Over 800 impact leaders came together at Benevity Live! 2025 in Palm Springs to answer one powerful question: how do we drive purpose, engage stakeholders and expand impact in an increasingly changing world?
This year’s event met the moment head-on, exploring how businesses are continuing to rise to the growing challenges and opportunities through innovation, resilience and purpose. Set against increased regulatory scrutiny and economic uncertainty, attendees left with new ideas, actionable insights and a refreshed sense of community.
The conference started, and ended, with storytelling. With three clients kicking off Day 1 with stories of memorable impact moments to the incredible wisdom shared by master storyteller, LeVar Burton. Creating narratives around your purpose work is more important than ever. Connecting purpose to business performance metrics using data and impact storytelling informs decision-making and helps communicate business and social value, while also mobilizing employees to stay engaged.
From leveraging analytics in CSR to finding joy in purpose-driven work, the event equipped changemakers with innovative strategies, fresh perspectives and a deeper commitment to driving lasting change through purpose-driven work.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Benevity Live! 2025 and the trends that will shape the future of corporate purpose.
Aligning purpose with business goals
In today’s business environment, CSR and impact programs has to do more than just good — it has to align with business goals, drive measurable outcomes and showcase real business value. This shift is critical for CSR impact leaders to earn a seat at the strategic table: enabling senior-level conversations, garnering executive buy-in and embedding purpose into the core of business strategy. It also enables CSR to become a driver of long-term impact and performance because purpose is a performance multiplier.
Purpose-driven companies outperform their peers on every metric: Deloitte found that they experience 40% higher workforce retention, 30% higher innovation and, according to Jump Associates, a 5x higher compound annual growth rate than their peers. These companies aren’t just building stronger brands, they’re building stronger businesses.
“The reality is that companies are continuing to invest in purpose and speak about it, despite all of the risk and complexity. It’s not just because it feels good or that it’s the right thing to do, purpose is good for business: 88% of impact leaders say their impact strategy is future-proofing their business when it comes to talent, customers and regulatory requirements.”
— Sona Khosla, Chief Impact Officer, Benevity
But purpose isn’t powered by passion alone. As CSR impact work becomes more strategic, it’s also becoming more scrutinized. Leaders are now expected to measure how their programs contribute to employee engagement, risk management, operational efficiency and long-term growth. The more purpose becomes central to corporate strategy and success, the more tactical and measurable it will need to become.
To support this shift, companies need more than vision, they need systems. That’s why Benevity released the Enterprise Impact Platform (EIP): a fully-integrated solution that unifies giving, volunteering, grants and employee mobilization into one secure, data-driven ecosystem. EIP gives companies the infrastructure to not only scale their programs but also track their outcomes and prove their value across the business.
Navigating complexity through trust, communication and transparency
As regulatory and social landscapes become increasingly more complex, CSR impact leaders are being asked to navigate a delicate balance: advancing impact while navigating strategic dialogue. This topic was front and center at Benevity Live! 2025 as leaders from Microsoft Philanthropies and Vanguard Group Foundation unpacked the realities of operating purpose programs in an ever-changing world.
In this environment, open, consistent communication and transparency with stakeholders is essential. It’s how companies build trust in uncertain times, respond thoughtfully to scrutiny and stay aligned with the values they’ve publicly championed. Stakeholders — including employees, nonprofit partners and investors — are watching closely, and they expect brands to back up their values with clear communication, accountable leadership and visible follow-through.
“The values that you hold and espouse as an organization, it’s important that you stay focused on achieving those. If you pivot too far, you run the risk of there being a gap between stated goals and values. It’s about staying the course, staying convicted in core values and inspiring others to do the same.
— Aldustus (A.J.) Jordan, Head of Community Leadership & President of The Vanguard Group Foundation
With rising public scrutiny and social upheaval, the way CSR impact leaders approach, manage and drive purpose work is changing. Creating robust, proactive risk management strategies that account for compliance, reputational exposure and stakeholder trust are now critical. Leading companies are building frameworks to identify emerging risks, establishing clear response protocols and creating stronger communication channels.
Benevity helps companies navigate growing complexity by delivering purpose-driven solutions that build trust, retain talent and align with strategic business goals. With features like Matching Offers, leaders can create and manage end-to-end giving incentives with ease; gaining visibility across initiatives and scaling their programs.
As employee expectations rise, engagement is more critical than ever. Benevity's volunteering catalog connects even more of your global workforce to their local non profits allowing you to increase engagement and scale volunteering impact. And with the new Donation Tracker, employees gain transparency into when their donations are received by nonprofits, strengthening trust while reducing reputational risk.
CSR impact narratives are evolving
CSR impactteams aren’t just shaping strategy, they’re shaping the story. As purpose becomes more deeply embedded across the entire organization, the need to communicate that work effectively to the right audience with the right message has never been more urgent.
Our data revealed a growing appetite for stories that spark action. 70% of respondents said the need for impact stories from nonprofits is increasing, demonstrating that while data may prove the value of a program, stories move people. Executives are no exception: the right story can elevate a cause to a business priority. The right employee narrative can ignite a company-wide movement.
“Storytelling allows us to be more empathetic towards one another, it allows for connection. This is what we need to come back to: the stories of the grantees.
