Name: CSR in 2026 – From PEACE to UNITY
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T19:30:56.134Z
Duration: 59 min 24 s
Description: CSR in 2026 – From PEACE to UNITY

Transcript for "CSR in 2026 – From PEACE to UNITY": And hello and welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, CSR Trends in 2026: From Peace to Unity. Before we get started with today's presentation, did want to just take a moment to walk through a couple of very quick housekeeping items. First and foremost, again, thank you for joining us for today's webcast, which is being hosted on our Goldcast platform. We have found for the best experience, we do recommend using the Chrome browser or another well known browser as well, but just making sure you're using one of the Chrome or well known browsers to access today's session. I would also add that if you're experiencing any lag in the broadcast, please do check your Internet speed, maybe close some other tabs or windows that might be open in that browser or on your computer as that sometimes can impact the actual performance of the webcast itself. I also want to call out a couple of features within our platform today because we certainly want to keep the opportunity for conversation and interaction throughout today's session. The first is over to your right hand side, you will see a chat feature. So I'm gonna actually encourage all of you to go ahead and find that chat feature right over to the right. And I want you to go ahead and feel free to drop in your name, the organization you're with, and where you're dialing in from today so we can actually start to just connect with each other through that virtual chat. And then of course, certainly feel free to keep the conversation going with each other throughout today's session in the chat as well. I'd also encourage you, as I'm sure you will throughout today's session, you might have some questions. And so I would encourage you to please use the Q and A feature that you also see to the right. That's actually a separate tab from the chat. And if you go ahead and log any questions that you might have into that Q and A feature, that'll be really helpful for us to see those questions throughout today's presentation. And with that, I'll just take one moment to call out that I've got my colleague Meredith on the line today as well. Hi Meredith. Thank you for joining us. Hey, everybody. So glad to be here. Excited for this. And so as I'm working through today's content, Meredith will be here. She'll be here to help with those questions in the question and answer section. So certainly any questions you have about today's presentation, about our solutions, feel free to drop those in there, and we'll be happy to help you throughout today's presentation. Finally, if you need any other help, there are some further troubleshooting tips that are listed under the Docs tab. And the Docs tab is the last and final tab that I wanted to call out in today's housekeeping. In that Docs tab, you'll actually see links to a whole host of additional resources that you can access today and of course moving forward. And so really do encourage you to check those out. I'll be doing a special call out to some of those resources throughout today's presentation and at the end of today's presentation as well. All right, with that, that handles our housekeeping items. And two more quick shout outs before I move into the core content of today's presentation. The first is I wanted to call out for anybody who is not aware, we do once again having coming back by popular demand our Corporate Social Impact Summit. For those of you that are interested in not only today's content but diving deeper into other thought leadership content, innovation, really hearing insights and best practices from your peers and experts and industry partners in the field. This is a definite cannot miss event. So I highly encourage you, if you haven't done already, to go ahead and check out our corporate social impact summit. Like I said, here in North America, that's coming up on March 30 through April 1. This year, we're actually gonna be in Nashville, Tennessee at the Conrad Hotel, and there is a link right in the docs tab to access that site. So if you're interested in finding out more details about the summit, about the agenda, the various sessions that we have planned, I highly encourage you to check it out there. It is a free event for you to register, and so we, hope that you can certainly join us. I will call out there is actually only a few spots remaining. It's actually been wildly popular. So definitely don't sit on it if you're interested. Definitely make sure you register and sign up sooner rather than later. And then one last shout out on the Corporate Social Impact Summit front for those of you that either might be located over in Europe or have team members on your team that are located over in Europe. Our European Corporate Social Impact Summit will be taking place again this year in London, and that's taking place on the June 16. So feel free to mark your calendars. That's at a beautiful, hotel, the Hamyard Hotel in Central London, and there's a link in the docs tab to that registration site as well. So if that's a summit, that you or some of your team members are interested in, want to make sure that we give you access to that as well. Alright. I promise I've gotten through all the housekeeping and now onward and upward into today's presentation. So for those of you I have not yet had the opportunity to meet, my name is Andrew Troop. I am our head of giving and engagement here at Blackbaud, and so thrilled to be, with all of you today for today's trends session. For a little bit of context, in my role here at Blackbaud as the head of giving and engagement, I have the opportunity, the privilege, and the honor of really leading our CSR thought leadership efforts. As you all know, we try to provide a a whole host of resources, best practices, insights, and data around CSR or corporate social impact, both ourselves and in partnership with some of our key industry partners as well. I also get to do work as a strategic adviser with our own internal CSR team as well. As I'm sure you all already know, we offer a very robust set of volunteering, giving, and philanthropic programs for our global employees. So we are right there with you elbow and elbow doing the work on our CSR programs and happy to always share some insights on that as well. With that said, for today's session, what we're gonna be doing is really talking about some of the top trends. And I'm gonna do that in a couple of different ways. I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the top themes and some of the key trends that we're seeing in CSR and philanthropy as we transition from 2025 into 2026. I'm also gonna talk again a little bit about a framework that we launched last year called our PEACE framework and in addition introduce you to a new framework for 2026, our Unity framework, as we think about giving you a couple of key disciplines or tactics that you can use to really address how you might be tackling some of these key trends that we're seeing. And so with that in mind, we'll be rounding out today's session, talking about some of those principles and how they can show up in action and giving you some real tangible next steps that you can take. Now as I dig in deeper into trends, I have brought forward a quote that I actually shared last year but wanted to share again this year. Think as we start a new year, I'm always hopeful as we think about the year ahead, as we think about the future, as we think about the positive impact that we can have through our employee engagement and philanthropic programs. And so I love sort of regrounding myself in this quote from Peter Drucker that The best way to predict the future is to create it. And so I really want us to think about that through today's session