About Us
HEPdata has been a pioneer in matching gift solutions for over 20 years, though was most recently known as Affinaquest Matching Gifts.
With the HEPdata brand brought back in 2025, we’re excited to continue to partner with your organization on your matching gift fundraising.
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Get in touch with our team with any of your matching gift, support, or billing questions.
Matching Gift & Donation Processing Glossary: Key Terms
Managing a high-performing charitable organization requires a deep understanding of the digital infrastructure that powers modern transaction ecosystems. When a supporter decides to contribute to your mission, their transaction triggers a complex chain of data exchanges that extends far beyond a simple credit card authorization. To maximize your revenue potential, your staff must be equipped to navigate the technical frameworks. And that’s why we put together this helpful glossary resource!
By building a unified understanding of these operational mechanics, your development team can protect data integrity, streamline financial audits, and unlock scalable revenue streams without increasing administrative friction.
# – A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z
501(c)(3)
The specific section of the Internal Revenue Code that grants federal tax-exempt status to qualifying nonprofit organizations operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. Within donation and workplace giving processing lines, this regulatory designation serves as the primary legal baseline that payment gateways, donor databases, and corporate social responsibility filters use to authorize tax-deductible gift receipting and automatically approve corporate matching gift eligibility.
ACH Payments
A specific type of electronic fund transfer processed through the National Automated Clearing House Association network. In gift processing, this framework allows nonprofits to pull recurring, pre-authorized donations directly from a supporter’s checking or savings account, offering lower transaction fees than standard credit card networks.
Attestation
The official digital confirmation step in which a donor or volunteer certifies that their gift or logged service hours completely satisfy a company’s guidelines. This validation step is required by corporate workflows before a match request can move forward to the nonprofit confirmation stage.
Auto-Submission
An advanced interface feature exclusively offered by Double the Donation and its integration partners that allows eligible donors to file their corporate matching gift application directly from a nonprofit’s confirmation page. Passing encrypted transaction tokens through secure connections eliminates extra manual steps and boosts overall submission rates.
Learn more about matching gift auto-submission here!
Batch Covers
An accounting control page attached to a physical group of checks or donation records during manual processing. This sheet logs critical management fields, including the unique tracking number, record count, and total cash value, ensuring clean ledger imports.
Control Totals
A systematic validation check where processing software compares initial field calculations against final data entry summaries. For example, matching the target dollar sum of a check stack against the final digital batch report ensures typing accuracy before database updates.
Corporate Giving
The broad framework of institutional philanthropy in which businesses allocate corporate resources, including direct cash investments, corporate foundation funding, employee matching donations, and in-kind business services, to support nonprofit organizations and community initiatives.
Learn more about corporate giving here!
CRM (Fundraising Database)
The master customer relationship management system used by a nonprofit to house all supporter history, corporate profiles, and communication logs. It serves as the central operational hub where tracking files link individual records to corporate matching data.
Explore highly recommended nonprofit CRMs here!
CSR Vendors
Third-party software engines hired by corporations to manage corporate social responsibility programs, distribute matching gifts, and track employee volunteer time. Nonprofits must register with these platforms to clear electronic funding transfers.
Learn how to register your org with leading CSR vendors here!
Data Dictionary
A technical metadata guide that defines the exact structure, name formatting, and character limits for every data field used in an organization’s information setup. It serves as an integration rulebook to prevent file transfer errors during donor software updates.
De-Duplication
The database cleaning process that scans incoming contact details to identify and merge identical user profiles. Clean matching rules prevent system errors, such as sending repetitive appeals or email follow-ups to a single donor.
Donation (Gift) Processing
The comprehensive sequence of capturing, validating, recording, and depositing incoming charitable contributions. This core administrative pipeline transforms raw cash, checks, or digital tokens into accurate accounting data and completed bank settlements.
Learn more about modern gift processing strategies here!
