1) Report hours regularly—don’t wait until the last minute
Beginning February 2018, retirees can report their hours directly into the Intel Get Matched portal. (This is the same portal used for the Employee Matching Gifts Program.) Volunteer hours can be logged at any time up until the December 15th deadline of the current year. This is a hard deadline and retirees are advised to report hours regularly or at least quarterly to avoid missing the cutoff. No exceptions will be made. Causes must be eligible for Intel’s matching programs before volunteer hours can be tracked.
2) Search for and/or nominate your cause in the portal
The Intel Foundation can only disburse funds to eligible schools and 501(c)3 public charities or their equivalent. Public organizations like fire departments, libraries, schools, or parks are not eligible unless they have a “Friends of . . .” partner organization that supports them. All causes must be in the Benevity portal in order to be eligible for a matching gift or matching grant payment. Nominating a cause is as easy as filling out the form located on the portal under Quick Links: Nominate a Cause.
3) Search for and/or nominate your cause in the portal
If your cause is part of a bigger organization (parent organization), it will only be listed if the parent has added it as a child project. For example, if you search Red Cross in the Benevity portal, you will see all the child projects listed in this way: Phoenix Region via AMERICAN RED CROSS. The child project is listed first (Phoenix Region), the parent cause is listed after the word “via” (AMERICAN RED CROSS). If your cause is not set up as a child project and does not have its own unique EIN number, you should ask the director of the cause to add it to the system. It’s easy and only requires the official contact from the cause to log in to the Benevity Causes Portal and update their profile with their child projects details. Questions? Contact the Charity Relations team at causes@benevity.org.
4) Be specific when reporting how you volunteered
When you report your hours, use the field provided in the Track Time form to describe your volunteer activity. (Ex: Coached girls’ softball; worked at the animal shelter, feeding, cleaning, and caring for animals; chaperoned boy scouts camping trip, etc.) Do not use acronyms that are not widely known as the program manager must understand the volunteer activity in order to mark it eligible.
5) Confirm the cause received a matching payout
Payout checks are usually mailed to causes in the second quarter of the year following the volunteering. (2017 volunteer hour payments will be mailed in the second quarter of 2018.) All hours reported to a single cause are rolled into one payment. The cause is not provided volunteer information for privacy reasons. Once the payments are disbursed, the retiree website will post the payout report so you can check that your cause received its payment. No commitment of funds on behalf of Intel or the Intel Foundation should be made to any cause until the payout report has been published and made public.