Maybe what we’re hearing today are only the stories of grants that are being lost and funding that needs to be shored up. With them, we need to continue to herald the stories of these great nonprofit organizations. I think that storytelling is allowing us to not only boost our own spirits, but also bring more people into the fold.
What folks can do now is to tell more stories, in particular about what our grantees are doing, because people desperately need these stories of the good that is being done in the world.”
— Miriam Warren, Chief Culture Officer, Yelp
Social impact teams are finding new ways to bring their work to life by co-creating stories with nonprofit partners, spotlighting employee changemakers and working more closely than ever with internal communications teams. In fact, more than two-thirds of CSR professionals reported increased collaboration with corporate communications teams this year. Many are also engaging directly with CEOs to shape purpose-led messaging at the highest levels.
CSR impact work and business sustainability are growing and the messaging must meet the moment.
5th annual State of Corporate Purpose report
In its fifth year, the State of Corporate Purpose report marks an inflection point for CSR and a sector in flux. Nearly two-thirds of companies significantly changed their corporate purpose strategy in the past year and 51% of CSR impact leaders surveyed experienced departmental or leadership changes. As enterprise-wide impact strategy takes hold in more companies, CSR impact is becoming a cross-functional imperative, requiring greater collaboration across stakeholders and inclusion in overall business strategy.
Amid economic volatility and rising stakeholder scrutiny, corporate social impact teams are being asked to do more than ever before. This year’s report identifies the trends shaping this new era: navigating caution and activism, closing the say-do gap in measurement, responsibly integrating AI and strengthening cultures through volunteering and ERGs.
“One theme is becoming very clear: we are bearing witness to a very important evolution in our space, one that will change who we are as leaders and as professionals. The more purpose and impact become central to corporate strategy and success, the more will be expected of you and the more you’re going to have a role to play. This is the new world of enterprise impact and you are leading it.”
— Sona Khosla, Chief Impact Officer, Benevity
Despite the current challenges, impact leaders will discover that the last few years of disruption — a global pandemic, record high inflation and social movements — have equipped them with the necessary skills and knowledge to lead their organization through this pivotal moment and position purpose as a critical business value driver.
Embracing AI with purpose
AI is reshaping how we work, give and drive impact. But in a world of accelerating technological change, companies must lead with responsibility in mind, not just innovation.
The State of Corporate Purpose 2025 reveals that granting is one particular area where CSR impact teams are bringing AI into focus. This includes using AI for grant application reviews (62%), streamlining grant applications (52%) and using AI for scoring and recommendations (51%).
In Future-Proofing Impact: AI, Work & Social Good, futurist and tech ethicist, Sinead Bovell, encouraged attendees to think strategically. As AI transforms everything from operations to community investment, the key challenge impact leaders are facing is how to leverage AI in a way that amplifies their business values and CSR impact goals.
“We can think of AI in our job as kind of like an intern that was an English major that’s very adept at generating any kind of content: summarizing, extracting key points, brainstorm with me, generate an idea.
What AI can’t do is make judgment calls. Judgment isn’t something you can teach, it’s something that we have through lived experience, and that’s why it’s going to be more and more important. That’s how our roles are going to start to evolve. We’re going to be directors and managers of these AI systems.”
— Sinead Bovell, AI and Future of Work Expert
As AI becomes more ingrained in CSR impact work, its potential will depend on how well it aligns with your company’s goals, not just how much it automates. Preparing your teams and organizations to fully leverage this opportunity requires building AI with transparency and oversight. It means incorporating inclusion, guarding against bias and creating tools that enhance human decision-making — not replacing them.
And nonprofits agree. Nonprofit respondents from our State of Corporate Purpose survey revealed that AI is much more positively seen when it’s used to support, not replace, human judgement. A third of all comments we received from nonprofits around AI were about issues relating to fairness, accountability and dehumanization. Impact leaders will need to be cognizant of these emotional and ethical concerns when integrating AI into their programs — doing so will allow them to turn AI into a purpose-led tool that drives real impact and systemic change across their programs and partnerships.
Celebrating purpose and the people powering it
Benevity Live! 2025 wasn’t just a conference, it was a celebration. A celebration of practitioners like you who show up everyday to drive impact, navigate complexity and put purpose to work. It was a space to connect, regroup and recognize the real people behind the programs changing communities and transforming organizations.
Service and community were felt in every corner of the event, from the Goodies Awards — which spotlighted brands with the most innovative and inspiring impact programs of the year — to the volunteer moment at the opening reception, where attendees created 200 stuffed toys and bracelet kits with the L.A. Unified School District for elementary-aged students displaced by the fires as well as 60 dorm kits for their college-bound graduating foster and homeless seniors.
Here’s to the stories shared, the impact recognized and the movement we’re all building together.
Purpose is evolving
If we learned one thing at Benevity Live! 2025, it’s that purpose is evolving into something deeper, more strategic and more essential than ever. And that the work, and those who do it, must be celebrated for the clear, measurable value it brings to employees, business and the world. Over two days, more than 800 CSR impact professionals came together to share not just strategies and insights, but stories of resilience, innovation and impact in action. These real stories showed us how purpose is being activated inside companies and communities around the world.
Armed with fresh perspectives, proven practices and renewed energy, this community is ready to take on what’s next. Here’s to another impactful year of putting purpose to work with strategic insight, clarity and resilience.
Read the 2025 State of Corporate Purpose for more data-backed trends shaping the future of impact