Donor-Advised Funds (DAF)
A specialized financial account managed by a public charity that allows individual donors to make tax-deductible contributions and later recommend grants to nonprofits. Processing these transactions requires attributing the bank credit to the managing fund manager while tracking the original individual for stewardship purposes.
Learn more about effective DAF processing here!
Double the Donation
The industry-leading workplace giving automation platform and comprehensive corporate philanthropy database. For gift processing teams, this tech-for-good software integrates directly with online fundraising pages and donor management portals to instantly identify match-eligible supporters, automate personalized email reminders, and power secure auto-submission protocols that unlock matching gift revenue, volunteer grants, and payroll contributions with zero administrative friction.
Learn more about Double the Donation here!
Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) Payments
An overarching umbrella term for any digital transfer of money from one bank account to another, encompassing wire transfers, direct deposits, credit card settlements, and online banking transactions. Within corporate social responsibility systems, this broader method handles the electronic delivery of large, aggregated employee payroll donations and matching gift distributions directly into a nonprofit’s bank account.
Employee Giving (Workplace Giving)
A category of corporate giving programs that allow corporate employees to support eligible 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations and educational institutions directly through matching gifts, volunteer grants, payroll deductions, and more.
Learn more about the programs here!
Employer Identification
The critical validation workflow in which a supporter profile is linked to their current employer within a fundraising database. This employment data, whether collected directly through engagement (such as on a donation form or volunteer registration) or an appending service, allows software to instantly check corporate matching gift rules and trigger automated outreach campaigns.
Learn more about the value of employer data here!
Fair Market Value (FMV)
The objective estimated retail price that a donated corporate product or specialized professional service would sell for on the open commercial market. When processing in-kind donations, such as technology equipment or pro bono legal services, both the corporate donor and the recipient nonprofit must utilize this valuation standard for tax and accounting tracking.
Fund Coding
The systematic assignment of alphanumeric tracking codes to incoming contributions, which routes them to the correct financial categories. This system maps every gift to its specific campaign, division, or legal spending restriction in the master ledger.
General Ledger
The master financial record repository that houses an organization’s entire accounting history. Gift processing teams must ensure that daily donation batches align perfectly with general ledger entries to guarantee accurate audit compliance.
Gift Receipting
The regulatory workflow for generating and sending official tax acknowledgments to contributors. These legal documents must state the total cash value received, confirm tax-exempt status, and specify if any goods or services were provided in exchange for the gift.
Gift Sorting
The early administrative step of organizing incoming mail, physical checks, and digital transaction files by payment category or campaign type. Grouping similar payment streams streamlines verification routines and keeps processing lines running efficiently.
Gift Valuation
The process of determining the objective economic value of non-cash contributions, such as physical equipment or professional pro bono services. Teams utilize fair market value standards to record these assets on balancing ledgers without violating regulatory guidelines.
Hard Credits
The primary database entry that logs the explicit legal ownership of a financial payment to the exact legal entity that issued the funds. For instance, a matching check from a business creates a hard credit on that company’s corporate profile.
Learn more about hard credits for donation processing here!
HEPdata
A legacy matching gift software provider that assists nonprofit organizations in identifying match-eligible supporters within their donor bases. In donation processing systems, this platform provides company lookup tools and automated follow-ups to help organizations discover corporate giving benefits and capture missing corporate matching dollars.
Learn more about HEPdata here!
In-Kind Donation
A non-cash contribution of tangible goods, software licenses, physical commodities, or professional pro bono services provided directly to a nonprofit organization. For gift processing teams, these assets require unique database tracking to record their objective fair market value at the time of receipt, ensuring accurate corporate tax receipting and compliance with standard nonprofit accounting audit guidelines.
Learn more about in-kind donations here!
Internal Controls
The collection of tracking rules, data protocols, and validation methods deployed to safeguard financial assets and prevent accounting fraud. These systematic boundaries ensure that every step of the donation process is fully tracked and verified.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
A strategic fundraising metric that calculates the total net contribution amount a single donor provides to a nonprofit over the entire duration of their relationship. Within gift processing and workplace giving ecosystems, this calculation must dynamically account for both the donor’s personal out-of-pocket transactions and the associated soft credits from corporate matching gifts, payroll giving, and volunteer grants to accurately reflect the true financial impact of that supporter.
