How Leeds Building Society Transformed Their CSR Activity with YourCause

The team at Leeds Building Society would often spend hours filtering through endless PDFs and Word documents to manage their charitable applications. Now, they’re setting a new standard by leveraging YourCause platforms to streamline their workflow and give them more time to focus on what truly matters – making an impact.

The Need

Leeds Building Society has long been committed to mutuality, community, and employee wellbeing – these are the values that define its culture and drive its ethos of making a positive impact, both internally and externally through corporate social responsibility (CSR). Their CSR programmes, which focus on connecting their employee to the community and supporting charities through grantmaking, enable them to engage their workforce with causes they care about whilst strengthening connections with the communities they serve. However, as the scope of these activities expanded, so did the complexity of managing them.

Initially, the company’s CSR team relied heavily on manual processes – using Word Documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets to track volunteer hours and process grant applications. These workflows not only proved to be time-consuming and inefficient, creating significant administrative burdens on employees, but they also limited the ability of their CSR programmes to fully achieve their purpose.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Leeds Building Society decided to partner with YourCause from Blackbaud to implement CSRConnect and GrantsConnect to streamline and automate their CSR activity across the business.

CSRConnect armed their employees with a platform to uncover meaningful volunteering opportunities, log their hours, and earn donations for their time – donations they could then contribute to a charity of their choice. The newly implemented platform motivated and inspired Leeds Building Society employees, allowing them to effectively track their contributions, participation, and overall impact – boosting volunteering engagement from under 15% post-Covid, to nearly 40% in 18 months.

For the CSR team, who were spending hours manually processing charitable applications, GrantsConnect fully automated their grantmaking workflow, making it much easier to review applications and communicate with charities. These optimisations ultimately gave them back valuable time they could reinvest in more strategic initiatives and making a positive case for ROI across the business.

The Impact

Since implementing CSRConnect and GrantsConnect, Leeds Building Society has seen significant improvements in both employee participation and community impact.

To date:

• Over 1,000 employees have participated in volunteering programmes.
• Leeds Building Society has contributed more than 12,500 volunteering hours to local causes.
• The company has supported 377 local charities through donations, amplifying its impact and making a difference in the community it serves.
• The CSR team has seen a 25% increase in volunteering engagement since utilising CSR software from YourCause from Blackbaud.

The Effect on Business

As a mutual organisation, Leeds Business Society’s success depends on their ability to connect with members and support the communities they serve. By empowering employees with accessible tools and opportunities to support meaningful causes, they have fostered a more inclusive culture, strengthened workplace satisfaction, and instilled a renewed sense of purpose within their team.

This commitment to effective and efficient CSR is felt by their colleagues, whose captured sentiment through their annual survey, places them in the top 25% for wellbeing in UK financial service sector employers. This is a critical advantage in attracting and retaining top talent – but it’s also allowed them to scale their programmes, deepen charity partnerships, and solidify their reputation as a trusted and people-centred organisation, proving that social good can go hand in hand with business success.

The Verdict

For Leeds Building Society, the decision to streamline their CSR programmes went beyond the need to improve efficiency – it was about creating a more inclusive and impactful approach to community and employee engagement.

Implementing YourCause’s platforms, CSRconnect and Grantsconnect, has not only simplified their workflow and processes; it has also empowered their employees with a true sense of purpose while driving measurable change in the communities they serve.

Your Turn!

If, like Leeds Building Society, your organisation is committed to creating positive change, we’re here to help. Our team of experts can help you address the issues that matter to your stakeholders, your organisation, and your employees while engaging your workforce through social good. Let’s partner together to amplify your impact and align your business purpose with measurable results!

Want to Hear from the Team at Leeds Building Society?

Watch the full video to discover how UK industry leaders use YourCause to create positive change, both inside and outside the workplace.