Each member of the Appluent team (and our families) have been touched by cancer in some way. We’ve witnessed the physical, psychological, and emotional drain this disease has on those affected as well as their loved ones. For Pete’s Sake has given us a chance to contribute to an organization that gives cancer patients and their caregivers a break from cancer–something we all wish we could do (have done) for our loved ones. That’s why, on April 15th, 2018, we successfully raised $3,970 for Angie Guin (45 years old, diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2017). This allowed the For Pete’s Sake Cancer Respite Foundation to send her and her family on a respite vacation to Disney World in Florida.

“This was our only family trip in 10 years – and it was the trip of a lifetime! The memories we created replaced the bad memories we have of the cancer journey. For Pete’s Sake helped us push the reset button on life.” – Angie

At MTX Group, social responsibility towards communities is at the core of our values, our culture and/or is a way of living. As much as we are involved in our business, we are equally engaged in giving back to the bottom of the pyramid, through our Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives in the areas of health, education, and others through the Nobel Foundation, because we believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity in life, and access to their basic human rights. We are committed to empowering lives of the community, both professionally and personally.

MTX being a proud member of Pledge 1% community, resonates its philosophy of committing 1% Profit, Product and Time towards the socioeconomic development of the shun communities.  We are actively involved in numerous initiative in the areas of health, education, livelihoods, displaced communities well-being etc. We had the privilege to help Fundación KiinBeh school in Quintana Roo (Mexico), schools in Fiji Islands and Jaipur (India), Desire society an NGO helping HIV affected children in Hyderabad (India), Rooms to read, Warriors on Wheels founded by a CNN hero Ned Norton in Albany, NY.  We will continue to help more organization in the United States and many other cities across the globe.

With our global philanthropy initiatives, we impacted lives of 500+ people directly and thousands indirectly across various communities, which includes kids, immigrants, disabled, displaced and women.

Apart from our contribution towards the underprivileged, we truly believe in “Charity begins at home”. Our employees are the center of our universe. We value them and their needs as much as we value our business hence, we ensure that we are in their thick and thins. We have been and always will be there for providing any kind support in critical situations of our employee’s life cycle at MTX and beyond. One such effort being the fundraising done within our team for the Lung Transplant surgery for one of our team member’s parent. All the team members displayed solidarity and in alignment to our values we stood together for our team member.

With the DNA of social responsibility within us, we believe that growth is possible and is fruitful only when shared. Hence, we look forward to compassionately and meaningfully contributing our time, resources and product towards building an equitable and sustainable society in years to come.

About MTX:

MTX Group Inc. is a global salesforce services/implementation partner and enterprise cloud consulting company established in 2008. MTX is headquartered in Albany, NY with development operations in India at Jaipur and Hyderabad.

Pledge 1%, a global movement to create a new normal in which giving back is integrated into the DNA of companies of all sizes, is ringing the Nasdaq opening bell today in celebration of its fourth anniversary and to honor the Pledge 1% member companies who unleashed millions of new philanthropic funding this year via their IPOs as well as the thousands of Pledge 1% companies who are having an impact long before their liquidity events.

Pledge 1% encourages and challenges individuals and companies to pledge 1% of any combination of equity, profit, product, and/or employee time to the cause of their choosing. It’s a simple, flexible, and scalable model that helps founders make giving back an integral part of their company culture. With an annual growth rate of 150% since its inception, over 8,500 companies in over 100 countries have joined the movement, helping to ignite over 1 billion dollars in donated volunteer hours, product licenses, pro bono resources and philanthropic funding to drive social impact around the world.

Pledge 1% is celebrating today alongside its Founding Builders, a group of over 20 members standing at the forefront of both economic and social change. These leaders are committed to creating a new business paradigm and to inspiring, empowering, and educating all entrepreneurs and companies to leverage their own unique assets to tackle the toughest social issues of our time.