Lump Sum Disbursements
A consolidation method where a corporate giving manager or vendor combines multiple individual employee donations or matching gifts into a single bank transfer. Processing teams must break down the accompanying data layouts to distribute credits to individual profiles.
Matching Gifts
A widespread form of corporate philanthropy where a company matches the charitable contributions made by its employees to eligible nonprofit organizations. Within the gift processing framework, when a supporter makes an initial donation, the processing system flags their employer, tracks the match request from inception through fulfillment, and automatically applies a secondary soft credit to the donor’s profile once the company disburses the matching funds.
Learn more about matching gifts here!
Merchant Account
A specialized bank account established by a nonprofit that enables the organization to accept and process digital payments, including credit cards, debit cards, and electronic checks. In the fundraising pipeline, it serves as the necessary holding destination where secure transaction tokens are converted into cash deposits before the funds are officially transferred to the nonprofit’s primary operating bank account.
NTEE Codes
The National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code is a highly structured alphanumeric classification system used by the IRS to categorize nonprofit organizations based on their primary institutional purpose, mission focus, or operational field of activity. Corporations frequently configure their automated giving programs to dynamically approve or decline match applications based on these codes.
Online Donation Platforms
The customer-facing digital software utilities that host checkout pages and capture online credit card payments. These tools must integrate smoothly with lookup systems to identify corporate match opportunities immediately during checkout.
Learn more about highly recommended donation platforms here!
Payment Processors
The financial tech vendor that serves as the secure middleman for transmitting credit card and electronic check details between a donor bank and a nonprofit merchant account. They authenticate payment security parameters for settlement.
Learn more about highly recommended payment processing tools here!
Payroll Deductions
An automated giving method in which a donation is deducted directly from an employee’s salary during their regular pay cycle. The collective funds are handled as a stable, recurring revenue pipeline that settles through bulk corporate disbursements.
Learn more about payroll giving programs here!
Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCD)
A direct financial distribution made from an individual retirement account to an eligible non-profit organization. Because these funds move directly from the tax-advantaged account, processing rules require unique handling to ensure the donor receives an accurate, non-deductible receipt.
Learn more about effective QCD processing here!
Record Reconciliation
The mandatory accounting step of cross-referencing your internal donor database transactions against actual bank deposits. Spotting and correcting variances ensures that your general ledger is perfectly balanced for auditing schedules.
Remittance Slips
The paper form or document returned alongside a donation check that provides clear instructions on how the funding should be applied. These notes outline donor intent and state specific designations for the gift processing team.
Remote Deposit Capture
A physical check scanning technology that allows processing staff to digitize and deposit paper checks directly from their office computer. This tool eliminates the need for manual trips to the bank, drastically reducing payment settlement lag times.
Restricted Gift
A charitable contribution that is designated by the donor for a specific program, project, campaign, or purpose. Within the gift processing workflow, these funds must be tagged with unique tracking codes to ensure they are allocated to the correct ledger accounts and spent in strict accordance with the donor’s explicit legal intent.
Restrictive Endorsement
A security stamp applied to the back of a physical check the exact moment it is opened, limiting its use to a specific non-profit bank account. This basic internal control minimizes the risk of fraud before the check enters the processing lines.
Securities & Stocks
Charitable gifts provided in the form of corporate investment shares rather than standard liquid cash. Processing pipelines require coordinating with investment brokerages to track the exact fair market value at the time of transfer before liquidating the assets.
Separation of Duties
An essential internal security protocol that requires separate staff members to handle different parts of the financial pipeline. For example, ensuring the person who opens mail checks cannot also approve general ledger modifications blocks internal fraud.
Soft Credits
A secondary database credit that recognizes a specific supporter role in motivating or arranging a donation without naming them as the legal donor. Nonprofits use soft credits to map matching gifts back to the individual employee who applied for the corporate match.
