Today when you look at a company, one should consider it’s product, it’s people and its focus on purpose. The product will vary and often drive public opinion by the consumer on how they see the company. In the event, a consumer calls into the service depart they will have a chance to interact with the people of the company. This is generally driven by questions or support concerns and doesn’t really give you an opportunity to determine the corporate environment in which you purchased from and why should you?

As the founder and CEO of Cloud Co-Op I believe that you should understand a company’s focus on purpose and how that drives a company and creates the environment for its employees that design, sell and support the product or service provided to you, the consumer. We have been a part of the Pledge 1% movement for just over three years and our company supports various non-profits in the veteran services community like Operation Supply Drop and Fourblock and organizations that promote justice, equity, sustainability and enfranchisement along with the local, state and national organizations in the beautification of the local communities like Solidago and Keep America Beautiful. As a corporate mission, we focus on purpose, by participating together as a way of team building while giving back to these amazing communities. Additionally, we allow our employees to support a cause of their own in which they receive paid time to volunteer their efforts and give back. We like to extend an opportunity for the extended family members to participate and the local community. We want to share the value of giving back and allow all who wants to participate with us to join in.

Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give”. In today’s market, it’s the company that learns to focus on purpose that will create a culture that people desire to be with and consumers what to buy from. When employees feel connected they perform and when consumers feel connect they purchase.  The focus on purpose is a business strategy that stems from the values of its leadership outward and makes everyone better. Learning to give back, not only helps the recipient but generally helps the giver more.

A company can become a multiplier when they engage their employee beyond the job description and by involving their clients to participate in the giving with them. Companies can extend the focus on purpose to their clients and the local community and create a bigger tribe that everyone rally’s around. CEO’s have to participate beyond approval. The impact here compounded when the executive (team) participates as an equal in this love of labor.

Originally posted: November 27, 2018

 

Giving Tuesday is focused on mobilizing the world around giving and community engagement. It’s a day meant to kickoff the charitable season, celebrate giving and philanthropy––and is fueled by the power of collaboration. Pluralsight believes that technology has the power to create freedom, equality and opportunity around the globe. Pluralsight One, together with Pledge 1%, has created a unique opportunity for its author community to make a difference this Giving Tuesday.

During the 2018 Pluralsight Author Summit, Pluralsight One shared an overview of its work and progress. The global Pluralsight author community was invited to join as catalysts in the Pledge 1% movement by committing a percentage of their author royalties to the Pluralsight One Fund as an investment to strategic priorities.

Pluralsight authors are experts in their field and are also deeply committed, so Pluralsight One spoke with them to understand their passions, respond to questions about giving priorities and discuss opportunities for impact. A number of giving options were presented to the contributing authors, and they were empowered to select their priority focus area.

Because Pluralsight authors have mobilized around a shared mission to democratize technology skills––Pluralsight One wanted to celebrate these thought leaders. So, in honor of the inaugural group of authors who have dedicated a percentage of their royalties to Pluralsight One Fund, they are matching their contribution with a grant on Giving Tuesday. This means that the total quarterly contribution of author royalties will be matched 1-for-1 by the Pluralsight One Fund with a one-time grant to Code.org to enhance capacity and accelerate outcomes tied to Pluralsight One’s investment in their:

• International program: Support for Code.org’s engineering team to develop offline supports and continued work around translating Code.org curricula into different languages that can be integrated into our Code Studio platform


• Teacher training: Support for Code.org’s rural teacher professional development efforts as well as K-12 teacher workshops through its Regional Partner network

“We are grateful to Pluralsight One and its author community for boosting our work to expand computer science education globally and supporting our efforts to prepare more teachers to teach CS. Together we will continue to move forward on increasing equitable access to learning and opportunity.” –Hadi Partovi, Code.org Founder and CEO

This program is a great example of the Pledge 1% ethos in action. On Giving Tuesday, Pluralsight One galvanized people around a shared mission and activated them, as individual contributors, in the exponential power of a collective approach.

In the last blog on Spotlight on #BeBoldForChange Campaign at Addteq, we talked about our individual 2017 goals for the Women in Tech movement, and Pledge 1% growth at Addteq. Our goals were to empower women’s advancement, promote women’s education and promote gender equality. Now that we are nearing the end of 2017, Addteq is proud to say that we have succeeded at our mission. With minimal to no effort, the program is organically growing within our culture.

