unknown). When a donor’s employer is flagged as a known matcher, the next thank-you email should include a soft line about matching with a link to the one-pager. When the flag is "unknown", the next welcome touch should ask the question. That is the entire automation.

4. Train the supporter conversation

The ask is not "will you give more". The ask is "can I help you claim something your employer already offers". A script that lands well:

That phrasing puts you on the donor’s side of the table. It also gives them a graceful no, which protects the relationship.

Measuring the lift honestly

Track three numbers and resist the temptation to track more. First, the share of active donors with a known employer field. Second, the share of those with "employer matches" set to yes. Third, the ratio of matched income to original prompted gifts in a rolling twelve-month window. A healthy programme moves the first number above 40 percent, the second above 15 percent, and the third toward 0.4 or higher.

If your CRM cannot produce these three figures on demand, that is the first thing to fix. Everything else depends on being able to see the picture.

A four-week pilot you can start on Monday

1. Week one: pick a known segment of 200 to 500 warm donors. Cross-reference any employer data you already hold against the matcher list. Write the one-page resource.
2. Week two: add the CRM flag, build the email trigger, and brief the supporter team on the script. Run a fifteen-minute roleplay so the language feels natural.
3. Week three: send the prompted email to the segment and call the top fifty by lifetime value. Capture every employer mentioned, even when the answer is no.
4. Week four: count the matches received and pledged. Decide whether to extend the programme to the full file, what to automate, and what to leave as a human conversation.

You will not double your income in a month. You will, however, prove the channel exists, build the muscle, and create a reporting line that finance and trustees can see. That is usually enough to justify the next quarter of investment, and the second cheque starts arriving as a matter of routine.

Related reading: Email Frequency: The Numbers Most Charities Get Wrong, Ramadan Appeals Without Tokenism: A Charity Guide and Lent Campaigns For Faith And Secular Charities.