Corporate philanthropy is going through one of its most consequential structural changes in a generation, and it has very little to do with how much money companies are spending. Across industries, businesses are stepping back from prescribing which causes their employees should support, replacing curated giving lists with open-ended programs that let workers direct charitable dollars toward organizations they actually care about.
Matching gift programs sit at the center of that change. Once a straightforward benefit designed to amplify employee donations to a pre-selected group of nonprofits, these programs are now being rebuilt with more flexibility, higher maximum amounts, and fewer restrictions on eligible organizations.
JP Conte, managing partner of family office Lupine Crest Capital, has watched this transition with particular interest. His philanthropic commitments span multiple cause categories: first-generation student scholarships, Parkinson’s and neurodegenerative disease research, environmental conservation, and immigration policy research. That breadth represents exactly the kind of cause diversity that narrowly drawn corporate matching programs have historically failed to support.
The Scale of Corporate Matching in 2025
The numbers behind workplace giving programs are considerably larger than most donors realize.
According to Double the Donation, more than 26 million individuals work for companies that offer some form of matching gift program, and those programs collectively contribute an estimated $2.86 billion to nonprofits each year. An additional $4 to $7 billion in eligible matching funds goes unclaimed annually, money left undeployed primarily because employees don’t know the benefit exists.
The field of companies offering matches continues to expand. Double the Donation now maintains program guidelines for more than 24,000 companies, a figure that rises as new programs launch and previously paused ones are restored.
According to Giving USA’s most recent annual report, total corporate giving reached $44.4 billion in 2024, a 9.1% increase year over year. That figure represents approximately 7% of all U.S. charitable contributions, a 40-year high per data from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Two additional data points underscore the momentum: 65% of Fortune 500 companies currently offer matching gift programs, and the share of Russell 1000 companies publicly disclosing those programs grew by 11.8% over the past three years, according to Double the Donation.
Why Are Companies Moving Away From Designated Cause Lists?
For decades, corporate matching programs ran on a top-down model. Company leadership identified preferred organizations, often tied to executive priorities or long-standing institutional relationships, and employees gave within those pre-set parameters.
That design is being replaced. According to Fidelity Charitable data cited in Benevity’s 2025 State of Corporate Purpose Report, 40% of employees want higher corporate matching amounts and 39% prefer access to a wider variety of giving programs. Research from Nonprofits Source found that 97% of employees want the freedom to donate to a nonprofit of their choosing and have their employer match that gift, regardless of cause category.
That preference reshapes where matching dollars ultimately land. When employees have genuine discretion, funding reaches smaller community organizations, university scholarship funds, and independent research institutions that would otherwise fall outside the footprint of traditional corporate giving programs.
For JP Conte, that kind of reach matters directly. His Conte First Generation Fund provides scholarships, mentorship, and support to first-generation students at 11 universities, including Colgate University and Harvard. His $5 million contribution to UCSF’s Department of Neurology, which established two endowed professorships focused on Parkinson’s and neurodegenerative disease research, represents a cause category that most employer-designated program lists would never include.
How JP Conte Thinks About the Infrastructure of Giving
JP Conte has been unusually candid about the distance between well-intentioned giving and effective giving.
“A lot of nonprofits aren’t run crisply,” he has said, applying to charitable organizations the same operational standards he brought to decades of private equity work. His approach to selecting philanthropic partners mirrors his professional methodology: evaluate internal capacity, identify where management and resources are genuinely aligned, and concentrate dollars where they will compound.
“I interviewed each school, visited each school, and learned that some of the schools were really good at it, good at providing resources, attracting that talent, and even mentoring that talent while they were at school,” Conte has recalled. “And other schools didn’t. They were either too small, didn’t have the resources, or both.”
That same scrutiny extends to how matching programs function mechanically. The platform employees use, the simplicity of the submission process, and whether workers even know the benefit exists all determine whether eligible dollars actually move. According to Double the Donation, 78% of donors don’t know whether their company offers a matching gift program.
JP Conte applied a version of this operational logic to his work with Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. After helping to install new organizational leadership, he noted the result directly: “We multiplied the reach of SEO in the Bay Area by five to seven times.” Better management infrastructure, not larger donations alone, drove that outcome — a lesson that translates directly to how companies design and communicate their matching programs.
What This Shift Actually Produces
Giving programs that allow employees to support any vetted nonprofit, rather than choosing from an approved list, generate a different distribution of charitable funding and a measurably different quality of participation.
According to Benevity’s 2025 State of Corporate Purpose Report, companies that recorded the highest employee giving and volunteering engagement were those whose programs connected to causes employees genuinely cared about, rather than causes their employers had selected on their behalf. Workers who give based on personal connection sustain that commitment at higher levels and over longer time horizons than those responding to company-initiated campaigns.
“Keeping that American dream alive is incredibly important for society and for the economy,” JP Conte has said. That framing positions philanthropy as a mechanism for sustaining something larger than a company’s brand identity, which is precisely the orientation that employee-driven matching programs are designed to channel.
“I’ve always felt the need to give back,” Conte has noted, tracing that impulse to the mentors and employers who opened doors for him as a young, first-generation American. His family office, Lupine Crest Capital, and the philanthropic infrastructure surrounding it carry the same underlying logic: resources directed by people closest to a cause reach places where they are genuinely needed. Well-designed matching programs that empower employees to make those decisions independently operate on exactly the same premise.
