As corporate social responsibility (CSR) leaders face growing pressure to demonstrate meaningful outcomes for employees, businesses and communities, a new Bonterra report finds that CSR teams are being asked to prove more, manage more, and report faster, and 95% of them are doing it across four or more disconnected systems. Not one team in the study described those systems as fully integrated. “The Integrated CSR Report: Creating Impact in an Era of Accountability,” released today by social impact technology leader Bonterra, provides CSR leaders with practical guidance for evaluating their programs across these five areas along with identifying opportunities to strengthen their impact.

The report draws on an independent Hanover Research survey of 150 funding decision-makers at organizations distributing at least $2 million in grants annually, including 110 corporate CSR leaders and 40 foundation respondents, alongside anonymized Bonterra platform data and external industry benchmarks. CSR-specific conclusions reflect the corporate respondent group, while grantmaking findings draw on all 150 participants. Together, the findings reveal where CSR programs are falling short today and identify opportunities for leaders to strengthen their impact across employees, businesses, and communities.

Highlights include:

  • CSR investment is growing, alongside pressure to prove its value: 91% of CSR leaders report that their company’s CSR investment has increased over the past two years. Additionally, 73% report growing pressure to link CSR efforts to ROI.

  • Proving impact requires connecting CSR activity to business and community outcomes: 64% of CSR leaders cite difficulty linking activity to business outcomes as the most common barrier to measuring effectiveness. Employee impact is also under-measured: fewer than half of corporate programs (46%) measure the employee-related value of their community investments, even as Bonterra platform data found that employees who both donated and volunteered consistently had lower termination rates than every other group over five years.

  • Employee programs need to prioritize participation, not just availability: Employee giving has grown 21% over the past three years, yet only 1% of organizations report employee participation of 75% or higher. Limited relevance to employee interests and poor user experience remain major barriers, cited by 45% and 41% of CSR leaders, respectively.

  • Reducing administrative work can free CSR teams to focus on impact and strategy: 93% of CSR leaders identify reporting and data collection as a leading time sink. 87% spend at least half their time on administrative work.

“CSR leaders are being asked to prove more than ever before, but too many programs still struggle to connect activity to outcomes,” said Bonterra CEO Scott Brighton. “The real unlock is giving leaders a clear view of how employee engagement, community investment and social impact outcomes move together. When those connections are visible, teams can spend less time documenting what already happened and more time understanding what worked, making better decisions and increasing their impact.”

The report also identifies what holds participation back. While 68% of CSR leaders call employee participation very or extremely important, only 1% of organizations report participation above 75%. The barriers CSR leaders name most often are limited visibility into impact (48%), limited relevance to employee interests (45%), and poor user experience with their tools (41%).

“Employees want to be part of something meaningful at work. Whether that happens is a design question,” said Kenrick Fraser, Chief Corporate Impact Officer at Bonterra. “The companies seeing the strongest participation and employee impact are those that make opportunities reachable for every employee. They design around how people actually engage and show what each contributions accomplishes.”

The research also points to AI as an emerging tool for helping CSR teams spend less time on administration and more time on strategy. With reporting and data collection consuming significant resources, CSR leaders are beginning to identify where AI can meaningfully reduce manual work, improve access to insights and help teams act on their data more quickly. The report found:

  • AI adoption is already widespread: 83% of CSR teams use AI in some capacity, even as organizations continue to determine where it can deliver the greatest value.

  • Reporting and compliance are the clearest near-term opportunities: 77% of CSR leaders identify reporting and compliance as a top AI use case, ahead of employee engagement (43%), impact analysis (42%) and operational efficiency (41%).

  • AI can help reduce the reporting burden: Only 13% of CSR teams can produce a comprehensive report in under two weeks, while 93% identify reporting and data collection as a leading time sink. The report recommends using AI to automate the aggregation and analysis of impact data, reducing reliance on manual data collection.

The report comes as Bonterra continues to invest in how companies build and scale their CSR programs. Following its acquisition of Deed in March, Bonterra launched Bonterra Deed in July, bringing employee communities, giving, and volunteering together with corporate grantmaking for enterprise CSR teams.

For more information about Bonterra CSR solutions, visit https://www.bonterratech.com/solutions/csr-software.

About Bonterra

Bonterra is the only solutions network built to connect nonprofits and funders across the social good ecosystem. Supporting more than 216,000 organizations and facilitating over $22B in annual giving, Bonterra helps nonprofits, volunteers, funders, corporate partners, and public agencies turn data into action and amplify impact. As the technology leader advancing the effort to raise charitable giving to 3% of U.S. GDP by 2033, Bonterra combines trusted platforms, ethical AI, and continuous innovation to power the next era of good.

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