This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

COVID-19 has been nothing if not a time of uncertainty and worry for workers and businesses around the globe. For freelancers in particular, that uncertainty can feel ratcheted up as budgets get cut and project pipelines dry up.

Despite that, their resilience has been so inspiring. They’ve leaned into these challenges and adjusted their hustles to lend expertise and remote work savvy during this time. Which is why we’re using all of the tools at our disposal to continue improving our platform, to give independent talent plenty of visibility, and to fast-track clients and talent alike to the best opportunities available.

Some programs we’ve participated in and launched so far include:

• The Freelancers Relief Fund. Upwork is a founding partner of the Freelancers Relief Fund alongside the Freelancers Union, which is helping assist independent workers experiencing financial hardship during the pandemic.


• Work Together Talent Grants are helping create economic opportunities for independent talent engaged on grantee projects that have missions directly tied to mitigating COVID-19’s impact. The program offers $1 million in talent grants to selected organizations (up to $25,000 in talent credits each) to be used on Upwork, where they’re matched directly with remote professionals who have the skills they need.


• Partnerships with companies around the world to help match remote talent to urgent, high-value projects. The focus is on projects and skills that are helping further business continuity and other critical COVID-19 initiatives, so we’re working to fast-track projects in web and mobile development, e-Learning, sales, content writing, UX design and more to help businesses and independent contractors get matched to the opportunities they need.  View current COVID-19 jobs


• A virtual event series to promote remote work and Upwork talent. We’ve launched monthly webinars to offer tips and guidance for working in the new norm, and we’re hosting virtual talent showcases to introduce Upwork talent and open the floor for them to discuss how they’re succeeding during COVID.


• Branded ad campaigns and email campaigns. To boost visibility of talent on Upwork and the stellar work they do, we’ve ramped up our digital marketing campaigns. Now is the time to show the world what independent talent can do!

We’ve also made improvements to Upwork’s platform based on feedback and the evolving COVID situation, including:

• Direct Contracts to help independent contractors grow their business with non-Upwork clients. New Direct Contracts let independent talent easily create fixed-price contracts with clients who aren’t on Upwork, while still benefiting from features such as escrow services, dispute assistance, simplified contract management, and instant payments. Learn more about Direct Contracts here. 


• Faster access to payments on hourly contracts. We heard from our community that faster payments would be helpful right now so we implemented a change that allows all Top Rated freelancers and agencies working on hourly contracts to receive their funds in half the time.


• Better, faster onboarding. Huge numbers of new professionals are joining Upwork every day. We streamlined the talent onboarding experience so we can better identify qualified professionals with in-demand skills and fast-track them to open opportunities.


• Improvements to voice and video calls. We’ve smoothed out the UX and improved call and connection quality to make it easier to collaborate and communicate on Upwork.

Also, we’re publishing freelancer-focused articles weekly on the Remote Work Resources page, including a recent profile of Upwork talent helping businesses get through COVID, as well as

• Freelancer’s Guide to Navigating Project Opportunities During COVID-19


• 10 Ways to Manage Your Freelance Business During Times of Crisis


• How to Pitch to Clients During a Crisis

As we navigate the challenges ahead, our commitment to supporting the freelance community remains our top priority. We’re working around the clock to ensure that the independent professionals have the best access possible to the opportunities they need.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Originally published on cashrewards.com

Cashrewards is proud to announce our participation in ‘Big Change for Little Champions,’ a fundraising effort held by the Starlight Foundation in conjunction with Channel 9’s The Footy Show.

The telethon event, which aims to raise $500,000, will be held on the evening of Thursday September 14 and broadcast live on The Footy Show, which airs from 8:30pm AEST.

All funds raised will go towards brightening the lives of sick children and teens and will support innovative programs aimed at their recovery.

How far will the funds go?

With $500,000, Starlight – Australia’s most trusted and broadest reaching children’s charity, will be able to help 12,500 sick kids.

These kids include little Austin pictured with The Footy Show’s Beau Ryan, below. Austin loves watching the footy with his dad, but cheers for his mum’s favourite team, the Cowboys. Austin has been diagnosed with cancer and had to be kept in isolation while undergoing chemotherapy. When Austin was well enough, he was able to mix with other kids again in the Starlight Express Room, where he could also hang out with Captain Starlight.

