As a financial institution, it is imperative to keep track of the community development activity types and categories of services employees complete every year. By not contributing these hours or achieving a bad rating on the CRA examination, your institution can be penalized with significant reputational risks, a shorter examination time frame the following year, and even halt long-term growth, preventing acquisitions, mergers, and new branches from opening.

Within the CRA, there are three specific activities types- loan, investment, and service – that can classify as five community development categories. These strict qualifications and criteria required of eligible services are just another reason documenting and tracking all efforts within a centralized process is recommended.

Having your employees log their own CRA qualified hours and services on one platform can help financial institutions save time, be more accurate in reporting, and increase employee participation. With CSRconnect, volunteering in your community becomes gamified and reporting yearly community development to examiners is a one-stop-shop!

The first of many benefits that come from tracking your employees’ CRA qualified activities is the time saved. From planning service opportunities to executing events, having all of your data in the same place reduces the time spent filling out spreadsheets which lets you use your time more strategically. One of our financial institution customers is spending 70% less time administering programs now that they have moved over to our platform.

-Gary Levante,

SVP of Corporate Responsibility & Culture, Berkshire Bank

Once employees have completed the CRA qualified activities and are ready to record them, having a platform to track saves time by streamlining workflows and simplifying the process. Employees just need to log into their company’s philanthropic community, log their service hours, and respond to a CRA survey about their volunteer service. An automated email notification alerts CRA reviewers at the financial institution when new CRA services have been logged by employees and are ready for review. With the platform’s built-in census geocoding data, reviewers can immediately confirm if services were within the institution’s designated geographic reinvestment area.

Another major benefit to utilizing a platform like CSRconnect to help track your employees’ CRA qualified activities is the reporting capabilities. When it’s time to submit a report to the federal regulator of your corporation’s completed CRA services, all of your data is readily available.

Once all employees’ CRA participations have been approved by your organization’s reviewers, each service will be shown in a complete report including details about the employees who participated, the Tract Code, MSA Code, County Code, Survey Responses, and more. When examination time comes, all of the service data can be exported and approved with a few clicks and attached in one report for the federal agencies, including built-in census geocoding that pre-approves the location of services.

Not only do you have access to all of the standard dashboards available in the Client Admin Panel, but you can create personalized Ad Hoc reports based on custom employee attributes that tell a compelling story about your employees and the initiatives they have taken part in to boost the community. Sharing data on the impact your financial institution has made boosts your company’s reputation in the different areas you serve.

Implementing a tracking platform is a successful way to increase employee participation over time by making sure employees have the necessary resources and the easiest route to find eligible volunteer opportunities. With the help of CSRconnect, customers were able to exceed their CRA Service goals by more than 530%, by promoting CRA-qualified volunteer events through Engagement Elements, making CRA-qualified opportunities for employees easier to find, register for, and report back on, and having everything located in one place.

By utilizing a tracking platform for CRA participations, financial institutions are able to better prove to federal regulators that they are meeting and/or exceeding CRA expectations, which allows for the growth and expansion plans of the institution. As the institution grows, so does the reputation, the employee population, and the loyalty of those employees that helped create the expansion.

-Gary Levante,

SVP of Corporate Responsibility & Culture, Berkshire Bank