that certainly there's a lot that's gonna happen in the future that we don't know yet, and I'll certainly touch on that in a moment. But we have an opportunity ourselves to really think about and really tackle what the future looks like as we help shape and create it ourselves. So with that in mind, let's start by just not talking about the future, but talking about the current. I wanna talk about, just for a few moments, sort of setting the scene. Right? Because I think it's important to sort of talk about where have we been and where are we going. There's a reality, and and many of you have heard me talk about this before, that when we kind of look back over the past several years, there's reality at a very macro level that there's been a lot of different global disruptions, right, from rising global tensions that started back in 2018 to the pandemic, COVID nineteen pandemic, that I certainly don't need to remind anybody of back in 2020 that had really huge implications that reshaped politics, economics, social structures, really the way we approach many things in the world today. Beyond that, we saw, unfortunately, continued conflict around the world, with the launch of the Russia and Ukraine conflict, for example, back in 2022. We saw disruption to global energy and food supply chains. We saw economic changes and further political disruptions. Then come 2023, boy, it feels like a long time ago already. Right? But think about big disruptions, like, really, the emergence of what we now consider everyday generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and the evolution of generative AI sort of living in our lives every single day. But, also, at the same time, we were dealing with economic pressures, inflation spiking globally, and really a changing economic landscape. We moved into 2024, and, boy, did things continue to shift. In fact, from a political standpoint, if you didn't know, in 2024, more than 70 countries around the globe held major elections. And in many of those cases, that led to major changes, incumbents being voted out, changes taking place, and in some cases, even regulatory shifts that started to come into place in 2024. And 2025, last year, I think we would all agree, was not really a quiet year either. We saw continued geopolitical volatility, technology disruptions, continued changes in the economy, and so and new legislation as well. So it all continues. So here's the thing. What I found, in this really fantastic framework last year, and I've noted at the bottom of slide, is in KPMG's great convergence framework, one of the things they emphasized about disruption is that it's no longer isolated. I think when we look back in history, there were sort of these moments, these isolated moments of disruption. And what we're beginning to realize and why I used this as context is it's really starting to become systemic. Right? AI, geopolitical climate, social change, all these things are actually interacting and, in many cases, amplifying each other. And so keeping that sort of larger, mix in mind, that sort of macro level, influence. If I take that one step further, I'll talk a little bit about the macro influence for us as individuals. Right? Because there are macro influences to each of us as individuals in this world. And before we can ever talk about how are we gonna drive engagement with our employees, how are we gonna be successful with employee volunteerism, with giving, with our philanthropic efforts, we have to remember and center the fact that our employees are people just like we're people. And all of us are feeling these macro influences, be that disengagement, stress, burnout, those economic pressures I talked about, even uncertainty, which in many cases is leading to things like the new term that came out in 2025, job hugging. Right? In fact, you'll see a call out in the bottom of the slide. There was a report done by Monster in 2025. They called it their job hugging report, but they actually went out and surveyed a large number of employees to really get their feelings around workforce, around changing jobs. Believe it or not, three quarters, 75% of employees surveyed said they expected to remain in the same job for at least two years. So that was last year in 2025. They're saying, I'm gonna be in that job at least until 2027. And that's quite a change from a couple years ago where we actually saw the opposite. Right? We saw a lot of folks coming out of the pandemic making job changes and doing a lot of job switching. Now we've seen a different trend where now we're starting to see folks changing less, doing a little bit more job hugging. So just using that as one example of these macro influences. Certainly, I know there's other influences well, be it natural or man made disasters, crises, the reality of our mental health and well-being crisis around the globe. But we also know there's positive influences that we can all help shape through our work, too, providing meaningful work, helping employees feel grounded in their purpose within our organizations, building a culture of belonging and inclusion, helping employees understand where technology and innovation and things that have been disruptive, like generative AI, can actually be tools that we can harness to amplify our work, and so much more. So again, just wanted to take that moment to sort of talk about the things that we're seeing at the macro level before we dig into some of the very specific CSR and philanthropy trends. Now, those who've joined my webinars in the past know it wouldn't be a fun webinar unless we did a little bit of a poll and got your brains and your juices flowing before we dive into some of the the core content. So with that, I've got a poll here. It's actually coming out of last year's state of the global workforce report from Gallup, their 2025 report. I'm actually eagerly waiting for their 2026 report. But in the meantime, using their 2025 report, and here I've got a poll question, which I'm gonna actually go ahead and open up the poll and share that poll so that you can all participate and answer. But here we're asking, what percent of global employees are thriving in their overall lives? And I want to note here that they define thriving in their report as employees that rate their current and future lives positively. So what percent of and I'm calling out specifically global employees are thriving in their overall lives? I see answers starting to flow in, which is great. I always love these polls. I love watching this sort of line shift up and down, grow, change. Alright. I'm still seeing a couple of adjustments, so I'll give you just a couple more seconds to answer that. I know you're thinking about it. What percent of global employees, very specifically, are thriving in their overall lives? Okay. I think we've gotten there. I'm seeing it slow down, so I'm going to go ahead and close the poll. I'm going to stop sharing there for a moment, And we're going to come back to our slides. All right. So eagerly, most of you said 33%. And I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed. You're on mark today. So 33% is correct. Only 33% of global employees are really saying that they're thriving in their overall lives. There is an opportunity to report to dig into specific regions and specific countries. I'll call out specifically for here in The US. It actually was 50%, But that's still only 50% of employees who say that they're thriving in their lives. And that actually from Gallup's measurements, from 2009 is really actually a record low in all of these years. So it definitely is still very impactful. And, you know, we're talking about thriving. We're talking about engagement. You know, something else to think about is there is a cost to all of this disengagement, to this not thriving in our lives. In 2024, for example, global employee engagement continued to fall. We'll talk about it