📠 Payroll Deduction Donations

Payroll Deduction Donations

What is a payroll deduction donation?

We just made donations even easier for your employees! Through Deed, employees can now donate a portion of their future income to nonprofits of their choice. Similar to how they’d contribute to a retirement fund or Health Savings Account, their donation will be automatically deducted from their upcoming paycheck(s), without having to input any additional information or think twice about it. Employees can choose to donate:

• once, deducting from their next paycheck, or
• recurring, deducting from every subsequent paycheck, until otherwise cancelled. Our system automatically syncs to your pay cycle. For example, if your company’s pay cycle is every two weeks, money will be deducted and a donation will be made to the nonprofit every two weeks.

Studies have shown that donating via payroll deduction reduces the perceived ‘loss’ felt when people donate out-of-pocket — which means more donations and more impact!

How can I access this feature?

Currently, our payroll solution is available through Workday for U.S.-based employees. **If you’d like to add payroll deduction donations to your platform, let your Partner Success Manager know and they’d be happy to assist you. Please know that our team requires 4-8 weeks of lead time to seamlessly and properly set up payroll donations for you.

We are expanding to include more HRIS systems as well as employees in more geographies. With Workday, employees based in the United Kingdom, France, and Canada will also be able to access to payroll deduction donations soon. However, if you utilize a different HRIS or if other countries are important to you, let us know! We are happy to gather feedback so that our platform can more effectively serve your needs.

🗣 Talk to your Partner Success Manager for more info on our upcoming plans for payroll!

How do employees make a donation via payroll deduction?

The experience of making a payroll donation is very similar to the experience of making any other donation on Deed!

• Making a donation

  When an employee navigates to the donation page of a nonprofit of their choice, they’ll be able to toggle between “Other Payment” and “Payroll.” Once they select “Payroll,” a slightly different interface will appear, as in the image below.

  You’ll notice that this page looks very similar to the normal donation interface, with a few differences:

  • As opposed to “recurring,” employees will be able to select to “give every paycheck.” There is helper text underneath the frequency toggle to inform employees when their donation will be deducted next.
  • There is no option to input a credit card, because that is no longer necessary!
  • When an employee clicks “Donate” at the bottom of the page, the donation will not be made instantaneously. Rather, the donation will be made to the nonprofit the day payroll is processed, when the appropriate amount is deducted from their paycheck.

• Checking the status of their donation

  As with all their donations, employees can go onto their profile to see their payroll deduction donations; they will show up in a list alongside any other donation they’ve made. When an employee clicks into the donation, they will then be able to:

  • cancel their donation (up until 2 days before the end of the pay cycle)
  • view the status of their donation, including when it will be (or was) deducted and whether or not the donation was successfully deducted from their paycheck.

• Employee notifications

  The experience of making a payroll donation is very similar to the experience of making any other donation on Deed!

  • Making a donation

    When an employee navigates to the donation page of a nonprofit of their choice, they’ll be able to toggle between “Other Payment” and “Payroll.” Once they select “Payroll,” a slightly different interface will appear, as in the image below.

    You’ll notice that this page looks very similar to the normal donation interface, with a few differences:

    • As opposed to “recurring,” employees will be able to select to “give every paycheck.” There is helper text underneath the frequency toggle to inform employees when their donation will be deducted next.
    • There is no option to input a credit card, because that is no longer necessary!
    • When an employee clicks “Donate” at the bottom of the page, the donation will not be made instantaneously. Rather, the donation will be made to the nonprofit the day payroll is processed, when the appropriate amount is deducted from their paycheck.

  • Checking the status of their donation

    As with all their donations, employees can go onto their profile to see their payroll deduction donations; they will show up in a list alongside any other donation they’ve made. When an employee clicks into the donation, they will then be able to:

    • cancel their donation (up until 2 days before the end of the pay cycle)
    • view the status of their donation, including when it will be (or was) deducted and whether or not the donation was successfully deducted from their paycheck.

  • Employee notifications

    Employees may receive 3 different types of email notifications throughout this process:

    • when they make a donation
    • when a donation was successfully deducted from their paycheck
    • when a donation was unsuccessful, which will direct them to reach out to you. More on that in the next section!

How do I track and manage payroll donations as an admin?

Admins can check the status of their company’s payroll deduction donations by navigating to the “Donations” tab on their left sidebar. If you click on the drop-down, you’ll see a page entirely dedicated to payroll.

• Breaking down the “Payroll” tab

  This page allows you to track how many payroll donations have historically been made since your company began utilizing this feature.

  Up top, in a white box, you’ll see the historic total deducted from employees’ payroll.

  Each subsequent blue box marks each payroll cycle; these automatically populate, thanks to our API integration with your HRIS system.

  When you expand the box for each pay cycle, you’ll be able to see:

  • each unique payroll deduction donation from that period of time, including
  • the amount deducted for each employee,
  • the frequency of the donation (one-time vs recurring)
  • the status of the donation

  As with the normal “donations” tab, you can click in each donation to get more information! You can also export the list of payroll donations as a .csv by clicking the “download” icon.

• Donation Statuses

  Payroll deduction donations can be one of four statuses:

  • Pending: Payroll deduction donations are officially made the day payroll is processed. Thus, a donation will show up as “pending” until their next paycheck is delivered. Up until 2 days before payroll is processed, employees can choose to cancel a donation from their profile page, at which point nothing will be deducted from the employee’s upcoming paycheck and no donation will be made.
  • Deducted: The payroll deduction donation was successfully deducted from their paycheck! To learn more about what this means from a financial perspective, check out the next question below.
  • Unsuccessful: An unsuccessful donation is often due to an error in the HRIS system. For example, if Workday did not automatically deduct the donation or deducted the wrong amount, our system will not process the donation until this has been resolved. If you hover over the “error” symbol next to an unsuccessful donation, you’ll be able to see the issue.
    • As you can see in the image above, our system accumulates all of the unsuccessful donations and notifies you both in the individual payroll cycle as well as in the historical totals, to urge you to resolve those issues ASAP!
  • Rescheduled: If a donation was unsuccessful for any reason, once resolved, our support team (support@joindeed.com) can help you “roll over” a donation into a future payroll.

How do payroll donations work from a financial perspective?

After Workday has (automatically) notified us that payroll donations were successfully, they withhold that money from employees’ paychecks and informs us to take that money instead.

Payroll donations are paid through your pre-funded PPGF Balance, which is tracked on the Giving Accounts page. In other words, in order to make sure payroll donations reach nonprofits and charities in a timely manner, we highly recommend pre-funding your account upfront!

We send these donations to our Payment Processing Partners ( Payment Processor Info) to disburse the donations on a monthly basis, at which point a line item on your Giving Accounts page will appear indicating all the payroll donations that were deducted that month.

Note that the fees on payroll donations are lower than a typical employee donation! The only fees on payroll deduction donations are our payment processing partners’ fees.