The Pledge 1% Builders along with Pledge 1% core funders and partners are investing in the future of Pledge 1% by helping to create new tools and content for the broader movement, sharing peer-to-peer best practices, and raising awareness to help other companies take the pledge, and ultimately accelerate their impact.

Pledge 1% core funders include tech leaders like Salesforce and Atlassian, and Pledge 1% Builders include recent IPOs like DocuSign, Pluralsight, and Upwork, hot acquisitions like SendGrid and Weebly, as well as some of today’s fastest growing companies like Addteq, Appfire, Box, Classy, Cloud Co-Op, Contentstack, Crunchbase, Flexport, Gliffy, Hint Inc., MapAnything, MediaMath, Okta, Optimizely, PagerDuty, Postmates, Silicon Valley Bank, Silverline, and Twilio. Influential tech ecosystem partners have also backed the movement, including 500 Startups, Foundry Group, Salesforce Ventures, StartCon, SV Angel, Techstars, TechCrunch, and WebSummit.

“We’re here today on #GivingTuesday to celebrate four years of Pledge 1% and the tremendous growth of the movement around the world,” said Pledge 1% Chief Executive Amy Lesnick. “With over 8,500 members worldwide who have already ignited over $1 billion in new philanthropy via their profits, equity, product, and time, the Pledge 1% movement is inspiring, educating, and empowering companies of all sizes and stages to leverage their own unique assets to make a meaningful impact on our world.

We are especially excited to celebrate today with our founding core funders and Builders who are not only having a direct impact with their own social impact programs, but also committed to building the Pledge 1% movement and propelling thousands of other companies to accelerate social impact globally.”

“Imagine a world where giving back is baked into the DNA of every single business. At Pledge 1%, that’s our goal,” said Scott Farquhar, Pledge 1% Board Member and Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian.

Pledge 1% encourages all companies – no matter their size or stage – to take the pledge and make their first step towards impactful change. To join or to learn more about how Pledge 1% can help your company, visit pledge1percent.org.

About Pledge 1%

Pledge 1% is a global movement that encourages and empowers companies of all sizes and stages to give 1% of either their profit, equity, staff time, or product to any charity of their choosing.  Over 8,500 companies in over 100 countries have joined the movement.  Pledge 1%’s founding partners include Salesforce, Atlassian, and Rally, three companies that know first-hand how pledging a small portion of future success today can have an enormous impact tomorrow. In 2014, they came together with the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado to accelerate a shared vision of every business around the globe integrating philanthropy into its corporate DNA. In 2016, Pledge 1% became a special initiative of Tides, a leading global philanthropic partner, and non-profit accelerator. To learn more or to take the pledge, please visit www.pledge1percent.org.

As designers, we are tasked with creating and improving a brand’s identity and defining the unique position it has in the world.  Our craft gives us a unique lens into culture and community and it fuels our passion and commitment to have a positive impact on the world we live in.

Community service and charitable giving are integral to the cultural backbone at Smith Design.  Committed to giving back, President and CEO, Jenna Smith, has been diligent in her continued efforts to instill charity and social responsibility into the culture of Smith Design. “The leadership team decided to join Pledge 1% because we felt the initiative was a great opportunity to further encourage our employees to give back,” said Smith.  “We’ve been committed to giving back for quite some time and Pledge 1% provided us with a platform to let our employees support various charities of their choosing and make a difference in people’s lives.”

Smith Design’s team holds firm belief in the importance of education and that everybody, despite differing abilities, should have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Smith continually donates her personal time to job-shadowing and internship programs for young women at local New Jersey Universities. Smith utilizes her and her staff’s knowledge, experience, and resources to provide guidance to young woman as they enter college and prepare for new careers. Upon learning The Nevada Blind Children Foundation (committed to scholastic and vocational education for the blind and visually impaired) was in need of graphic design services, Smith set to work and tasked her team with an important mission- the foundation’s 2018 After School Program Booklet.

The After School Program Booklet is an important material to the Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation as it outlines their large variety of programs offered throughout the year. We are proud to have partnered with the Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation to develop their 2018 After School Program Booklet.