more in just a moment. But it actually is costing the world economy approximately $438,000,000,000 in The US in lost productivity, in US dollars, I should say. So, meaningful. Right? And and part of the reason why we know our programs come to be critically important to help us drive more engagement and ideally, view one of the elements that we can provide to help employees start to feel more positively about their current and their future life. Okay. With that, let's start digging into our actual CSR and plan to be transferred 2026. And I'm really gonna do this in a little bit of a layered approach, and I wanna actually start at a higher level theme. You know, as we really reflected on the past year on 2025 and we started thinking about the year ahead, 2026, one of the things that became clear is we really saw, the work that we're doing and the trends that we're starting to see really come to shape within four different themes. And so here at a very macro level, there are four different themes where I really see as sort of shaping the work we're doing in philanthropy. You know, first is inspiration. I mean, here we're absolutely talking about employee engagement. Last year, many of you know, I did a session and will be continuing to do some sessions on inclusive engagement. Right? How do we make sure that we look at our employee engagement programs and make sure they truly are inclusive, that we've taken the time to really step back and see, are there any potentially inadvertent physical, emotional, social, attitude, or psychological barriers that might be preventing employees from engaging in our programs? But this year, we see that going even further. Right? We're, yes, of course, talking about inclusive engagement at the foundation of our programs. But what can we do to go one step further to not only make these programs inclusive, but to make them really programs that inspire action? How do we actually get employees to feel inspired to take action? Not just engage once, not just engage twice, but feel inspired to act again and again and again. How do we start to drive that inspiration into momentum and really drive that into employees feeling inspired and to go above and beyond the minimum within our programs. Another key theme that we see really emerging is this idea of focusing in on intelligence and the role of intelligence. Yes. We're talking about innovation. There's a lot of innovation that's been taking place and continues to take place within our space, within the corporate social impact space. And one of those innovations absolutely is things like artificial intelligence as I've been talking about. But what's also important is understanding what's the role of our own human intelligence in that innovation and in the use of that artificial intelligence. How do we make sure that the work we're doing in innovation and intelligence is still centered in a human centered strategy? And how can we make sure that it's the really the mixture of those things? Right? The human centered strategy that we have with the innovation and the intelligence that helps us really surge forward and amplify our work. AI at the core, as they say, but purpose at the heart. Next, interconnection. You know, we've talked a lot over the years thematically about the importance of partnership, of growing partnership, of best practices around partnership. Certainly, we've talked in the past about trends around trust based philanthropy, how are we building through the right trust based principles, the right partnerships, for example, on the ground with our nonprofit and community partners. But I think it goes beyond that. That is such a critical element of interconnection, our partnerships. But it is also about the interconnection that we have internally as well, which I'll be talking about more in a moment. But where are we actually building those cross functional partnerships for success in our programs too? Because we can't do this work alone. Right? For those of us doing this work in corporate social impact, we need to do it along with our HR colleagues, along with our sustainability colleagues, even with our sales and marketing and other colleagues across the business, because it's really holistically together that we can make these programs a success. We also need to be thinking about interconnection from an employee interconnected experience as well. And many of you have heard me talk about this in the past, but we know that it's critically important to not just think about employee volunteering or giving in a silo, but think about the truly interconnected experience. That volunteering or that giving experience has a potential positive impact on employee well-being, employee satisfaction, employee retention. So it's important to be thinking about these from an interconnected experience perspective as well. And then, of course, as has been the case for many years, impact is such a critical theme as well. But when we think about impact, hopefully in 2026, what we're really doing is starting to zone in on measuring what actually matters, understanding how can we streamline some of the work we're doing around our impact measurement, getting crisper about what we mean when we talk about impact measurement, doing that with partners to really make sure that we understand in partnership on the ground what should we be measuring, what's important to measure, what is the story that that's going to help us then shape and share, and of course the storytelling component and the tools we use to build those stories, cohesive impact stories and holistic impact stories is critically important as well. Okay. So I've touched on those four themes. How does that sort of round out into some of the key trends? Well, some of those key trends are things that we've been seeing over the past few years and some of them and continuing. And some of them are are trends that are starting to further emerge. From a further emergence standpoint, I would say one of the things I'm gonna talk about more in a moment is the changing workforce. You know, this is there. There has been, of course, the changing workforce, but it's coming, and it's coming faster. And we're gonna talk about that more in a moment, but the changing workforce also comes with changing expectations. Other changes from a change perspective are the realities of new and changing legislation and regulations. We're seeing that a lot here in The US, but we're seeing it across the globe as well. Right? And so making sure that we're all doing the work that we can to stay on top of some of those new changes, some of those new legislation, pieces that are coming into play because they're an important trend as well. Of course, also AI innovation, digital experiences, the impact of AI, that interconnected experience that I've been talking about, that's critically important too, and that's a trend we've been seeing but will only continue to see further evolve as we go through 2026. But there's other trends that have existed and continue to play such a critical important role as we think about 2026 because what does shared values and trust and empathy look like this year as we move forward? What does that interconnection, for example, between belonging and well-being and engagement look like as we continue to work through that interconnected experience? And then, of course, as I mentioned, what does redefining both engagement and impact measurement itself look like in 2026 as well. With that in mind, there was three trends I wanted to very quickly spotlight before digging into our more tactical frameworks. First is a trend that I alluded to, the changing workforce and some of the changing expectations. So I've talked with some of you in the past, and you've heard me talk about this before. But but from a challenge perspective, we have a reality that today, global employees are disengaged. In fact, you see there