Bonterra News August 2026 | Deed Engage

Welcome to the August edition of Bonterra News!

We have a meaningful set of product updates to share this month — from a full redesign of Impact Measurement goal setup to a long list of quality-of-life wins across organizer admin — plus resources to help you respond quickly to several active global disasters.

Enjoy the read!

Warmly,

Megan Dodds

Manager, Digital Customer Success

🚨 Responding to Active Disasters

Communities across multiple continents are facing active emergencies. Wildfires are burning in Oregon and across parts of France and Spain. Indiana is responding to severe flooding. The Philippines is managing the impact of monsoons and cyclones. And Colombia is in the aftermath of a significant earthquake. In each situation, local organizations are working urgently to provide evacuation support, food and shelter, and long-term recovery assistance.

Bonterra has identified verified nonprofit partners currently delivering emergency response for all five events. If your program is mobilizing a disaster response campaign, your Bonterra team is ready to help.

View our crisis response page here. 

📈 Impact Measurement: A redesigned experience

🎯 Who it's for: Deed admins managing Impact Measurement goals

We shipped several improvements to Impact Measurement that make it easier to track progress and manage your goals:

• Goals now calculate automatically - a new goal used to sit at zero until someone manually linked deeds to it. Goals are now live the moment you create them and will calculate progress from any existing deeds already using the same impact indicator. Narrowing to specific deeds is still an option, but it's no longer a requirement.
• Setup is now one section at a time - the goal creation form now reshapes around what you've selected: targets show their unit inline, timeline includes presets with computed duration, and the unit picker is searchable.

• Linking deeds is explicit — the goal name and indicators sit at the top of the modal so you always know what you're linking toward. A live count shows exactly how many deeds you're committing.

• Deed names on goals are now clickable — from any goals screen, deed names link directly to that deed in a new tab. 

✨ Why This Matters

For CSR program managers, accurate impact data is often what gets shared with leadership, included in ESG reports, and used to justify program investment. A goal setup experience that requires less manual linking and provides clearer feedback means your data is more likely to be complete and trustworthy from day one.

🤖 Impact AI improvements

🎯 Who it's for: Deed admins using Impact AI

• Bulk nonprofit additions to campaigns — share a list of nonprofits with Impact AI and have them added to a campaign without manually linking each one. The assistant handles routing between campaigns and fundraisers end to end.

• Taglines that always fit — the assistant now reads campaign character limits before writing and self-corrects if needed, so taglines are always ready to save.

✨ Why This Matters

When you're building a campaign around a disaster response or giving season push, speed matters. Bulk additions and auto-fitting copy reduce the back-and-forth that slows launches down.

📈 Nonprofit nominations: More flexibility, more coverage

🎯 Who it's for: Deed admins and employees participating in nominations

• Government entities are now eligible for volunteering nominations — employees can nominate government organizations for volunteer engagement, with the right outreach flow automatically applied.

• Nonprofits can approve affiliations they previously declined — giving nonprofits the flexibility to revisit and approve a company affiliation without going through support.

• Nominations page now has search and filters — find nominations by status, entity type, or company quickly, without scrolling the full list.

• Website is now required on the nomination form — ensuring every nomination arrives with the information needed to verify it quickly.

✨ Why This Matters

Government-affiliated volunteer sites — parks departments, public libraries, emergency management agencies — are some of the most accessible service opportunities in many communities. Opening nominations to these entities meaningfully expands where your employees can volunteer.

🔧 Organizer admin: A long list of improvements

🎯 Who it's for: Deed admins and nonprofit organizers 

This cycle brought a broad set of quality-of-life updates across organizer admin:

• Cleaner data management — duplicate employee prevention blocks split records at creation; email search now matches exactly; bulk attendee upload accepts Employee ID or email.

• Better reporting — a date range filter on Manage Deeds applies to results, counts, and CSV exports; the Organizations page now exports to CSV with your active search and sort applied.

• Smoother deed creation — error validation now points to the specific field that needs attention; past deeds support In-Person, Virtual, and Hybrid attendance types; image uploads show recommended dimensions at the point of upload.

• Smarter notifications — approval emails go to the original submitter only; volunteer hour rejection presets let admins select from predefined reasons rather than typing from scratch.

• A few fixes worth noting — pagination is no longer blocked by the chat launcher; automatic HRIS organizer sync is now available via flat-file SFTP feed.

✨ Why This Matters

Together, these updates add up to a significantly smoother day for the people running your program — less time chasing errors, cleaner data, and fewer workarounds.

🤝 Catch you at ACCP! 

🎯 CSR professionals attending the ACCP conference

ACCP brings together some of the sharpest minds in CSR, and we're glad to be part of the conversation again this September in Boston.

Bonterra's own Kenrick Fraser and Amanda Fleising are joining Laura Turner from TIAA and Olivia Leow from AllianceBernstein for a session on focused, place-based employee impact — and what happens when CSR leaders choose depth over breadth. If the idea of driving 40%+ employee participation increases while narrowing your program's focus sounds worth exploring, this is the session to catch.

Hope to see you there.