We feel that everyone can play an integral role in helping drive better outcomes for all genders. Through result driven actions we can all be responsive in creating a more gender inclusive workplace. The World Economic Forum predicts that the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2186. This is just too long of a wait. This is how Addteq shapes their company culture to help in closing the gender gap.

Our Journey with #BeBoldForChange

We are continuing to Empower Women’s Advancement while driving more focus on education and gender equality.

Promote Women’s Education

Addteq wanted to offer the opportunity to continue education with a tuition reimbursement program and flexible work schedules. We were set out to allocate one tuition reimbursement for the year. However, we over succeeded and allocated three tuition reimbursements for employees. 2 out of the 3 recipients were women.

According to the Department of Labor, “only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women. Among computer programmers, the situation is better – but not much. “Women account for only 26% of all American coders.” (via Wired).

Sneha Sheth was one of the employee at Addteq to take benefits of the tuition.

“I am a firm believer that women must have the opportunity to get educated and earn success in life. The tuition flexible schedule helped me achieve my education goals without the burden of paying a large sum of money at the same time. It eased my worry as I could concentrate more on the actual studies than being concerned about the cost”. Sneha Sheth, Atlassian Implementation Expert at Addteq.

We also re-elected, for the second year in a row, a female student from India to receive the Iris Foundation’s International Scholarship award. Suvarana Maji was the first and second year recipient of Addteq’s very own, scholarship award. Addteq continuously works toward our goal to bring more women into technology by promoting women’s education.

Promote Gender Equality

In October of 2016, we launched the gender equality program at Addteq and introduced paternity leave. This was in hopes that the men have equal opportunity to take time off with their loved ones. In October, we had one of the first male employees who took advantage of this new benefit at Addteq. We also allocated flexible work schedules to allocate extra time to the new parents.

Addteq hopes that this new benefit will take the pressure away from new mothers to have to take time away from work. With the new fathers being able to also take time away from work, it alleviates the family’s pressure of missing out on paychecks.

How is Pledge 1% shaping our company’s culture?

We noticed that since we have taken the Pledge and associated Addteq with Room to Read interest by our teammates to give and volunteer has sparked.

A few of the employees volunteered to donate a portion of their paycheck toward the Iris Foundation Scholarship Fund. Leaders are becoming philanthropy role models at Addteq by utilizing 1% of their time to volunteering efforts.

Recently Himanshu Chhetri, CTO at Addteq, presented a “DevOps with Atlassian Tools” talk session at nPower. Motive for his presentation was to bring awareness of DevOps to students in the IT field by showing real world examples of DevOps and Atlassian tool usage. Himanshu also wanted to set an example for his team, that you can utilize  your day to day work and still volunteer. To continue his effort, Himanshu is interested in setting up an internship program at Addteq to support the nPower students.

Also, while Himanshu is taking leave to visit his home country of Nepal, his goal is to visit ECDC. ECDC’s goal is that “No child should grow up behind prison bars.” Himanshu’s goal is to build an education partnership with ECDC to help promote their cause back in the states.

Pledge 1%, Room to Read and the addition of the Iris foundation has shaped our company’s culture and allowed the leadership team to look into different causes and programs from another perspective.

Optoro is a reverse logistics technology company helping brands and retailers reduce supply chain waste. Every year we host a free community event called Swap Shop. Swap Shop brings our community together to trade used clothing, shoes and accessories so that these items don’t end up in landfills.

Every year, millions of quality items are sent to landfills, resulting in billions of pounds in waste. The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world, surpassed only by petroleum.

For every item that attendees brought to the event, they received a ticket which could be used to trade in for other items at the Swap Shop. Most attendees came with 20+ articles of clothing, and walked away with a new wardrobe! Over 4,000 items were brought to the event to be reused.

Clothing leftover at the end of the day – almost 600 lbs worth – were donated to charity to help with job creation.

In addition to Swap Shop, we’re doing a “Q4 volunteer challenge”– the employee who spends the most time Giving Back — whether through our formal VTO policy or on their own time– will receive $500 to donate to their charity of choice!

To help other companies have an impact, here are five tips to increasing participation in community engagement:

1. Track and share your progress- We have a poster in our kitchen that shows our company progress towards1%. Updated weekly, the poster is broken down by team to show which teams are leading and which teams have more hours to go. This is a great way to celebrate leaders and remind others what needs to be done to hit our goal.


2. Organize an annual company-wide volunteer outing- Each year our company takes a day off to spend time together. In the morning we volunteer in our community at various sites and then the afternoon is spent hanging out together listening to music and playing games.