at the top, 79% of global workers disengaged. That's coming from that same Gallup state of the global workforce report. Digest that for a moment. I know I said it last year. Some of you might have heard me say it last year. I'm saying it again this year, but, like, I really need us to digest that. 79% of global workers are disengaged. That's a challenge. Folks are are either actively disengaged, like, looking for something else to do, and or they're passively disengaged, meaning they're doing the bare minimum, but they are really not engaging. We're not getting the best from them. We're not getting their creativity. We're not getting them inspired. We've got some work to do here. Right? We also saw in some of the reports last year, 40% of respondents said that they have turned down or decided not to pursue a job or even an additional position because of a perceived lack of inclusion at an organization. I know it's a challenge, especially in the belonging and inclusion landscape at the moment, but employees are being very clear. Inclusion is still critically important to them. It matters to them, that culture of inclusion at the core of our work. And well-being matters as well. Not only do employees again and again say that they want companies to really be thinking about their well-being first and foremost, but managers are calling it as well, right? 93% of managers saying employees' mental health and well-being is actually having a negative impact on company bottom line. So it's a critical problem that we have to address. Now I always share on the positive side, right, that we see some positive light here too. Right? Gen z's and millennials, for example, in Deloitte's annual Gen z millennial survey, 75% of them say that an organization's community engagement work and societal impact is an important factor when they're considering an employer. So we know there's a positive light here. The impact, how we can show them their role in having a positive impact in society through our programs is actually very positive for attracting that top talent and, of course, keeping and retaining that top talent. We also know that the companies that did focus in on inclusion, that did focus in on inclusive and belonging practices and culture, actually 1.7 times more likely to be innovative leaders in their particular markets. So that inclusion piece is not just a nice to have, it's actually driving positive results. And we know, of course, that 89% of millennials have said that that sense of purpose is so important to their overall job satisfaction. And so that impact, that inclusion, that purpose, what's at the heart of that? The good news is our employee volunteering giving and philanthropy programs is at the heart of that. We can play such a critical role in that. Here's the thing that I'm calling out, though, and it's I know it's a little small. It's over on the left. I found from Virtual Capitalists this great little chart. There's lots of charts out there. It's like what will shape the global workforce over the next ten years, but I thought this one was visually helpful. The very top of the chart, we see about 12% of the workforce today is still baby boomers who are that generation. But you see as you go forward out ten years, that's really, really decreasing. And in fact, if you look at each of these different generations, Gen X will be decreasing over the next ten years in the workforce. Even millennials will be decreasing in the workforce over the next ten years while Gen z starts to grow, of course, in the workforce over the next ten years. And then most importantly, I know it's already on your radar, but calling out again, Gen alpha's already here. They're already just starting to enter the workforce. But, boy, look at that. They do surge and and really increase inside the workforce over the next ten years. And with that change to a very heavy Gen Z and Gen Alpha workforce, we're seeing a changing set of expectations. We're having to get crafty and think about how we inspire them, how we engage them, how we provide them with that sense of purpose, inclusion, and belonging within our programs as well. Alright. Two other trends I said I was going to highlight very quickly. One is really around what are some of the changes we're seeing, right? And what I said is globally there are changes, new legislation, new regulations we're seeing pop up everywhere. One example here is in The U. S. We are seeing new regulations and new changes that are going into effect now in 2026. And so, again, it's just reminder to make sure that you're working with your team, be that your government relations team, other internal or external experts that can help you really stay up to date on where are some of the both federal and state level changes having some potential impacts and or considerations that you should be putting into mind as you're thinking about your CSR programs and thinking about inclusion within your organizations. So on our federal level, of course, many of you already know about the one big beautiful bill and the act there that had many implications for corporate philanthropy and corporate programs, introducing a new 1% floor on corporate tax deductions, for example making some changes to the universal charitable deduction, having a new universal charitable deduction, is a very positive thing for nonitemators. That's for standard, standard filers, standard text filers, will now have a new universal charitable deduction, which is great. And then there are some changes for those that do itemize, right, in fact, including a deduction floor for them as well. So, again, there's a lot of nuance on there. I'm not going into full detail in today's session, but calling this out as an area to to make sure you're digging into. That's actually one area that I'll also call out. We have some upcoming webinars and resources coming out in this area too with some of our partners. So more to come there soon. And on the state level, just don't forget on the certain state level, especially for those of you that have employees that are across the entire globe, and certainly across the entire nation, keeping in mind that state by state, there can be some different regulations. California Assembly Bill, for example, which is already in effect and already been implemented, and then Florida Senate Bill 700, which passed last year, which has some implications around where employees can and cannot give to certain countries that have been identified as areas where they can't give. So again, there's some nuance here that's critically important to be thinking of. All right. And then rounding up the three trends I wanted to highlight for today, obviously, AI innovation and digital experiences. Right? I mean, I don't have to tell any of you that there's all there's been a huge proliferation of new AI tools and solutions out there. All of you are starting to use them, starting to find ways that it starts to impact the work that you're doing very specifically in your corporate social impact programs. One of the things I wanted to call out, I think many of you know that each year we do a annual CSR insights report with our partner ACCP, the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals. Last year when we did our report in 2025, we saw a dramatic increase, and this is a survey of CSR professionals. So all of you that are out there running these CSR programs, it is your peers and yourselves that are answering this survey. Right? But we saw a dramatic increase from 2024 to 2025 in the number of folks that are using AI tools in their everyday work for CSR programs, heavily on the helping you with communications and storytelling, heavily from a productivity perspective, and increasingly from looking at aggregating data and looking at data insights that really help influence your decision making as well. So, again, just calling out that AI, certainly as we all know, is here. We're starting to use these tools. Our employees are using these tools, and we're needing to continue to think about what is that digital experience for employees throughout our programming as well. Okay. We've covered a lot. I'm gonna pause here because I think it's time to get your brains flowing again. I can't just talk the whole time. We gotta get you thinking a little bit, and so we're gonna dive into another poll. