Bosch, North America

Bosch bridges giving and volunteering efforts at locations across U.S. with Blackbaud’s YourCause

With more than 100 U.S. locations and a heart for supporting STEM education, Bosch sought a corporate social responsibility solution that could provide a shared process for employee giving and volunteering programs. Blackbaud’s YourCause solution boosted ease, efficiency, and enthusiasm. 

A clever video crafted with infomercial flair kicks off with a series of questions for associates at Bosch in North America.

“Tired of tracking emails and spreadsheets for your volunteer events?” The narrator asks. “Sick of trying to read sloppy handwriting on sign-up sheets? . . . Stressed out by disorganized donation campaigns?” And finally: “Do you want a way to better organize employee events and giving campaigns?”

Not surprisingly, a set of Bosch coworkers huddling around a colleague’s desk cheers, “YEEEESSS!” and the narrator gives them the answer they were waiting for—a cloud-based software solution designed with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in mind. “Now there’s YourCause, where you can sign up to volunteer and donate to charities all in one place!”

The video—which was recognized as a finalist for a Bosch company award—and Blackbaud’s YourCause have boosted CSR efforts at Bosch, where a popular cause is STEM education, including coaching kids in FIRST® Robotics competitions. “Employees want this,” said Brad McKenna, corporate citizenship manager for Bosch, North America. “They want to be a part of it.”

A Cohesive Approach

Bosch’s complex supply operations in the United States involve around 18,000 associates across nearly 100 locations. Before YourCause, those locations all promoted giving and volunteering, often with great passion, but their methods weren’t consistent or necessarily efficient.

“Each location is doing great work in the community, but everybody was working independently,” McKenna said. “We needed something that would help us to have more alignment, a cohesive approach, and the YourCause platform was going to be that tool. We saw that quickly.”

When he started to seriously consider YourCause in 2018, McKenna was impressed by the solution and won over by the people and processes behind it. At the time, YourCause was already an industry leader, and when Blackbaud acquired the YourCause platform in early 2019, McKenna was even more pleased. He was familiar with Blackbaud solutions from his previous work in fundraising for New York University and other nonprofits.

“I always looked at Blackbaud as the knowledge source for how nonprofits do business and how they need to engage their donors, and YourCause was doing great work around learning the needs of companies and how to engage nonprofits,” McKenna explained. “The acquisition said to me, ‘Oh my goodness. Both sides of this picture are going to get even better.’”