The Foundation’s mission is to provide children “the essential building blocks including extended educational curriculum, extracurricular activities, social opportunities, and transitional skills to children who are visually impaired.” Their Programs are designed to: (1) Increase graduation rates and post-secondary education enrollment and/or vocation. (2) Increase employment rates for blind adults. (3) Increase quality of life for blind or visually impaired children with significant intellectual and/or physical disabilities that prohibit them from graduation and/or vocation.

“Working on Pledge 1% projects like these are nice for a change because you know that even in seemingly the smallest way possible, you are a helping hand in making a difference for someone else. That’s what’s so rewarding.”- Lexi Savino, Designer

“Through our active participation in philanthropic initiatives, our employees feel good about themselves and are proud to be part of something bigger than themselves.  Whether we commit resources as individuals or as a team, we are creating a strong sense of community at Smith Design.” said Smith “We believe it is our responsibility to enrich the lives of others and to make the world a better place, in small and large ways.”

The mission of non-profits is to help and give back to those in need around the world. To be successful, these organizations have established fundraising and marketing programs using the data stored on their Salesforce platforms. OwnBackup supports non-profit organizations by guarding this Salesforce data against data loss and corruption with comprehensive Salesforce backup and recovery capabilities. As a Pledge 1% member, OwnBackup donates backup and recovery services to various non-profits, through product discounts, supporting world-renowned relief organizations in the healthcare, social and legal services, education, and environmental advocacy sectors. Busy non-profits need a reliable, efficient backup solution that can support their growing Salesforce infrastructure.

With OwnBackup, the Salesforce platform data of these non-profits are fully protected against data loss and corruption. This provides giving their teams peace of mind as they continue to run their organizations and integrate essential data onto the Salesforce platform. Non-profits trust OwnBackup to not only safeguard their data and provide better insight into data changes, but to also help them quickly and efficiently recover in the event of a data crisis.

It is the OwnBackup mission to ensure that no company operating in the cloud should ever lose data. OwnBackup provides daily, automated Salesforce backups and ensures rapid recovery of deleted or corrupted data with relationships, as well as sophisticated data compare tools to identify and scope any data loss or corruption. Whether the deletions or corruptions were caused by human error, malicious intent, integrations with external systems, or bad code or triggers, OwnBackup allows non-profits to quickly and completely recover. OwnBackup proactive Smart Alerts provide an additional layer of protection by ensuring data changes don’t go unnoticed.

People do not focus on what companies do, they focus on the reasons why they do it. Every organization, especially non-profits, set a mission and goals that demonstrate why they do what they do. OwnBackup prides itself on helping data-driven non-profits protect their data as they continue their missions to bring positive change in the world.

SaLisa Berrien, Founder and CEO of COI Energy Services, has over 25 years of experience in the electric power and smart grid space. From working in vertically integrated utilities (PP&L and PECO Energy) prior to deregulation to ConEdison Solutions a deregulated energy services company, and then on to Smart Grid, Clean Tech, Big Data Analytics, and SaaS Solutions, SaLisa has had a diverse career in the energy space. In her early career, she sold the first electric vehicle (G-Van) in her region. She later went on to help EnerNOC become a #1 Demand Response company in the industry. She credits her first company out of college for laying the foundation for a successful long-term career in the industry. PP&L (which is now PPL) ensured their employees put its customers first regardless of personal priorities. She has brought this practice to COI Energy with the “Platinum Rule – Do unto your customer as they would have you to do unto them.”

SaLisa is also the Founder and Board Chair of STRIVE Inc., a 501c3 charitable organization founded in 1995 which focuses on STEM leadership development training for students in 3rd thru 12th grades. STRIVE has three NSBE Jr. Chapters in PA and FL. In 2013, she established COI Ladder Institute to focus on delivering leadership and empowerment services to millennials and women. Annually, COI Ladder Institute hosts a conference in Martha’s Vineyard.