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up this poll for all of you, this one, of course, being AI related. So let me go ahead and open up that poll and share it with you. Now in this particular case, we're asking what percent of leaders expect to use agents, in this case, mean AI agents, artificial intelligence agents, to meet the demand for more workforce capacity in the next twelve to eighteen months. And I'm noting these are AI agents that are acting as digital team members. Right? Really helping us with our capacity with additional digital team members? Great. I'm seeing the answers start to flow in. Again, what percent of leaders expect to use these agents, these AI agents, to meet the demand for more workforce capacity in the next twelve to eighteen months. Alright. Still seeing a lot of movement, so I'll keep giving folks a moment. This is a slightly tougher one. All right, seems like we're slowing down. So I'm going go ahead and close out our poll, and I'm going to stop sharing there for a moment. So the question was what percent of leaders expect to use those agents, AI agents, to meet the demand for more workforce capacity? And you all were leaning toward 47 or 63%. Only a handful of you, a couple of you I will say a couple of you were there, got the actual answer correct. It's 82%. And this is coming from, Microsoft's Work Trend Index annual report that they did in 2025. And, again, that's that's big. Right? 82% of leaders are actually expecting to use AI agents to supplement, to help, to amplify, right, and address some of the workforce capacity challenges in the next twelve to eighteen months. Why is that? You might be thinking to yourself, well, couple of other data points from that particular report. 80% of the workforce, and that is both the employees and the leaders, are saying that they lack enough time and energy to do their work. I think we could all probably agree with that. Right? Is there anybody here that would not raise their hand and say, you probably don't have enough time to get everything done? I think that's true for most of us. Right? We've got a lot of work, not enough time to get it all done, maybe not enough energy either. Right? So we feel that. But at the same point, look at the second point there. 53% of leaders are saying productivity has to increase. It needs to increase. This is a critical area, where things have to be changing. And so this is where a tool like AI and AI agents may play a critical role as we start to look out over the next one to two years, that opportunity for AI agents to help amplify the work that we're doing, not replace the work that we're doing, but amplify the work that we're doing, reduce some of the burden for all of us so that we can actually free up some of our time and energy to continue driving towards some of our critical work. Okay. Great. Thank you all for participating in that poll. Now that we've covered our trends, what I wanna do is talk a little bit about our actual frameworks and our themes. And so last year, as many of you know, when we did this webinar together, we talked about and introduced our PEACE framework. And the PEACE framework was really a way to sort of think about our work, to think about the year ahead, and to think about how we could ground the work that we were doing in our CSR programs and with our employee engagement and philanthropy. And so when we thought about the PEACE framework last year, we talked about perseverance, really being that opportunity to stay the course and measure our progress. We talked about evolution, that ability for us to evolve and to embrace innovation and to track what that transformation really looked like. We talked about adaptation being critically important because, boy, was it important, I think we would all agree, we look back at 2025, to remain agile, and to really be able to adapt and to assess where things were relevant, where things were becoming less relevant, where we had to make adjustments. We talked about captivation in that framework to inspire action. Right? How do we get employees not just engaged but really captivated in our programs and and really driving toward and evaluating what our impact is through that captivation? And then, of course, we talked about the importance of empathy, the critical role that empathy plays, and making sure that we're keeping humanity at the center of our programs and our work and that we're listening to our partners, listening to our employees, and listening to each and every story from an impact perspective. So we've had our peace framework, and what I wanna introduce this year is a really an evolution of that peace framework, as you saw from the title of today's webinar, from peace to unity, and really talk about, a new set of principles as you launch into 2026, really a set of five different disciplines to help guide your work, guide your strategy, and guide your thinking this year. And so here we're introducing the unity framework, unification, navigation, intelligence, trust, and, of course, your impact. And you might be saying, okay. Well, why the Unity framework now? And I would say there's a couple key reasons. One, we're continuing to see a rising set of expectations on the work that all of us are doing. There's rising expectations, rising workload, as we've seen in the data for all the folks running corporate social impact programs. There's constant changes. They're shifting throughout 2025. There's a lot of changing of language that we were using both internally and externally and with our partners. There's been a lot of conversation, of course, around data, around AI, the important connection to data, the storytelling we can do with data, the important, results we can get from that. And, of course, artificial intelligence, it's not coming. It's already here. We're already using it, as I said, from the data. But have we been really plugged into what are the important guardrails of of the usage of that as we move forward as well? So with that in mind, I'm gonna dig into each element of the Unity framework that will hopefully give you some tips and some quick tips, and tricks as you sort of think about your strategy and think about your programs for this year, and I'll start with unification. And unification really is about, unification at at a broad level. It's about aligning your people. It's about aligning your partners. It's about aligning your platforms, the tools that you're using. But I wanna be really clear, you see it's called out here in the slide. It's not about centralizing for control. This is not a a call for you to control everything. It's about connecting for clarity. It's about alignment. It's about understanding where can we align and unify our efforts in a very positive way. It's not where can we suddenly control everything. So I wanna be very, very clear about that. So couple of things to think about when we think about unification as one of our disciplines. The first is are we taking the time, and January is the time, it's the new year, to build a shared set of new goals and outcome measurements? Have we taken the time to do that both internally at the cross functional team level? So do we have those meetings on the calendar? Have we already started to meet cross functionally about our 2026 goals? And do we understand where our corporate social impact goals map to the broader business goals? Are we aligned? Do we need to have some conversations? Are there some