If you are unable to donate out of your own pockets, we will gladly donate on your behalf. During the Telethon and for 24 hours after, Cashrewards will donate $10 to the Starlight foundation for every new member who signs up for free to

Cashrewards.

Cashrewards would also like to recognise the amazing contributions from other companies involved in the Big Change for Little Champions telethon fundraising event, including of course The Footy Show and Channel 9, as well as Oxipay, F45 Training, the NRL, Soul Origin, Canterbury Leagues Club, Jaycar and Parramatta Leagues Club.

About Cashrewards’ partnership with the Starlight Foundation

Cashrewards is very proud to have joined Pledge 1% as of June 1st, 2017. We have pledged to donate 1% of product, 1% of equity, 1% of profit and 1% of employee time to the Starlight foundation. Our goal is to help 10,000 seriously ill children by the end of 2019. Besides rewarding you for every purchase you make with cash in your pocket, we donate an additional 1% of your Cashrewards on your behalf from our pockets. At the time of publishing, with your help we have been able to give back and help 512 children.

Proudly supporting

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Archima Solutions’ give back initiative focused on Allies in Service, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping veterans and their families attain employment, affordable housing, education and healthcare. The relationship between Archima and Allies in Service is an extensive one – we have sponsored Allies at Vetforce and Dreamforce events in order to raise funds for the organization to fuel their resources and programs. After discussing the project and submitting a proof of concept, the long term goals derived were to make data analytics through email communication more organized, and redesign the process of collecting data to make timely reports accurate and streamlined for the organization, the sponsors and the participants.

Our pro bono work revolved around implementing and updating Salesforce for Outlook through Einstein, writing APEX codes for email lightning template automation, email list configuration, writing visualforce PDF reports (the one-two page PDF allows sponsors to see an instant snapshot of how the program is helping veterans or their spouses and if the organization’s efforts are beneficial), creating succinct and combined dashboards for easy data analysis and reporting, and a few other system redesigns. All these efforts were done to help the organization have concise and accurate data reports for their participant base, be able to send timely surveys to participants for program feedback, and understand the effectiveness of providing resume workshops, networking and sponsorship opportunities, and more to service members. Allies employees are now able to automate and send email campaigns with ease, can have all information regarding a participant in one clear dashboard, have a synchronized Salesforce for Outlook calendar, and have easier SMS Messaging. The only “third party” tool used during the solution design was Archimeta Studio data model – an Archima tool created by our technical architects. Since this project is still ongoing, Archima will be deploying full changes in the next few weeks as we are on the last stages of stress testing now for what has already been done. The delivery resources are taking the technical revamp process slow so that Allies employees are comfortable with a few changes at a time, and can get acclimated to changed features to provide feedback before more work is done. 

The work accomplished to date has, “been critical to [their] success,” and Allies has noted Archima as being, “an extension of [the] organization,” as our solutions have helped them conduct better business. Furthermore, Allies was pleased with how Archima “met and went well above [their] expectations,” and used a wonderful team of “intelligent and amazing women” for the project. After three years of sponsoring Allies in Service, Archima was finally able to give back to them with these solutions to help the organization become more efficient in their marketing and communication technology. As Archima’s motto goes, “You have the obligation to make something better if you can,” and we certainly helped Allies employees have an efficient method of conducting their business of giving back to and supporting the service members of the United States. 

https://www.alliesinservice.org/

https://archimasolutions.com/

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Empower your employees to give back at the individual level by downloading our new Virtual Volunteering Playbook, which includes ideas and best practices on how to excite and inspire individual giving. 

by Bret Peters

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has changed all of our lives in many ways, including our ability to give back. In the midst of the holiday season, this is a time where people often reflect on the year and contemplate giving. So often, many of us volunteer at food pantries, organize toy drives, participate in charity fun runs, or find ways to participate in community service with others.

Today, on Giving Tuesday, we here at ADF are reflecting on the state of the world and how we are making a difference in the lives of the people we serve. We are a technology company with 15 years of experience building digital investigation software that helps stop crimes against children. We employ former law enforcement and digital forensics experts and our team members are passionate about helping stop child exploitation, human trafficking and
cybercrime — so in addition creating tools that help quickly identify victims as well as suspects, we work to find ways to spend our profits with like minded nonprofit organizations tightly aligned with our mission.