3. Create friendly competitions- We’re currently doing a “Q4 Volunteer Challenge”- the employee who logs the most volunteer hours will get $500 to donate to a charity of their choice. This has been a good motivator for a lot of employees who are passionate about specific causes.


4. Monthly events- We have two organizations that we volunteer with every month. The day/time is the same each month. This consistency is helpful for long term planning and allows for whole teams to sign up for events together.


5. Create a resource for managers- We created a list of local orgs that host volunteer opportunities and shared it with managers. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for busy managers to find opportunities that interest their teams.

At ShoppingGives we believe that customers want to support brands and retailers who prioritize giving and that they will prioritize shopping at those brands. Our mission is to create frictionless giving between these brands and the causes their customers are most passionate about.

This #GivingTuesday, we’ve enabled select retailers and their shoppers to work together to support great causes by partnering with ShoppingGives. These partners have taken a step to make more of an impact this holiday season by increasing their donation with every purchase:

• Gourmetgiftbaskets.com – Gives 9%, plus save 15% off your entire order with code “SG15”


• PetMate – Gives 12%, plus save an additional 10% off sale items with code “SGTEN”


• Bagallini – Gives 13%, plus get a free RFID phone wristlet ($25 value) with your order over $50 with code “SGGWP”


• KIND Snacks – Gives 6%, plus take $5 off your order with code “SGIVEKIND”


• Happy Socks – Gives 11%


• White + Warren – Gives 5%, plus save 10% your entire order on with code “Shopping Gives10”

Beyond the Holidays, we’re providing access to over 750 of the most popular online retailers who give back with each purchase including – Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, and Best Buy.

Making giving easier for customers at major retailers is one of the biggest challenges facing many companies, which is why we’ve created a way for more brands to get involved. If your brand is interested in making a difference, ShoppingGives has created a new technology called Change Commerce. Change Commerce is a technology that facilitates an exchange between retailers and nonprofits, that uses the consumer as the catalyst.

The goal is to empower retailers to have an easy-to-use system for allowing customers to donate, that simultaneously handles all the tracking, and makes it easy to receive donation receipts and measure data. Using Change Commerce is easy for the customer, and the platform even gives them the opportunity to track their giving across Change Commerce retailers and further support the causes they care about most.

Your company has the ability to select which charities they wish to feature for their customers to support. At checkout for every purchase, large and small, customers will be prompted to select a charity, where they can donate 1% of the total pre-tax purchase price to help make a difference.

White + Warren, one of our featured partners, was able to easily expand their giving with Change Commerce:

“Supporting good causes has always mattered to us at White + Warren. With ShoppingGives, we’re able to share our passion and the charities that hold a special place in our hearts while also giving our customers an easy option to choose where the donation goes.” — Susan White Morrissey, Founder and CEO of White + Warren

If you’d like to find supporting retailers, please check out our website at shoppinggives.com to find out where you can give back to this holiday season. If you’d like to find out how you can offer this unique chance to your customers, retailers can visit our Change Commerce platform, at shoppinggives.com/change-commerce to find out how you can help make a difference. To date, our Change Commerce technology has helped create an impact for over 600 nonprofits of all sizes, around the world.

We believe in the work that Pledge 1% is doing, and based on our experience working with small companies and major retailers, we know that for every dollar made through Change Commerce, two dollars go back to the nonprofits chosen by our retailer partners’ customers. If you are on the fence, why not make this year’s #GivingTuesday, the day you took a step towards giving back? Using ShoppingGives’ Change Commerce technology, you can make 2019 the year that you started giving beyond just #GivingTuesday.

By Laura Wronski, Senior Research Scientist, SurveyMonkey

As we head into the holiday season, many people are eager to give back and donate to the causes they care most about. In fact, according to last year’s SurveyMonkey/#GivingTuesday survey, 76% of Americans said that donating to causes they believe in is more or equally as important to them as buying gifts for loved ones.

With 2018 #GivingTuesday on the horizon, nonprofits all over the world will look to leverage every tool they can to maximize their donations and help their causes this year. Seeking feedback from your most important constituents–community of supporters, donors, volunteers–is one of the best ways to continuously grow engagement of these contributors, and as a result, your organization’s impact.

Many nonprofits are often understaffed and may feel that they don’t have enough time to create a survey to send to potential donors or their community. But really, that means they’re losing out on opportunities. Surveys can help generate valuable insights that will surprise future donors, volunteers and establish credibility that only hard numbers can provide. In short, they build confidence.