goals on the other cross functional teams that are really relevant or might influence changes we might wanna make to our programs? At the same point, have we had a refreshed goal conversation with some of our nonprofit partners? You know, for many of us, some of our nonprofit partners might be in the middle of several long term, engagements with us. They could be in multiyear funding programs. They could be in multiyear volunteerism programs. And so are we taking the time to just make sure we're being really thoughtful and intentional about resetting with them around our shared goals, our shared outcomes, and how we're using the language and measurement around those. Are we also thinking about our connected systems as well? What systems are we using across our organization to track all the things that we're doing and all of the reporting that we're doing, and are we aligned on that? And in turn, are we using data and impact measurements that can help us then turn and tell a very holistic and cohesive story? Because the reality is oftentimes we're having positive impact in our communities, positive impact with our employees in so very many different places, and so we're bringing that all together to tell that one holistic and cohesive story. So a couple very quick and short tactics for you, three opportunities as you think about unification and getting started this year. One, of course, up those alignment meetings as I talk about and dive into those shared goals, dive into those shared outcomes, and dive into the vocabulary as well. What's the language we've been using? What's the language we are using? What's the language adjustments we might want to be taking, as we think about 2026? Think about those connected experiences as well from a unification standpoint, as I called out earlier, that interconnection. How are we thinking about, for example, the employee experience throughout all of this? How are we thinking about our community partner experience throughout all of this, especially if there are multiple touch points from our organization with our nonprofit or community partners? So, again, thinking about that from a unification standpoint. And then don't forget co creation, right, that opportunity to co create both with internal teams but also with our partners, our external partners as well, thinking about how we can unify some of our plans and some of the work that we're doing. Alright. Next step is navigation in our Unity framework. And here's my thing. We can plan for uncertainty with some resilient routes. And so what do I mean by that? Can we predict everything that's gonna happen in 2026? I certainly don't think so. I certainly couldn't have told you what was gonna happen in 2025. There was many things that happened in 2025 that were not on my bingo card, as I'm sure as they weren't on yours either. In fact, there's a few things in early twenty twenty six that were also not on my bingo card. So here we are. Right? The reality is disruption's gonna happen. In fact, that's where I started today's presentation. Disruption is happening, and in fact, it's happening in many levels, not just in silos, and it's amplifying each other. But here's what we can do. We can actually start to prepare flexible paths. We can get ourselves prepared to pivot, and to navigate by being a little bit more proactive in some of our planning rather than reactive to some of the disruptions that are happening. So, for example, we could be leaning a little bit more into scenario planning. Right? Are we today doing some scenario planning to stress test our programs, our budgets, our targets, our outcomes, our portfolios to really understand what might we do in best case scenario? What might we do if we hit some headwinds, if we hit some tailwinds? Right? Where might we pivot? And being prepared for that already rather than making that decision in the tough moment when it happens. That's the same for establishing trigger points too. Again, I think oftentimes we find ourselves in a moment of being very reactive, right, where we end up in a trigger point or a trigger moment and we have to pivot, and then we're thinking about our programs and then pivot in that moment. Can we establish some of those trigger points now? What would make us, for example, make a change to our matching gifts programs, to our caps, to our levels, to what we offer? What would make us make a change, for example, to our disaster relief programs, to what we offer, to how our employees are engaged? What would make us make a change to some of our volunteerism or some of our incentives? So establishing what some of those triggers might be. And then also thinking about proactively coming out with some preauthorized playbooks, authorized playbooks for communications, for shifts in your matching program, for shifts in your volunteering program, thinking about if this scenario happened, here's how we would react. Here's our communication and or our reaction opportunity. It doesn't mean that's exactly what you're going to do, but if we are prepared for it and have some of that in place ahead of time, it can be really helpful in the moment rather than us feeling scrambled and reactive. So for your navigation checklist, three quick things. Think through those scenarios. At a bare minimum, just take a a little bit of time and say, what's my base case today for my programming, my outcomes, my expectations, my budget this year? What would happen if we hit some headwinds? What if suddenly we hit a disruption and I was asked to decrease our budget midyear a little bit? What if we hit some tailwinds? What if I suddenly was given additional budget midyear or additional opportunity to launch a new program? Let's do a little bit of planning proactively to be ready for that. Also, thinking a little bit about capacity buffers, not just capacity buffers internally. Like, if you hit some disruptions and or challenges, how might you up your own team's capacity? But also some capacity buffers for our nonprofit partners. Right? As we've seen over the past couple of years, we never quite know what to expect. What if funding disappeared again for some of our nonprofit partners? If they were suddenly struggling, do we have any opportunity to provide some capacity buffer as well? We may or we may not, but thinking about it proactively is the key here. And then being transparent in our communication when we are making navigational shifts as well is gonna be key, and that's where those preauthorized communication playbooks can play such a critical role. Okay. Next up, intelligence. This is obviously the hot topic. Right? We've been talking about artificial intelligence, but where do we really use it as a tool? How do we fuse human judgment plus the trusted data and use AI in a responsible way to really help with some of our, some of our decision making? Yes. I think many of us today are are sort of scratching the surface. We're using AI and some of its automation to reduce administrative work. So, yes, that's fantastic. That's giving us a little bit more capacity, hopefully, more time to focus in on on key work. But where are we starting to, hopefully, use AI as a tool to surface insights that we might not have even seen in the past because we wouldn't have been able to look at those large quantities of data to even rise some of those insights up to the surface? Where can we use it as a brainstorming tool where it can help us think about how we might make adjustments, how we might personalize engagement, how we might shift and change some of our programs? And yet at the same time, are we plugged in to our broader organization's use of AI to our governance committees around AI within our organizations, and are we sure that we're keeping really our human centered strategy and ethics at the core of this? So with that in mind, my little checklist for you today is, yes, get out there, use AI tools, start