Learn more about soft credits for donation processing here!
Split Receipting
The advanced calculation method used to create a tax document when a donor receives a physical item or benefit in exchange for their gift. The receipt must separate the total transaction cost from the true tax-deductible amount.
System Integration
The structural connection that allows payment forms, donor management tools, and workplace platforms to share data points seamlessly. Strong connections eliminate the need for manual file exports, saving administrative staff time.
Tax-Deductible Amount
The explicit portion of a charitable contribution that a supporter can legally claim for annual tax deduction benefits. This value equals the total cash received minus the fair market value of any perks given back to the donor.
Transaction Fee
The processing charge assessed by financial intermediaries, including payment processors, merchant account providers, and credit card networks, for securely routing and settling a donation. These friction costs are typically calculated as a fixed cents-per-transaction fee plus a variable percentage of total gift volume.
Unrestricted Gift
A charitable contribution given with no donor-imposed limitations, allowing the nonprofit to allocate the funds wherever the operational need is greatest. During the gift processing sequence, these transactions are directed to the organization’s general operating fund.
Verification
The official administrative check in which a nonprofit confirms, within a corporate giving platform, that a supporter base donation actually cleared their bank gateway. This validation step is mandatory before a business will release matching funds.
Volunteer Grants
A corporate giving incentive where companies award monetary grants to nonprofits where their employees regularly volunteer. The software tracks cumulative service hours over a defined period and triggers a corporate grant payout once the hours are verified. Also known as “Dollars for Doers” programs.
Learn more about volunteer grants here!
Workplace Gift Processing
The combined operational workflow of tracking, auditing, and recording contributions originating from employer-sponsored corporate donation initiatives. This track handles the complex data layers needed to balance individual donations alongside corporate matching checks.
Learn more about workplace gift processing here!
Wrapping Up
Upgrading your internal processing and workplace giving vocabulary is a critical step toward building a more resilient and integrated fundraising operation. When your database administrators and finance teams master the appropriate terminology, your organization can actively prevent data corruption, eliminate manual tracking errors, and speed up corporate giving timelines.
For more information on next-level gift processing strategies, we recommend checking out these additional resources:
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How to Manage Workplace Giving Disbursements & Reconciliation
Before diving into the complex world of corporate philanthropy management, fundraising leaders must establish a clear framework for handling incoming corporate funds. Managing workplace giving disbursements and reconciliation is a critical yet frequently overlooked component of a modern nonprofit toolkit. This guide explores how to establish rigorous tracking systems, navigate corporate vendor portals, leverage automation technology, and centralize processing operations to ensure your organization captures, attributes, and reconciles every single dollar of workplace giving revenue.
The final phase of the workplace giving lifecycle begins when a corporation releases funds; yet for many accounting departments, this milestone marks the start of a prolonged administrative bottleneck. When a corporate entity approves employee-driven philanthropic actions, the financial distribution does not arrive as an instantaneous or perfectly transparent transaction. Instead, the revenue moves through external digital channels, clearinghouses, and payment processors before reaching your bank account. To maintain financial compliance and prevent severe reporting discrepancies, development teams must understand the precise backend mechanics that govern how corporate funds are grouped, transmitted, and verified.
The Anatomy of Workplace Giving Disbursements
To build efficient accounting workflows, you must understand that workplace giving disbursements are fundamentally different from standard individual online donations. Individual gifts typically flow directly from a donor credit card into your merchant account, generating immediate donor metadata. Corporate workplace giving revenue, however, is almost always aggregated and distributed on fixed temporal schedules by third-party intermediaries.
These disbursements encompass multiple programmatic streams, each with unique operational workflows. Let’s take a closer look at the three main channels that workplace giving disbursements are likely to come through:
Corporate disbursements rarely happen in real time. Instead, companies or their processing agents combine hundreds of individual employee actions into a single lump-sum disbursement. This aggregation occurs on fixed monthly, quarterly, or bi-annual payout cycles.
