America’s Charities and SmartSimple Partner to Deliver New Cutting-Edge Employee Giving and Social Responsibility Solution

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a global blueprint for helping organizations navigate the significant environmental, social, and economic challenges our world faces. Since the 17 global goals were announced in 2015, 72% of companies have mentioned the Goals in their annual corporate or sustainability and impact reports, and 50% have identified priority SDGs. However, just 27% include the SDGs in their business strategy, and only 23% of companies disclose meaningful Key Performance Indicators and targets related to the SDGs, according to PwC’s SDG Reporting Challenge 2018 report. While companies are “increasingly using the SDGs as their strategic north star,” there remains a gap between good intentions and actual ability to integrate the SDGs with a company’s core business strategy.

Part of the problem is the lack of expertise and a technology solution sophisticated enough to integrate the SDGs into corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. We are proud to announce we have solved that problem: our two organizations, SmartSimple, and America’s Charities, are partnering to offer nothing less than the most complete CSR solution in the market today. 

Simply put, we have joined forces to make it easier than ever for companies to make a difference inside and outside the walls of the workplace. More specifically, we help businesses incorporate the SDGs into their giving impact; distribute and track funds; and manage and report giving, engagement, and impact across all CSR programs.

SmartSimple is a cloud-based tracking and reporting platform that helps organizations automate their critical processes. On June 26, SmartSimple will release its newest offering in the CSR space: Engage. Engage provides a technology front-end for organizations to manage their entire workplace and employee giving programs. And unlike many other available CSR solutions, Engage is the world’s first platform to integrate the SDGs framework directly into its architecture fully. [Editor’s note: On June 17, 2020, America’s Charities announced Engage to its audience. Read the press release here and learn more about the America’s Charities Engage solution here.] 

America’s Charities inspires employees and organizations to support causes they care about. We manage the entire back-end funds management process for companies, including matching gifts, donation transactions, charity vetting, financial reporting, and much more. Each year, we process more than 1 million transactions and send approximately 40,000 payments to qualified nonprofits. Our deep expertise and 40 years of experience managing employee giving programs and distributing more than $700 million to more than 20,000 nonprofits mean we know how to help companies scale their operations and save critical time, money, and resources.

Together, we offer companies an end-to-end solution to manage, track, and report across all giving and engagement programs, directly align corporate values with the SDGs, and even help employees leverage their activities and impact around common goals. This new full-scale solution—SmartSimple Cloud software plus America’s Charities complete funds management service—helps companies stop focusing on the many small tasks that comprise every giving, engagement, and CSR program and instead focus on what matters: building culture, supporting communities, and changing the world. Companies can work with Engage and America’s Charities together or as a stand-alone service.

For us at SmartSimple, joining forces with America’s Charities was a no-brainer. Beyond the vast experience and long track record of successfully servicing corporate organizations and nonprofits alike, they also bring deep expertise and knowledge of the industry. Their funds management work delivers a valuable service, and they are the best in the industry. But beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, it became clear to us early on in our discussions why America’s Charities had developed such a strong reputation and loyal client base. They have an unparalleled level of knowledge and expertise in the workplace and employee giving spaces, and we feel that their guidance and feedback will help us to continue refining our technology to ensure we’re putting the best CSR management solution out in the market for our clients.

For America’s Charities, partnering with SmartSimple was both natural and necessary. For the past decade, we’ve conducted original research to find out what donors, companies, and nonprofits want, expect, prefer, and need when it comes to giving and engagement, and we constantly pair our findings with our everyday conversations with our nearly 60 corporate clients. While every program is different, one theme is constant: companies want to focus on making a real and lasting difference, and they don’t have the time or resources to track down donations or funding, force software to work they it was intended, or bend vendor services to their needs. We are beyond excited to partner with SmartSimple because it’s clear that they inherently understand this. Their philosophy tracks with ours – we should meet the clients where they are, not the other way around. Their new Engage technology also provides something never seen before that is crucial for social good: an opportunity to authentically focus and commit to the SDGs.

Together, Engage plus America’s Charities means we are delivering to companies something truly unique: a full-service solution – expertise, strategic thinking, tactical execution of tasks, SaaS technology, and more – and perhaps even better, ultimately we are collectively charting a path to a better future through giving, engagement, and CSR.

We are thrilled to bring our united suite of offerings to you – the businesses that care about their communities and the world. Whether your need is robust CSR software, in-depth funds management, or a one-stop shop with all of the above and more, our organizations—America’s Charities and SmartSimple—are thrilled to now serve you, whatever your organization’s purpose, shape, or size. For more information, please visit www.charities.org/engage.