How to Give Virtually

Our entire company is now remote and with the decrease in business travel and the move from industry events to online formats, we actually saw some savings, primarily in marketing spend. This allowed us to expand the number of justice minded nonprofits that we were able to support and it opened up opportunities for us to spend more time connecting virtually with our international partners that are often helping fight human trafficking and child exploitation, such as the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII), Project VIC and International Justice
Mission.

In addition to financial support, we were also able to offer our nonprofit partners seats in our new online self-paced ADF Certified User Training which has the dual benefit of raising individual skills, and helping learners understand investigation best practices. This was particularly beneficial for ATII which had more than a dozen college interns learn mobile forensic triage.

Giving Time

Last year, we launched the ability to have each team member give back one percent of their time – about 20 hours per year. It’s a lot harder for individuals to do this when working remotely so we encouraged everyone to think about their unique skill sets and the organizations that might need their time remotely. Rich Frawley, our Director of Training was able to leverage his mobile and computer forensic skills to create a video to teach high school
seniors about digital safety. As the CEO, I had to consider my unique skills, which led me to donate my time to teach sales and marketing skills for a virtual world to United Way Worldwide leadership executives via Zoom.

Giving Back & Team Building

Like teams everywhere we love being together when we can and since we can’t be together, we’ve had to find unique ways to do team building. We recently underwrote team member participation in the annual Turkey Trot benefiting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We also launched a matching giving campaign so team members can give to their local food bank with a company match during the holidays.

The pandemic has created many new challenges, but it has also created opportunities for companies that are in the unique position to give back, with even more of an obligation to do so. Our team is blessed to serve those who serve communities around the world. Learn more about ADF Pledge 1% here.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Empower your employees to give back at the individual level by downloading our new Virtual Volunteering Playbook, which includes ideas and best practices on how to excite and inspire individual giving.

By Joseph Fung

As we celebrate another #GivingTuesday, a worldwide celebration of generosity, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the reasons we give and the impact we hope to achieve. Earlier this year, on top of our existing donation program, we became members of Pledge 1% and donated a portion of our company’s equity to the Upside Foundation in support of charities focused on diversity & inclusion.

Uvaro is an online training company, and exists to help close employment gaps — sometimes those gaps are due to systemic problems. As soon as we acknowledge that we can’t solve these challenging problems alone, it becomes clear that we have to not only focus on our own solutions, but also support others in their solutions. Building a culture of philanthropy becomes clear. That said, with so many organizations out there, why give through Pledge 1%?

While donations are up across the board (thanks to initiatives like #GivingTuesday), the average age of donors is 64 years old and makes 2 gifts a year. As donor populations age and giving moves more towards online and smaller donations, we need to consider ways to build lasting habits of philanthropy. We need to help build a movement.

Through our participation with Pledge 1%, like so many other companies, we have not only embedded social impact into our business, but tied our success to public good.

Pledge 1% helps companies make a public commitment to give their Equity, Time, Product, and Profits. Joining this community of like-minded companies is the best way to build the movement that’s needed, and we’re proud of the progress we’ve made!

Along with our equity donation, we’re also giving our products and our money. Our Community Fund, established with the help of the KW Community Foundation, enables our team to contribute with every paycheck; the resulting endowment will support our community throughout our company’s lifetime and beyond. While our tech sales training program is available to the public with up-front and income-geared payment options, we also offer Uvaro On Demand, a free continuing education offering to help professionals build their sales and business skills.

While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, there’s always more to do; giving as part of Pledge 1% lets us amplify our impact, helps learn from others, and ensures that these gifts are part of a broader movement towards doing more good, together.

Uvaro is an online tech sales training company that offers  a 12-week training program with live classes, $0 up-front tuition, and agency services to help students land great jobs in tech sales. Uvaro’s work-integrated program builds sales teams that ramp faster and achieve more.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Originally published on adaptovate.com

ADAPTOVATE has a responsibility to give back to our community, and Pledge 1% is a great opportunity to do so. Our company is young, and it’s critical to our culture that we give back. As our company continues to grow, we will continue to pledge our time and services for the greater good of our community.

We have a unique offering focused on transforming the way organisations deliver results, and we offer our valuable time, resources and services to our Pledge 1% partners to teach them how to more effectively fulfill their missions. We work closely with our pledges and we are committed to their success.