Because of this delay, a match marked as “verified” or “approved” within a corporate portal does not indicate that the cash is in-house. As workplace giving continues to grow (a key trend we’re seeing in corporate philanthropy), managing internal expectations regarding these payout delays is essential to maintaining accurate cash flow projections.
The Operational Challenges of Disbursement Detective Work
Unfortunately, workplace giving disbursements can introduce a few administrative bottlenecks within the gift processing cycle. Therefore, it’s essential to examine the primary hurdles that can slow down your operations when handling incoming corporate funds.
Why? Establishing structured workflows to proactively address these issues can significantly lower the administrative burden on your staff. When you identify these specific roadblocks early, your development team can shift from one-off troubleshooting to establishing a highly scalable reconciliation system.
Here are the primary operational challenges that turn your fundraising reconciliation into complicated detective work:
Lump-Sum Payments Missing Donor Context
The most common roadblock occurs when a financial team discovers a substantial direct deposit or physical check from an entity such as “Pfizer” or even “Benevity” with no documentation attached. This lack of information forces staff to perform intensive administrative sleuthing to reconcile the revenue with the correct accounts.
Stripped Remittance Paperwork Due to Corporate Anonymity Settings
This challenge is severely compounded by donor anonymity settings on corporate social responsibility platform interfaces. When an employee checks an “anonymous” box within their company’s internal giving portal, the system intentionally strips the donor’s name, email, and specific fund designations from the standard remittance paperwork.
Manual Pattern Identification and Internal Data Cross-Referencing
Without structured automation systems, gift entry teams often seek visual patterns to resolve these payout mysteries. Staff are forced to spend hours cross-referencing the incoming lump-sum amount against pending matches, historical donor records, and known employment affiliations within their database. And if internal searches fail, they may resort to manual searches on Google or LinkedIn to track potential donor employment changes.
Inefficient Outreach Tactics and Interdepartmental Guesswork
When internal database records provide no clear answers, processing teams may resort to blasting emails across departments to determine if anyone is expecting a specific corporate match. If this guesswork also fails, staff are left with no choice but to call the company or corporate social responsibility vendor to hunt down the missing information.
Displaced Revenue Tracking for Peer-to-Peer Events
For P2P fundraising organizations, a lack of disbursement clarity creates massive friction when match funds should almost certainly go to a specific participant. When a peer fundraiser works tirelessly to raise funds for an event, a missing or uncredited match can damage trust and hurt retention. If the processing team cannot accurately identify the target account, matching funds may sit in a general corporate holding account, ultimately stalling your stewardship efforts.
Navigating Corporate CSR Vendor Portals for Clean Reconciliation
To move from chasing payments to systematically managing them, your organization must go beyond paper remittance slips to master CSR vendor platforms. CSR (corporate social responsibility) vendors act as technical intermediaries hired by companies to host giving portals, track volunteer hours, verify eligibility, and distribute aggregated funding.
These CSR vendors can be extremely valuable resources in the workplace giving disbursement process, but the first step is registering for the various platforms.
While workplace fundraising software like Double the Donation identifies matching and other employee-led opportunities for nonprofits at the front end of the giving experience, CSR vendor platforms are where backend verification and payout processing occur.
To unlock the data required for accurate reconciliation, your gift processing team must maintain secure login credentials for every CSR platform used by your donors’ employers. When an email or check arrives without an explicit data breakdown, the necessary information is almost always waiting inside the portal.
While it can vary from one platform to the next, the reconciliation workflow typically follows five operational steps:
Rather than manually copying this information, experts recommend that gift processing teams download the reconciliation spreadsheet (typically a CSV or Excel export) directly from the vendor portal. This asset provides a comprehensive audit trail that your finance team can use to upload the data to your internal database.
Centralization Strategies for Large Nonprofits and Federated Chapters
For large, multi-chapter organizations or nationwide federated nonprofits, a decentralized gift-processing model (or leaving each chapter or affiliate to its own devices) can lead to significant revenue loss and messy data.