using it, yes, to reduce administrative burden, think of it more as a potential tool for brainstorming and key insights, that can help your decision making in the future. But make sure it's grounded in these four principles around transparency, around privacy and security, around bias mitigation, and around human oversight, that each of those is still playing a critical role as we think about and use these tools. I can't stress enough with intelligence, and I wanted to make sure I paused here and did a little bit of insight on intelligence very specifically within this framework that, again, our human centered decision making is really critical at the core of this. So yes, we should be exploring and we should be using these tools. But using these tools in a way, as I keep saying, to amplify our work. How do we find a way to use these tools to, yes, reduce some of our burden, but also help us surface, as I said before, those really important key insights, those things that we may not have been seeing without AI helping us parse through the data to understand what's happening that can really help inform some of our key decision making. It's really important that we understand that this is a tool to help us make those decisions. It's not one to replace our decision making. Okay. I've stressed that enough. Moving on in our framework, I want to make sure we spend a moment talking about trust in our Unity framework because it's so important, and all of you were doing this already, but it's important to remind ourselves to center inclusion and empathy and transparency and trust at the core of this work. Right? We know that trust is really the foundation. Both of the participation we see from employees trusting in the engagement activities and the work that we're doing, the impact that we're helping them have, and trust with our partners, right, our community partners and our nonprofit partners to work together in a very trust based relationship to really build towards success and impact. So a couple things to keep in mind. One, double down on that inclusive design, the empathetic storytelling and some of your reporting. When we do inclusive design, remember, as I said earlier in today's presentation and as I talked a lot last year, inclusive engagement is critically important. Take the moment, take the time to do an audit, for example, and think about your current programs. Are there any physical, psychological, social, or attitudinal barriers that might be preventing folks from engaging in your programs, and is there a way for you to address some of those key barriers? Think about getting voices into your programming as well. Right? Don't forget we need to invite employees. We need to invite our ERGs, our employer resource groups, our business resource groups, the leaders of those groups to not only provide feedback. I think we're all doing that today. We're getting feedback from employees. We're doing surveys. We're getting feedback from ERGs, but we wanna actually invite them to co shape programs with us. We want them to be co creators. We want them to be engaged in some of the the brainstorming, some of the early thinking, some of the piloting that we might be doing through engagement experiences. So really leaning into that. And then most importantly, making sure that we're all, all employees, but especially our leaders, with language that does focus around belonging, opportunity, empathy, and being transparent about what impact we are having, what's succeeding, and frankly, even what's not. Right? Because we'll build even more trust with our internal and external stakeholders when we're very clear about what is but also what is not working and where we're gonna make those navigational pivots we talked about before. Okay. So from a trust perspective, a couple quick actions you can take. Don't forget to do those inclusive design audits. Don't forget to think about storytelling from a partner first storytelling lens as well. We oftentimes, when we talk about storytelling, think about storytelling from selfishly our own perspective. How do we raise up a story about our engagement programs? How do we raise up our employees' voices in those programs? That's great. That's important. But let's not forget our partners are such a critical component of that story. It's the impact we're having with those partners. So is there an opportunity to flip that on its head, to have a partner first storytelling approach? And then most importantly, make sure that we're using some plain language and transparency. Right? Trust is built when we're very clear and we're very, plain language focused in some of our report apps as well. Okay. Coming down the home stretch of our new framework, to close out Unity is your impact. Right? And this, of course, brings it back to the measurement, and making sure, as I said earlier today, measuring what actually matters and telling that full cohesive story. Yes, we know impact is both quantitative and qualitative data coming together. Yes, I know all of you today are thinking about what are your outputs, the participation, the dollars, the hours, all that good stuff. You're thinking about the outcomes, the behavioral changes that are taking place because of those outputs. You're thinking about hopefully with your partners, especially the ones you've been working with on longer term initiatives, what the longer term change is within that community where we're seeing actual change at a statistical level. That being said, I want to just reground us that we resist the urge to over collect. Yes, we want to collect our outputs. We want to collect expert outcomes. We want to get to longer term change. Absolutely. But let's not over collect. Make sure we're doing and rightsizing what those measurements are. And the best way to do that is in partnership, again, with our nonprofit partners, to be meeting with them to understand because they are the ones doing the work at the ground level. What should we be measuring? What's important to measure? What actually matters? And also being transparent back with our nonprofit partners. Here's what I have to measure and report back on internally to show the return on investment in these programs, to show that the reason we're making this investment is because it's having this positive impact in a certain way. So again, really critical to be doing that in partnership. So with that in mind, a little checklist for you from the impact perspective. First, define a small set of outcomes. And why I'm saying small set of outcomes is today I bet if I came to any one of you like myself, you have a very long list of potential outcomes that you wanna be achieving. And can we pare that down? Can we right size that? Is there an opportunity to really right size the outcomes that we're trying to achieve? Can we map those outcomes? So where are we getting the evidence for those outcomes? Is that realistic? Is there the capacity and the resource to do that? Where are the sources for that? And then how are those outcomes that we're achieving and that longer term change that we're achieving layering into our actual stories? And are we telling layered impact stories, not just flat one sort of off impact stories, but layered stories have changed over time? And then as you see me call at the bottom again, don't forget the business case. Because for all of us, at at the same time that we're tracking our impact and doing that with our partners, we have to be thinking about our internal business case at all times. How are we driving a return on investment in these programs? Because it does have a positive return for us as a business on our employee retention, on our employee satisfaction, but also in many cases on our actual bottom line, on our revenue, on new markets we can serve, on our productivity. So let's not forget to keep tying back to our core business case as well so that we can