What’s new for Bonterra Strategic Philanthropy 2H 2024?

Bonterra's vision is to grow the stagnated giving rate as a percentage of U.S. GDP from 2% to 3% by 2033. Achieving this goal means investing in product innovations that help our customers unlock their impact potential.  

For our corporate customers, we're focused on making advancements that boost employee participation, increase matching gift requests, strengthen nonprofit partnerships, and streamline granting processes. We’re also rolling out foundational updates that make our platform easier to use, fully compliant, and more scalable.  

In our recent product roadmap webinar, we showcased the latest innovations and gave a sneak peek at what’s coming next.

In this blog, you’ll find the highlights and key takeaways from the webinar. Or if you’re ready to dive into the full session, you can now watch it on-demand.  

Boost employee participation  

Global giving

To create a more inclusive giving experience, we recently launched international credit card giving. Now, employees everywhere can donate to over 300,000 pre-vetted nonprofits across 100 countries. Bonterra handles all disbursements, reducing admin work and legal risks, so you can empower your workforce with confidence. 

We’re also improving the employee portal for international users. When employees log in, the date, time, and currency formats will automatically align with their local settings. By making the giving process intuitive and familiar, you’ll boost participation and drive deeper engagement. 

Peer benchmarking 

For years, customers have told us they need a way to measure program performance against broader industry standards and best practices. While annual CSR reports offer valuable insights, the data is often outdated by the time it’s published, making it hard to drive real-time optimizations. 

That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce the first and only real-time benchmarking resource for CSR teams. Customers using our Employee Engagement solution will soon be able to filter by industry or company size to compare engagement trends like participation rates, top causes, and most popular programs. You’ll get both year-over-year and current year-to-date comparisons, giving you the insights needed to make data-driven changes in real-time. 

Streamline grantmaking processes 

Accounting exception management  

Disbursements often involve exceptions that can disrupt the processing of physical checks — like poor print quality, faulty scans, or physical damage — creating operational headaches. 

To better manage these exceptions as they arise, we’re making system updates that will allow for more rapid payment status reconciliation with our banking partners. This will slash our operational overhead and free up more time to focus on innovating our disbursements services to better meet your evolving needs.  

Foundational: support, security, and compliance  

Increase admin autonomy 

While our support teams are always happy to help, relying on back-and-forth communications for system changes can lead to avoidable delays. That’s why we’re enhancing our products to give admins more control, speeding up processes, and saving time. Here are two recent improvements we’ve made: 

• Insights user permissions: Admins with the appropriate permissions can now manage all Insights users independently. This includes viewing analysts and their access levels or adding and removing users as needed — no support tickets required. 
• e-signature integrations: Our DocuSign and Adobe Sign integrations allow admins to create, upload, and store new templates — eliminating the need to contact Bonterra’s support team when changes are needed. 

Security remediation 

Security is always top of mind at Bonterra. We run regular penetration tests — and many of our customers do the same — to keep our platform locked down. Over the next few months, we’re focusing on four key areas of improvement:  

1. Content security policy: We’re conducting a comprehensive audit of all pages to implement strict Content Security Policy (CSP) controls, ensuring that only approved content can be loaded onto the platform. This will help guard against cyber-attacks. 
2. FrontDoor multifactor authentication: We’re adding FrontDoor multifactor authentication to prevent unauthorized access and ensure secure interactions between nonprofits, grantmakers, and our platform. 
3. Global allow list for file extensions: To enhance security, we're supplementing existing client allow lists for custom field upload fields with a universal allow list. This will limit the file types which can be uploaded to our platform.  
4. Session timeout improvements: Users will receive a pop-up alert before the session times out, giving them the option to extend the session. This will prevent unexpected logouts while maintaining secure time limits.  

Your questions, answered. 

During our live webinar, we received a number of insightful questions from our audience. Below, we’ve pulled together the answers that we believe may be the most helpful from what was discussed.  

When will nonprofits and customers get details about MFA, and what will companies need to do to prepare? 
We’ll share more information on the MFA rollout for FrontDoor and participating nonprofits closer to the end of the year. Changes won’t happen until after the year-end giving season, and we’ll notify all nonprofits in advance. 

Whose data is included in the benchmarking dashboard?  
Data is being pulled from existing Bonterra customers and includes a broad range of industries and company sizes.  

Do I need multiple proposal types for international giving?
No. We’ve streamlined the system so you don’t have to create separate proposal types by country or region. This combined approach simplifies operations, making it easier for CSR teams to manage both domestic and international giving efficiently. 

Watch the on-demand webinar 

Watch the on-demand webinar now for a deeper dive into what’s new and coming soon for Strategic Philanthropy – and stay tuned for more as we continue to innovate the products you know and love. 

Interested in leveling up your support package, need additional licenses, or have questions about the roadmap? Reach out to your account manager or book a call with our team.