To combat these inefficiencies, leading organizations are increasingly routing corporate philanthropy inquiries through a single, centralized team. Workplace giving centralization streamlines operations and drives massive revenue growth.
Standardizing corporate gift-processing delivers several clear organizational benefits. These include:
The results of such a transition can be astounding! When the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation centralized its workplace giving process, the organization achieved a 26% increase in matching gift revenue and a 48-hour verification turnaround time in its first fiscal year.
Data Architecture & the Power of Soft Credits in CRM Management
To maintain clean donor data, your CRM architecture must distinguish between financial recognition and actual revenue. Legally, a matching gift or volunteer grant is a direct contribution from the company. That means the corporate entity must receive the hard credit within your financial ledger. However, to track donor engagement metrics accurately, the employee who initiated the match should receive a soft credit. This allows your development team to capture a 360-degree view of an individual’s impact without double-counting cash-in-the-door.
Take a look at the following example:
This structure accurately indicates a $1,000-level supporter, ensuring they are appropriately recognized during annual giving tier evaluations.
By establishing and sustaining clean data-entry practices and integrating your fundraising software with tools like Double the Donation, your team can build a comprehensive tracking system. This will also provide you with real-time visibility into corporate giving engagements, allow you to follow up on incomplete requests, and identify top corporate partners with whom your organization can deepen relationships.
Actionable Frameworks for Modern Gift Processing Teams
To convert these insights into a reliable day-to-day routine, your development team should implement structured frameworks designed to minimize cognitive load and streamline gift processing. Here’s what we recommend:
#1: Establish a Dedicated Matching Gift Inbox
Rather than letting notifications and verification requests flood your general email accounts, we suggest creating a single, dedicated email address. (For example, matchinggifts@university.edu or workplacegiving@yournonprofit.org.) This isolates all incoming digital confirmations, portal links, and supporter inquiries into a single repository.
#2: Implement Batch Processing and Structured Imports
It’s generally not a great idea to manually key in individual matching gifts or payroll deductions as they trickle in. Instead, batch similar administrative tasks together. Processing staff can then step away from day-to-day firefighting and block out specific times to enter “workplace giving mode.” This enables them to regularly handle batch verifications and portal updates when focused and ready.
To get started, set aside a weekly two-hour window to download data from each CSR platform you’ve registered for. From there, you can clean up duplicate contacts, match transaction details, and upload large quantities of corporate payments at once.
#3: Set Realistic Timeline Expectations Across the Board
To protect donor trust, explicitly communicate corporate processing delays across all fundraising channels. Clearly state that corporate matching gifts can take weeks or months to officially arrive. This proactive transparency prevents supporters from worrying about missing credits.
Then, when the match clears the reconciliation pipeline, update the individual’s fundraising total and trigger a follow-up celebrating the win.
#4: Standardize Your Corporate Policy Reviews
Corporate philanthropic guidelines are not set in stone. Companies frequently update their match caps, adjust hour minimums for volunteer grants, or change their focus pillars. Therefore, task your gift-processing team with using a company database tool to conduct a comprehensive policy review once or twice a year. If you discover a change in your eligibility status for a specific program, log it within the company’s CRM record.
This prevents your team from wasting time chasing invalid requests and ensures your outreach strategies reflect the most accurate guidelines.
Wrapping Up & Next Steps for Workplace Giving Disbursements
Managing workplace giving disbursements and reconciliation does not have to be a huge undertaking for your team. By moving away from fragmented processing and leaning into a unified model supported by the right technology and clear data tracking, your organization can eliminate administrative bottlenecks and drive more corporate revenue to completion.
Doing so protects your data integrity, saves valuable staff time, and strengthens corporate relationships. Plus, it allows your team to focus on what matters most: advancing your mission.
