Most companies won't switch their CSR platform mid-year. The timing feels wrong. You're already running programs. Employees know how the system works. You just don't want to create chaos for a problem that can wait until renewal.
Edelman Financial Engines switched mid-year. And they had 50% employee participation within three months.
The story behind it is about more than platform choice. It's about what happens when the company handling your migration actually knows what they're doing.
Why They Switched
Edelman Financial Engines had a platform. It was running. Employees could donate and log volunteer hours. The box was checked.
What wasn't working was participation. The platform required too much from employees: navigation that wasn't intuitive, a matching process that added friction instead of removing it, and no real-time visibility into what the program was accomplishing. HR was managing the platform on top of their other work with no dedicated support.
Low participation in CSR programs is usually diagnosed as a communication problem or a culture problem. It's almost always a platform and support problem.
The Decision to Switch Mid-Year
The nervousness about switching mid-year is real. What happens to employee giving history? What does migration actually involve? What if employees show up to the new platform and their data is gone?
Edelman's team asked all of these questions. The Legacy Liberator process answered them. Giving history carries over. Volunteer hours carry over. From the employee's perspective, they log into a new platform and their record is intact. The process takes four weeks. Not four months.
The full account of what switching mid-year looked like is in Edelman's case study. The short version: the switch itself wasn't the risk. Staying on a low-participation platform was.
What the SIM Did in the First 90 Days
The platform switch is the smallest part of what happened. What drove the participation result was the program that ran on the other side of it.
Edelman's Social Impact Manager built the program calendar, designed the communications, and ran the first volunteer events. When a new employee joined, the program was already in the onboarding flow. When a department wasn't showing up, the SIM flagged it and adjusted. The HR team wasn't running the program on top of their regular work. The SIM was running it.
Edelman Financial Engines had employees who wanted to participate. What they didn't have was a program designed to earn participation. The SIM built that program.
The 50% Number
50% employee participation in a CSR program is unusual. The industry average on legacy platforms sits around 15-20%.
To put Edelman's result in context: they didn't start at 15% and work their way up to 50% over years. They switched platforms in week four and were at 50%+ within the first quarter.
That compression is the point. A well-run program with a dedicated manager doesn't take years to produce results. The infrastructure either exists or it doesn't. Platform, support model, event programming. Once it's in place, participation follows quickly.
What Made It Replicable
The Edelman story isn't about Edelman specifically. The structure that produced their result is the same one Percent Pledge deploys for every customer.
Modern platform built for employees, not administrators. Data continuity through the migration. A Social Impact Manager who owns the program calendar, events, communications, and participation tracking. Monthly community events employees can join without additional planning from HR.
Progress Software logged more volunteer hours in six months than the prior three years. DRW doubled a $750K giving goal in two weeks. These aren't outliers from a lucky customer. They're the pattern from a program model that works.
Read the Edelman case study for the full account. To understand what your first 90 days would look like, book a demo.
