Twice the target. Half the time most companies would expect to get there.
That result didn't come from goodwill. It didn't come from an all-company email and a donation link. It came from a campaign designed from the start to drive participation, not just enable it.
Here's what went into it.
Who DRW Is
DRW is a trading and investment firm headquartered in Chicago. They're a data-driven, competitive culture. That context matters for understanding why their giving campaign worked the way it did.
When you design a giving campaign for a firm full of people who live on performance data, real-time leaderboards aren't a gimmick. They're the native language.
The Campaign Design
The campaign wasn't just an ask. It was a challenge. DRW structured it around team competition across departments, with a matching gift component that amplified what employees gave.
Every donation was visible in real time. Department-vs-department standings updated as the campaign ran. The scoreboard wasn't a summary at the end. It was live.
The mechanics matter. A giving campaign that only shows participation as a final percentage tends to feel low-stakes. One where you can see your department sitting in third place and watch the number move when your team donates creates a different kind of engagement. It's the same instinct that drives a healthy sales floor. Applied to giving.
What the Platform Did
Legacy giving platforms aren't built for this. Real-time leaderboards require live data. Team competitions require matching logic that processes instantly. Instant impact reporting requires infrastructure that older systems don't have.
Percent Pledge's platform was built specifically for this kind of campaign. The leaderboard updates as donations come in. Matching calculations happen automatically. The dashboard HR watches throughout the campaign is the same dashboard employees can see. No manual reconciliation. No end-of-campaign summary that comes three weeks after the energy has faded.
Who Ran It
The Social Impact Manager assigned to DRW ran the campaign end-to-end. That means structuring the challenge design, writing the communications sequence, monitoring participation by department in real time, and triggering follow-ups when specific teams were behind.
That level of campaign management is the difference between a giving campaign that generates a result and one that generates a participation rate HR is quietly disappointed by in the recap.
On a self-serve platform, that work falls on whoever in HR has CSR in their job title. On Percent Pledge, it belongs to the SIM. The HR team sends a calendar invite and reviews the final report. The SIM handles everything in between.
What $1.5M Actually Measures
The financial result is significant. The charities DRW's employees chose received more than double what DRW had planned to give.
But the metric underneath it is the one that matters for HR. A result like this is a participation story first. To generate $1.5M against a $750K goal, a significant portion of the company had to show up. They donated. Their departments competed. The matching program amplified what they gave.
That's evidence that employees weren't experiencing this campaign as an obligation. They were engaged with it. They checked the scoreboard. They nudged colleagues. Some of them probably refreshed the leaderboard more than once.
For an HR leader building the internal case for a robust CSR program, that's the proof point: employees will show up when the program is designed to earn their participation.
What You Can Replicate
DRW's specific result belongs to DRW. The mechanics behind it are available to any Percent Pledge customer.
Real-time leaderboards. Team and department competitions. Live dashboards for employees and admins. A SIM who owns campaign design, communication, and monitoring. These aren't features that require custom configuration. They're part of the platform.
Most giving campaigns don't fail because employees don't want to give. They fail because the campaign was designed as an announcement, not an experience. That design change is what moves a result from 20% participation to a number like DRW's. From static to live. From announcement to challenge. From self-managed to SIM-run.
Read the full DRW case study for the complete story. To build a campaign like it, book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like at your company's scale.
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