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Double the Donation vs. HEPdata: The Definitive Comparison
When comparing Double the Donation vs. HEPdata, the choice is between a modern, automated growth engine and a stagnant legacy database.Double the Donation provides a daily-updated database, 100+ turnkey integrations, and full automation that maximizes revenue, whereas HEPdata’s tech often leads to missed matches, manual data entry, and a clunky donor experience. By choosing a solution that prioritizes daily data integrity, WCAG accessibility, and SOC 2 security, you can avoid the costs of stale software and ensure every corporate-matching dollar is claimed.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of corporate social responsibility and nonprofit technology, the tools you choose to power your fundraising efforts are the engines of your mission. For decades, matching gifts have represented one of the most accessible yet underutilized revenue streams for nonprofits. Research indicates that while $2 to $3 billion is donated through corporate matching programs each year, an additional $4 to $7 billion is left unclaimed.
However, as the sector’s digital transformation accelerates, the gap between legacy solutions and modern technology has become a chasm. For organizations currently using HEPdata’s matching gift tools or evaluating it alongside modern alternatives, the choice can feel complicated. This comprehensive guide will help you make the right decision for your team.
We’ll cover:
You’ll learn about why the industry has shifted toward Double the Donation, the hidden risks of relying on stagnant technology, and why your choice of a matching gift partner directly impacts your bottom line.
Here’s a quick overview to get started.
The Core Philosophy: Innovation vs. Stagnation
To understand the difference between these two providers, one must look at their trajectory over the last decade.
Double the Donation was built on the premise that matching gift revenue should be automated, integrated, and data-driven. By focusing exclusively on the donor experience and automating the identification-to-submission pipeline, Double the Donation has become the industry standard, powering the matching gift programs of thousands of nonprofits, from local animal shelters to international universities.
HEPdata, conversely, is often viewed as a legacy provider. While they were early pioneers in the space, the platform has not kept pace with the API-driven world of modern fundraising. Many users find that while the tool still exists, it no longer evolves. In a world where corporate giving policies change overnight, a tool that is not constantly innovating becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Database Integrity as the Foundation of Matching Gifts
The single most important component of any matching gift software is its database. If a donor searches for their employer and finds outdated information (or worse, doesn’t find their employer at all), the conversion funnel breaks instantly.
Double the Donation’s Data Advantage
Double the Donation maintains the most comprehensive and up-to-date matching gift database in the world. This isn’t just a marketing claim; it’s the result of a massive, ongoing investment in data science and manual verification.
HEPdata’s Data Problem
In contrast, HEPdata’s database is widely considered stagnant. Reports from former clients suggest that the data is often out of sync with current corporate policies.
Bottom line: Your matching gift database is the single point of failure or success in the donor journey. When you rely on a platform that prioritizes regular program updates, you build trust with your supporters and ensure that no revenue is left behind.
The Integration Ecosystem Comparison
In a modern nonprofit tech stack, your organization’s tools need to talk to each other. Your donation form should talk to your CRM; your CRM should talk to your email marketing tool; and your matching gift tool should sit right in the middle of that conversation. For that reason, it’s important to examine your workplace giving solution’s existing partnership network.
Double the Donation’s 100+ Turnkey Integrations
Double the Donation currently features over 100 turnkey integrations with the leading providers in the space, including:
When a supporter engages via a platform integrated with Double the Donation, the system immediately captures their employer information. No manual data entry is required from your staff.
As a result, the automated donor journey typically looks like this:
HEPdata’s “Manual” Experience
While HEPdata offers a few legacy partnerships, it lacks the deep, bi-directional API integrations that define modern software. Therefore, using HEPdata often requires your nonprofit’s team to:
This batch processing model is a relic of the past. It means your donors aren’t being engaged at the peak of their passion, or the moment they hit the donate button. By the time you send an email three days later, the supporter has likely moved on.
In other words, the journey is often fragmented. The donor might see a link, but there is rarely a sophisticated follow-up sequence. If the individual forgets to submit the match, that revenue is lost. There is no automated nudge to bring them back to the finish line.