continue to sustain that executive sponsorship and leadership that we have in our programs. Okay. I've covered a lot. So we're gonna round out today's session with just a moment of thought and reflection because, boy, I've been talking a lot, and you might just need a moment to digest everything that I've been talking about. And so with that in mind, I'm actually gonna start with just a one minute reflection activity. I do not expect you to finish this in one minute, but what I'm gonna do is just pause for one minute. I'm gonna give you an opportunity to look at the five elements of the Unity framework. Pick the one that's resonated most with you as I've been talking today, and just look at some of these reflection questions. Keep in mind you're gonna have access to this presentation after today, so there'll be an opportunity for you to reflect on any and all of these questions if you so wish on your own time. But right now for one minute, yes, I'm gonna give you one minute of uncomfortable silence to go ahead and read through one of these areas, one of these disciplines, and the questions to start your brain thinking and reflecting on how this might align to your current work. All right. For some of you, that sixty seconds was the longest sixty seconds ever. For others of you, it was the shortest sixty seconds ever. But thank you for taking the time to look there, to reflect for a moment. What I actually encourage you to do in our last few minutes of today's webinar is feel free to just drop into the chat which of the five disciplines you don't have to say which question but which of the five disciplines is maybe resonating with you most? Which is the area that after today's session, you wanna spend the most time reflecting on and working on with your team? Is it unification where you're thinking about alignment? Is it navigation where you're thinking about proactively addressing potential pivots in the future? Is it intelligence where you're thinking about this really interconnection between human and artificial intelligence and the use of that? Is it trust where we're talking about the importance of centering inclusion and empathy and transparency and trust in our work, or is it impact? Is it really where you're thinking about sort of what are you measuring, and what does that and does that not actually mean, and how does that show up as a return on investment in your programs? So certainly feel free to just jot down for each other in the chat. Unification or intelligence, what's resonating most with you? Okay. As you're doing that in the chat, I'm gonna give you one last little, idea. One concept that you could use for this Unity framework as you go back to your teams and go back into your work is to think about the potential of running a Unity alignment sprint. Now I'm gonna just give you a little bit of a very high level framework. You can think about this. It's just offering it up as an opportunity. You might say, you know what? I don't wanna do the whole sprint. I just wanna do part of it. That's perfectly fine too. The idea here, though, is could you, for example, over the course of a very focused four week period or sprint, translate this unity framework into some operating disciplines for yourself and ideally come out of that sprint with some shared outcomes and vocabularies we've talked about, with some scenario planning and some of the navigation playbooks we talked about, with some guardrails around AI or at least further understanding of the current guardrails your company has around AI, maybe even some pilot use cases for AI both in your work or in the work that you're doing with your nonprofit partners? Could you come out of it with a trust and inclusion checklist, maybe, for example, doing that design, inclusive design audit that I talked about, and also blueprint for your impact and your impact measurement. So with that in mind, here's just a little sampling of what you might do in that four week sprint if you choose to do all four weeks. You could focus week one on unification. That's where you're setting up those cross functional team meetings. That's where you're doing that alignment. That's where you're digging into those outcomes and language. You're mapping systems. You're thinking about roles, who's playing what role, which initiative is playing what role, kinda doing that important unification work. Week two could be all about navigation. That's where you build that three scenario plan, the best case, the headwinds case, the tailwinds case. This is where you might set up some of those actual measurable or understandable triggers that would trigger why you would make a program pivot. This is where you could create some of those preauthorized plays and playbooks and even draft some proactive transparent communications around pivots. Week three could be all about intelligence and trust. This is where you're digging into your AI guardrails, your guidelines, your governance. This is where you might be launching some of your AI pilots. This is where you might be also doing that inclusion audit and even codifying some of your partner first storytelling approaches if you haven't already. And then week four could be all about your impact, thinking about what is our impact, our outputs, our outcomes, our longer term change. Are we rightsizing that measurement? Are we identifying what those evidence sources are, and are those realistic or are they burdensome? Thinking about our story cadence, then, of course, thinking about what the actual comms plan would be for sharing that impact, especially those partner first storytelling pieces as well. Okay. I hope this Unity framework has given you a lot of things to think about as you think about the trends for 2026. With that in mind, we have lots of additional resources for you to access, many of them, again, linked right there in the docs tab for you today. And I'll also call out coming very soon, I'll have a blog post taking today's webinar and this Unity framework and putting it into a written form for you as well. So keep your eyes peeled. That'll be coming out very soon, and you'll be able to see that from piece to Unity framework blog as well as an additional resource. And, of course, the whole host of other links and resources that we have here. But with that in mind, I really appreciate you all joining us. I'm gonna open up one last poll because I know some of you actually might have some questions. You'd love to connect with some of our team members. And so I'm gonna go ahead and open up that poll and let you just let us know. I'll let myself and let Meredith know if you're interested in finding out more about our employee engagement, our grant making solutions, around the other sources that we have. We're always happy to connect with you on resources. If you need just a touch point on some strategic guidance, we're happy to help there too. So if we can be of any help, if you're interested in learning more about what we can offer you at your cost from Blackbaud, please do just hit yes and Meredith and someone from our team will follow-up with you and to schedule up a time and connect with you. All right. I'm going to leave that poll open so you can all continue to answer that as we round things out. But again, I just want to just say a huge thank you. I appreciate all of you joining today. I know we covered a lot of material, but hopefully there was a couple of nuggets in there for you, a couple of key insights in there for you as we covered through today's trends looking at 2026 and walking through our piece to unity framework. I'm always happy to connect with all of you, so please do reach out on LinkedIn. Happy to connect, continue the conversation, and look forward to, connecting with many of you in the coming weeks and months throughout the remainder of this year. Alright. Thank you all so much, and we'll be in touch soon. Thanks, everybody.