Vimeo switched from Benevity. In year one, they saw 4x more employee participation and cut their program costs by 50%.
Both numbers matter. Most companies assume better outcomes cost more. Vimeo's experience is the opposite.
Here's what happened.
Why They Left
Vimeo is a mid-market tech company with a distributed workforce and an engaged HR team. They had a CSR program. They were on Benevity. The box was checked.
The problem was familiar. Participation stayed low. The platform took more effort to manage than it should have. The donation fees were taking money out of every employee contribution. The HR team was running a program that most employees weren't using.
That's the Benevity pattern. Not because Benevity is poorly run. They built a platform for a different era and a different buyer. Compliance-driven, IT-configured, designed for companies with a dedicated grants manager. Vimeo, like most mid-market companies, didn't have that structure. The results reflected it.
The Switch
The decision to leave an enterprise platform feels riskier than it is. Giving history. Matching balances. Volunteer hours. Employees who've been donating for years. What happens to all of it?
The Legacy Liberator process answers those questions directly. Data migrates completely. Employees log into the new platform and see their history intact. The switch doesn't disrupt the employees who were already engaged.
Vimeo made the switch. The full story is in the case study. The short version: it happened, it wasn't disruptive, and what came next was the more interesting part.
What Changed for Employees
Modern CSR platforms are built from the employee's perspective outward. That sounds like marketing. For participation rates, it's everything.
An employee navigating Benevity to donate faces a platform designed for grants managers, not for them. The search interface, the matching process, the account structure. All built for administrative clarity, not user experience.
Vimeo employees on Percent Pledge were in a different product. Curated cause portfolios removed the search problem. Automatic matching calculations removed the form-submission problem. Virtual community events gave employees something specific to do together, not just a link to click alone.
The individual experience of giving back got easier. When it gets easier, participation goes up. Employees didn't suddenly care more. They already cared. What changed was that the friction stopping them was removed.
The Numbers
4x more employee participation in year one. 50% lower program costs.
The participation number is the lead metric for HR. It means 4x as many employees actively engaged with the CSR program. 4x as many people giving, volunteering, and connecting to something outside the work itself.
The cost savings are the metric for CFOs. Benevity charges 2-3% on every donation transaction, on top of the annual platform fee. On meaningful giving volume, that compounds fast. Every $100 donated on Benevity sends $2-3 to fees that never reach a charity. On Percent Pledge, a significantly larger share of what employees give goes where they intended it.
Vimeo got both outcomes simultaneously. Better engagement and lower cost. These aren't usually in tension. They're in tension only when the incumbent platform is your reference point.
What Other Benevity Customers Should Know
Vimeo's result isn't unique to Vimeo. It follows the same pattern as Progress Software (more hours in 6 months than the prior 3 years) and Edelman Financial Engines (50%+ participation in under 90 days).
The common thread is the same in each case. A mid-market company. A legacy platform. Low participation. Not because employees didn't care. Because the platform wasn't built for them and nobody was actively running the program.
If you're on Benevity and participation is lower than you'd like, the real cost of Benevity is worth reading before your next renewal conversation. If you're already thinking about switching, book a Liberation Consultation. We'll show you exactly what the migration looks like and what your first year could bring.