In the year 2020, ADAPTOVATE had the honour to provide pro-bono services to a hospital, 2 not-for-profit foundations and multiple schools across the globe. These inspiring organisations across the globe are:

Australia

Gomo Foundation provides education opportunities for young women with potential so they can drive change in their developing communities. ADAPTOVATE supported Gomo Foundation in creating their Objectives and Key Results to help guide the organisation into their next phase and implementation of strategy. ADAPTOVATE shaped the high-level strategy into a detailed roadmap with dedicated iterations using Agile methodology to align and engage a fully volunteer-led team.

Our Place | Colman Foundation works through local schools to create the environment for children, families and communities to flourish. They aim to reshape the service system and open up access to the resources, opportunities and support that all children need to learn and develop, and that enable families to achieve their aspirations. We supported Our Place and their partner organisations in Morwell, Australia to facilitate 4 key workshops. We helped them create a vision , focused their priority areas, and a roadmap to implement their strategy and objectives. This helped them to achieve their vision of happy, healthy and aspirational children in thriving families with a sense of belonging to the community.

Singapore

Tan Tock Seng Hospital, together with National Centre for Infectious Diseases, have played a pivotal role in the COVID-19 efforts for Singapore and it is a privilege to give back to them with our agile experience. ADAPTOVATE had recently conducted an Agile Virtual Immersion (VI) session with the hospital to introduce agile concepts and practices. The 32 participants from 16 different functions were able to experience first-hand working in an agile way and appreciate how it can engage the organization, optimize the processes and empower its people in the hospital.

Poland

The Covid-19 pandemic forced schools around the world into a swift and unexpected transition to remote learning. ADAPTOVATE trained, coached and mentored teachers across Poland to embrace an agile mindset to boost a culture of feedback, reflection and adaptation at schools. This new culture will lead to greater learning outcomes, promote collaboration to  problem solve, and build resilience to change.

United States of America

JerseySTEM is a fully volunteer-led not for profit organisation providing STEM education to underserved children in New Jersey through innovative, hands-on and online after school projects and inquiry-based learning opportunities. ADATOVATE supported JerseySTEM’s IT initiatives of implementing a new Service Desk and knowledge base by refining their proof of concept and developing a full roll out plan to their 150+ volunteers.

The more we can practically help organisations achieve their goals, the better the world will be, and the better our organization will become. We are committed to serving our communities across the world to create a better future.

Please find a link to case studies of our Pledge 1% projects on our website.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Empower your employees to give back at the individual level by downloading our new Virtual Volunteering Playbook, which includes ideas and best practices on how to excite and inspire individual giving.

By Jeffrey Rangel, Senior Director, Global Corporate Responsibility

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the world. Widespread and deep economic devastation pales only in comparison to lives lost. We all know this is a very difficult time for so very many people. One major impact has been on charities serving the hungry. The food bank near our Santa Clara, California headquarters is reporting twice as much need as this time last year. We really want to be as impactful as possible and have therefore decided to significantly broaden our annual U.S. Food Drive and our support of employee giving in 2020. 

On November 17, we launched our first global Hunger Relief Campaign. For four weeks (over Giving Tuesday), we are matching donations to charities identified as “Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition” up to $5,000 at 400%—if our employees give $5,000 we will match it with $20,000. Our goal is to raise enough to provide at least two million meals at food banks around the world. 

Fewer than 72 hours into the campaign, we are well on our way: our employees have donated $50,000 and we have matched $200,000. 

Historically, our food drives focused on one beneficiary near each of our four US offices. But we know the needs are far greater, and now working remotely, our employees are more distributed. So aligned with our FLEXWORK approach, which is centered on employee choice, we’ve expanded the hunger campaign to help enable our worldwide employees to support what is local to them.

