The Grateful Giving Foundation, a Des Moines-based nonprofit, released its inaugural Most Giving Companies in Iowa report on June 11.

The nonprofit’s vision is to provide companies the ability to put a small portion of every transaction toward charitable causes, according to a news release. It offers a software platform that allows businesses and individuals to make micro-donations.

With the software, businesses can choose to automatically donate a percentage of each customer transaction to one or more charities, or they can allow the customers to choose the charity from Grateful Giving’s database of over 1.5 million charities, Lisa Acheson, partner success manager at Grateful Giving, said in an email.

Businesses can also choose to donate a fixed amount to a customer, allowing them to choose their favorite charity.

Individuals can use the software to pick one or more charities to support with automatic micro-donations from their daily and monthly spending, Acheson said. It is free for nonprofits to have a profile and receive donations through Grateful Giving’s platform.

The Grateful Giving Foundation originally started as a certified B Corporation, a for-profit company with a social purpose, and transitioned to a nonprofit model in October 2023, Acheson said.

Acheson said the Grateful Giving Foundation launched the Most Giving Companies program to recognize companies that share its belief in the importance of philanthropy.

“We believe that businesses have a fundamental responsibility to give back to their communities and to our world. This report is intended to honor companies who accept that responsibility and who are true leaders at giving back,” Founder and CEO Matt Ostanik said in the report’s introduction.

Grateful Giving started with a list of the 1,000 largest employers headquartered in Iowa and identified 220 companies that included public statements about philanthropy on their websites.

To review and analyze the data, Grateful Giving’s research team performed this three-step process on the pool of 220 employers:

• Contacted each company directly to request details about their giving activities.
• Reviewed each company’s website for giving metrics, including impact statements and annual reports.
• Reviewed corporate foundations’ public tax records, including their most recent annual charitable grants and contributions paid numbers if a business had a foundation.

Acheson said many larger companies had giving details readily available while smaller companies were “less used to publicly sharing details about giving.”

“We plan to issue new versions of the report in the future, and we hope to engage more smaller and midsize businesses in sharing their giving information in future years,” she said.

The report includes 34 total companies. Giving activities reported for each company include their total charitable giving across all business locations.

Twelve companies that were nominated for the report were not included because Grateful Giving did not obtain details of their giving activities before the report’s publication.

The report recognizes small, medium and large businesses in the following categories: financial giving, in-kind giving, employee volunteer time, most nonprofits supported and innovative giving.

To view the full report, click here.

Related: Second annual State of Central Iowa Philanthropic Giving Report released