Capturing All Forms of Workplace Giving
It’s important to recognize that matching gifts, while powerful, are merely a subset of the larger, continuously expanding category of workplace giving. If your organization is only focusing on the standard corporate match, you’re likely missing out on:
Double the Donation is positioned as a comprehensive workplace giving partner. Their tools are designed to identify corporate volunteer opportunities and provide supporters with the specific instructions needed to log their hours. It’s also expanded its database to encompass payroll giving programs and, more broadly, corporate sponsorships and grants (which we explored in more detail in this recent blog).
HEPdata, on the other hand, remains largely focused on the traditional employee matching gift model, leaving these newer, high-growth revenue streams untapped.
The True Cost of Doing Nothing (or the Risk of the Status Quo)
Many nonprofits stay with a legacy software provider, even when it is no longer meeting their needs, because the pain of change feels greater than the pain of staying the same. However, the hidden costs of stagnant technology include:
When CFOs or Development Directors look at software pricing, they often focus on the subscription cost alone. But the true cost of software is as follows:
Let’s break that down a bit further.
Subscription Price
When comparing Double the Donation vs. HEPdata, the initial subscription price often tells two very different stories about value. Double the Donation uses a transparent, tiered pricing model that starts with a pay-per-use Essentials plan for smaller nonprofits and scales to the Standard plan for mid- to large organizations (and to Enterprise for their largest users). This pricing is most often structured as a flat annual fee, meaning costs remain predictable and fixed even as your revenue grows.
In contrast, HEPdata often operates on a custom-quoted legacy model that can appear lower on the surface. However, it lacks the comprehensive value of a modern SaaS platform required to actually move the needle on your fundraising goals.
Opportunity Cost
If your matching gift tool has a lower “capture rate” due to poor data quality or a lack of automation, you are losing money. For example:
By trying to save a few dollars, Nonprofit B actually lost out on $57,000 in potential revenue.
Labor Hours
How much is your staff’s time worth? If your team spends 5 hours a week managing matching gift data because your software doesn’t integrate with your CRM, that equates to an estimated 260 hours a year. At a rate of $30/hour, that’s $7,800 in wasted salary every year. Next-level automation eliminates this cost almost entirely.
Security, Reliability, Accessibility, and Trust
In an era of increased data privacy regulations and a heightened focus on digital equity, how your vendors handle donor data and donor access is paramount. An insecure tool puts your reputation at risk, and an inaccessible tool excludes a significant portion of your donor base.
The Legacy Gap
As a legacy provider, HEPdata often lacks the modern security certifications and rigorous accessibility standards that IT departments now require. Using a tool that hasn’t been updated for modern accessibility standards doesn’t just hurt your conversion rates. It creates a barrier between your mission and a significant portion of your supporters.
Security and SOC 2 Compliance
Double the Donation maintains the highest standards of security in the nonprofit technology industry, understanding that it is a custodian of your donors’ trust. For this reason, it offers:
Leading the Way in Digital Accessibility
Accessibility is no longer an extra feature; it is a paramount requirement for modern nonprofits. If your matching gift tool is not screen-reader or keyboard-only navigation-friendly, you are effectively turning away support. For this reason, Double the Donation has made significant investments to ensure its interface is inclusive and highly accessible.
These include:
A nonprofit’s technology should be a bridge to its mission, not a barrier. By choosing a partner that prioritizes security and accessibility, you aren’t just checking a compliance box. You are safeguarding your organization’s reputation and ensuring that every donor has the opportunity to engage with your cause.
Conclusion: It’s Time to Move Forward
The comparison between Double the Donation and HEPdata is clear. One platform is an active participant in the future of fundraising, investing millions into data accuracy, automation, and integrations. The other is a static tool that largely remained the same while the world around it changed.
If your organization is serious about maximizing corporate revenue, you cannot afford to rely on stagnant data or manual processes. You need a partner who helps you capture every available dollar, not just the ones that are easy to find. The choice is yours: stay with the “good enough” technology of yesterday, or embrace the automated, data-driven future of today (and tomorrow).