SaLisa’s personal and professional mission is to positively impact the space she occupies by leaving it better off than it was when she found it. She does this through her work in servant leadership, philanthropy, environmental stewardship, and with COI Energy. COI Energy mission is to make the world more energy efficient. We pledge 1% of our revenue to saving the environment through non-profit initiatives.

Our solution the COI Optimizer^TM helps electric utilities and businesses of all sizes identify and manage existing energy resources in order to improve energy performance of buildings and monetize those flexible energy resources that can support the electric grid. The platform learns energy behavior utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. It uses that information to predict future usage patterns, create energy saving and revenue generating opportunities. We offer four products in our suite of services including: OptimizeDR^TM, OptimizeEE^TM, OptimizeRE^TM, and OptimizeIR^TM.

Launching a startup is exciting, but it can also be an expensive and difficult environment to navigate. Stuck in the Sand’s mission is to give entrepreneurs a foundation, as well as easy access to tools to build on their ideas.  For our 1% pledge, we have been giving back in the form of offering free mentorship and guidance to those who may not have as much money, time, or experience to begin navigating the startup world.

Each Tuesday, we host a free workshop known as “Unstuck Tuesdays” where aspiring entrepreneurs can come pitch their ideas to one another, give and get feedback from their peers, meet with a mentor, and have a free workspace at our offices for the day to continue building on their ideas. We strive to give everyone a chance to make their ideas a reality. Through the workshop, we have seen meaningful connections be made and first-time entrepreneurs find ways to progress their business through simple collaboration with other like-minded individuals. We also continue to give back by offering free services to college students who desire to start a business. We will go to college campuses to give a lecture about startups, offer guidance to students who want to start a business, and help build them a prototype or idea plan for free.

For a student, financial resources are limited but their ideas are big, therefore it is important to give them the chance to learn how to make their ideas into a viable business. At Stuck in the Sand, we believe you do well by doing good which is why we prioritize giving back because helping others is the best way to succeed.

In January 2017, I chose to let the shit hit the fan in my life. I had a clean slate ahead, in other words; I was starting from scratch at the age of 33. As an engineer with a Masters in Actuarial Science, I decided to begin a career as a fiction writer. You read it right, a fiction writer. With all the time in my hands, I decided to join a government supported volunteer group and teach at a local public school. I volunteered to teach ethics and scriptures to primary school children, particularly expatriates.

At that point in time, I was not a startup founder; but was strongly inclined to become one. I was working on establishing product-market fit. I had a strong purpose in hand, neither did I know what my product was nor my target market. All I wanted to do was change the world. Yeah, stupidly naive. In the startup spirit, I volunteered at SparkFestival’17. That’s where I got to know about Pledge 1% and immediately signed up. Because I believe in giving. I was super confident that my startup will take form. And it did 6 months later, I named it BlueTemple.

I continue to volunteer at the school and spend half an hour every Tuesday with primary school children. I help them stay in touch with the culture and tradition of their country of origin. This is my way of investing in the future. I think the more we help with refreshing the practices of various cultures, the more interesting the mosaic of perspectives could be. This may also help the future generation embrace diversity and add depth to their identity and background.

As the founder of BlueTemple, this giving helped me comprehend the enormity of the business opportunity. Though giving at the school began out of my personal interests, it slowly began to add value to the thought process of BlueTemple’s product strategy. The purpose of BlueTemple is to create a stress-free meaningful life for everyone, a little peak into the mindset of tomorrow’s consumers; helped me understand the depth of influence BlueTemple’s product can have on their lives. Giving-first helped me understand the true meaning of ‘give and take’. All this time, unknowingly I lived by ‘give and receive’; the complete meaning of ‘give and take’ occurred to me recently. It gave me a lot of clarity and strength, a much-needed quality for a startup founder. I want to think that this personal development is an accumulated result of my collective giving. I like to believe giving-first provides returns in twofold. Once when you are open to receive and again when you’ve found the strength to take righteously.

3 Cheers to giving