Surveys can also help gather more qualitative information, too. Is your mission clear? Are there topics your community is interested in learning more about from your blog or annual report? What problems have volunteers run into when trying to help your organization? What feedback do they have for you on the latest event? You can use surveys to ask open-ended questions that will give you talking points when you first meet a new donor. This helps organizations’ leaders stay aware of potential issues, and builds credibility as someone who is responsible and trustworthy—and who cares. That’s invaluable.

Here are just a few types of surveys that can give you very actionable insights for this year’s #GivingTuesday and holiday giving campaigns:

• Market Research surveys help to discover specific needs from your target community before launching new initiatives. What causes do they care about? For example, our survey leading up to #GivingTuesday last year showed that disaster relief was top of mind for over a half of Americans (54%)–more than any other cause. With Camp Fire’s devastating consequences in California, disaster relief is likely still a cause that people care about this year. What can your organization do to help?


• Donor feedback is extraordinarily important to keep cash flow positive. Checking in with the donors before and after #GivingTuesday will help make sure you’re giving them the best experience as they support your organization, and find out what you can improve to keep their donations coming in. For example, in our survey last year we found out that nearly one-third (31%) of respondents who are familiar with #GivingTuesday noted that the movement makes them more likely to contribute in some way to nonprofits. Knowing this, you might want to focus on raising awareness about the movement which can result in increased donations.


• Volunteer satisfaction with the experience can mean the difference between volunteers who continue to support your cause and them moving on to something else. Ask questions like, “How appreciated did your volunteer supervisor make you feel?” and, “How easy was it to get along with the staff at this organization?” to get the information you need to keep your valuable volunteers happy, fulfilled, and coming back.


• Volunteer recruitment. Need to spread the word and recruit volunteers fast? Create a survey and post the link on your social media pages to use your social network’s built-in virality to get sign-ups quickly–and feedback later on!


• Fundraiser event planning and feedback. Before your fundraising event, a planning survey can help collect contact information and get a better understanding of funding sources, demographics, staffing, and more. After the event, a fundraiser feedback survey will help discover areas your organization excelled in, and where you could improve your efforts.

Now to the surveys and how you can make sure you get a high response rate and really actionable feedback in return. There are a few simple rules survey scientists at SurveyMonkey follow when sending any survey out. Follow them to survey like a pro:

We treat a survey as a conversation. Respondents are growing weary of poorly designed surveys. An uninspiring look and feel can easily turn your potential respondents off, so take the time to match your template to your brand standards, as well as utilize the great pre-designed survey templates you can use for surveys these days.

We skip the buzz words and explain the goals. You can get better quality results if you state the purpose of your survey up front and explain how results will be used—people get so many surveys that never lead to any action that they will appreciate being part of something important. Getting clear answers also means avoiding jargon in your questions and using relatable phrases that can be understood by a very broad audience.

We keep them short. People whose opinions matter to you are likely pressed for time. After analyzing over 26,000 SurveyMonkey Audience surveys, we found the median number of questions per survey was just 12. Shorter surveys also have higher completion rates, which means you will get better data quality overall.

We leverage existing templates and new technologies. There are great templates for…well, everything. No need to reinvent the wheel! It’s also great to keep in mind tools like SurveyMonkey Genius which brings together AI, survey experts, and machine learning to develop survey intelligence based on the billions of questions and answers flowing through our platform. It automatically applies those insights to help you create your survey and does a lot of the work for you to help you ask better questions and get better response rates.

We keep mobile users in mind and test surveys for them. More and more respondents complete surveys using mobile devices. Keep images and video usage to a minimum to streamline your surveys for mobile and use the Preview/Test function to see how it will look on mobile devices.

We analyze and report back on the results. If your survey reveals an unhappy donor or volunteer, reach out to address the issue. If larger trends are discovered, then maybe a newsletter or email is the right channel to share it more broadly. It’s important to let respondents know that you hear and understand their feedback and are working on an action plan.

Companies and organizations with CSR programs in place can also take advantage of gathering insightful feedback and driving engagement through surveys. For example, survey data played a crucial role in the recent launch of SurveyMonkey for Good, our new corporate responsibility program with the mission to speak up for those without a voice to advance equality and make a positive impact on society. In order to best define the mission and pillars of this program, we sought to capture opinions of our key stakeholders to identify a mission that would resonate the most with them.

Holidays are a critical time of year for nonprofits as it is the last big push for annual contributions. Organizations that prioritize gathering actionable insights this #GivingTuesday will be in a position to foster greater communication with their communities and ultimately help a greater number of people and groups who need it most.