The Hunger Relief Campaign is a part of our overall coronavirus relief efforts. In March, we set a goal to raise $5M for communities and colleagues impacted by COVID. We’ve raised $4M towards that goal benefiting 18 causes around the world. We believe this Hunger Relief Campaign will surely move us past our goal! This is certainly the biggest response Palo Alto Networks has delivered in the face of a disaster in our 15 year history, but it’s commensurate with the biggest challenges faced by our world in 100 years. It’s been inspiring to see our global workforce rally so strongly to support something so important, even as their own lives have been disrupted by the multiple crises they’ve faced in 2020. Through these efforts, we are proud to be living our corporate values and mission.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Originally published on addteq.com

The business world is beginning to understand the importance of being accessible. The COVID-19 outbreak has forced most of us to re-evaluate our IT infrastructure and its importance it is to our organization. While private organizations are working fast to create an accessible IT infrastructure, government organizations are increasingly expected to abide by digital accessibility standards; e.g. US federal (Section 508) or EU accessibility (WCAG 2.1) requirements. Addteq’s Unstoppable app enhances accessibility to Atlassian’s Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence products. Making it easier for users to read with the latest screen reader software. It also provides 508 compliance with WCAG 2.1 standards.  Unstoppable is compatible with JAWS and NVDA screen readers and can be used with Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Auto Enable Accessibility

A major challenge for any organization is being able to identify all of the users that need access to accessible software. Unstoppable is able to auto-detect a user that is using a screen-reader software and auto-enables the accessibility options, without the need to contact the administrator or manager. This helps users to overcome the initial hesitation of asking for support, and may potentially overcome a legal requirement. The video below demonstrates Unstoppable identifying a visually impaired user and prompting them to enable accessibility features.

Navigate Better

Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence are full of links that a visual user can navigate easily. However, all these links are not always properly read by screen readers. Most of the time, the issues are that the links may have some missing ARIA tags or labels. Unstoppable has the ability to add the missing ARIA tags and labels to Atlassian’s front end, to ensure seamless user experience. Below is a video showcasing the navigation on a Jira ticket while using Unstoppable and NVDA screen reader.

Cover Your Corner Cases

Unstoppable solves some of the minor issues visually impaired users face. Some of those issues may include creating a page from a template in Confluence, or adding a list of components in a Jira ticket. Although these issues seem small, a non-visual user may find it extremely frustrating. With Unstoppable these minor issues are resolved and allows the user a seamless experience.

 

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

The entire business model of SeaFreight Labs (www.seafreightlabs.com) is based on the open-innovation principal that no single company has enough smart people, or all of the right people, to solve all of their mission-critical problems. This foundational tenet drives us to look outside for potential collaborators in all that we do. We look to the ‘global crowd’ as the source of expertise, innovation and creativity for our clients.

This worldview led us to join the Pledge-1% movement in May 2020 (read our press release here and our Pledge-1% blog posts here). The sheer number of 1%-pledgers and their great diversity excited us because we know the power of a large and diverse group to achieve great things when it focuses on a common goal. In this spirit, we pledged to donate at least 1% of our ‘product’ to global non-profits to aid their work on humanitarian issues.

After taking the 1% Pledge, we initiated two major projects to honor our product commitment: Habitat for Humanity (www.habitat.org) and World Vision (www.worldvision.org). Each organization is working on intractable problems where a solution would positively impact tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Both projects are soliciting the global crowd to find breakthrough ideas and solutions. We need solvers to engage in any of four different challenges that include:

1. Seeking ideas for improved construction- and demolition-waste management:  https://bit.ly/34wMzzW 


2. Making homes with no foundations more typhoon and/or earthquake resilient:  https://bit.ly/34yrvYG    


3. Seeking ideas for affordable rural single-family sanitation solutions:  https://bit.ly/3nChTF4 


4. Seeking low-cost chlorine monitoring for rural piped-water systems:  https://bit.ly/3er4ZWq 

The due dates for submitting solutions to the challenges are in January 2021. Prizes to winning solutions are up to US$25,000.

Participation in the 1%-Pledge movement emboldened us to seek strategic marketing collaborations with global innovation groups totaling over 1,000,000 members. Participating promotion partners include InnoCentive (www.innocentive.com), Engineering for Change (www.engineeringforchange.org), HeroX (www.herox.com) and the Maker Community (www.make.co). Each of these organizations has contributed time and resources to give all four challenges a better chance of success and to help SeaFreight Labs with honoring of our 1% Pledge. 

As of 11 November 2020, over 440 people have registered as potential solvers in the 4 challenges. They hail from over 45 countries. Each one has the potential to be the “elusive solver” with a new answer to an intractable problem. 

It is truly amazing what our commitment to the 1% Pledge has engendered. We are eager to continue our efforts to impact the world in collaboration with the global crowd and the Pledge-1% movement.