John’s Crazy Socks

Farmingdale, NY U.S.A.

Number of employees: #34

johnscrazysocks.com

John’s Crazy Socks is a social enterprise spreading happiness by showing what people with differing abilities can do and giving back. They have committed to pledging their profit and product towards helping the community.

Giving Back is an essential part of our mission at John’s Crazy Socks. Giving Back is baked into everything we do. The idea is simple: we do not believe it is enough to just sell things, we have to give back. Giving back is a way of saying thank you and expressing our gratitude. Giving back is a way to serve our community. Giving Back is an essential part of our social enterprise.

We Give Back in many ways:

• We pledge 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics.


• We donate 5% from our Sock of the Month Club to the Special Olympics.


• We donate 10% from our awareness socks to our charity partners.


• We donate boxes of socks to non-profits to use in fundraising efforts such as auctions and raffles.


• We support local and selected charities with donations.


• We operate a Charity Fundraising Program to help non-profits raise money.

Giving Back to the Special Olympics

John and many of our colleagues are Special Olympic athletes and we see first-hand the many benefits of that organization. Without the Special Olympics, there would be no John’s Crazy Socks. John has learned many valuable skills and values through competing in the Special Olympics.

From the day we opened, we have pledged to donate 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics. When we added our Sock of the Month offering, we committed 5% from the subscriptions to the Special Olympics. Thus, every time you purchase a subscription to the Sock of the Month, you are making a donation to the Special Olympics.

We have created special socks that both celebrate the Special Olympics and raise money for them.

• Polar Plunge Socks: John does a Polar Plunge every year to support the Special Olympics and we created Polar Plunge Socks both to celebrate the Polar Plunges, but also to raise money. We donate 10% from the sale of those socks to the Special Olympics.


• Shark Socks: John plays basketball and competes in track and field with the Commack Sharks. He loves that team so much that John designed Shark Socks and we donate 10% from the sale of those shark socks to the Special Olympics.

Beyond these donations, John and John’s Crazy Socks does all we can to support the Special Olympics:

• Polar Plunge: Each year, we enter a team in the Polar Plunge to raise money for the Special Olympics and have raised thousands of dollars through those efforts.


• Giving Tuesday: On Giving Tuesday, we donate $1 for every order placed with John’s Crazy Socks to the Special Olympics.


• Donations of Gift Boxes: We donate boxes of socks for auctions and raffles that the Special Olympics uses to raise money.


• Custom Products: We have made custom socks and masks for the Special Olympics that they have re-sold as fundraisers or used as incentives for donors.


• Supporting Fundraisers: John has assisted at many special Olympic fundraisers and gotten onstage to help raise money. At John’s Crazy Socks, we use our social media and email list to promote special Olympic fundraiser events.

All of these efforts with the Special Olympics are a crucial part of our Giving Back program.

Their #1 tip or advice for companies? 

The more we do for others, the better off we are.

GoSquared

London, England

Number of employees: #10

GoSquared.com

GoSquared is a email marketing and web analytics tools developer. They have committed to pledging their product towards helping the community.

Did you know that over 300 billion emails are sent every day, emitting between 4g and 50g of carbon per email? – BBC Science Focus

It’s not possible to stop sending emails. But what is possible is to offset the carbon generated through how we market our business including email campaigns – something most of us don’t even realise is contributing towards the climate emergency. This is the mission of GoSquared, with the product we have created called EcoSend. 

Having partnered with Tree Nation, we have made it possible to plant a tree for every 5,000 emails sent on our platform. Although still in its infancy, through EcoSend we have already planted over 1,000 trees on behalf of our clients. 

For businesses, we’ve ensured the benefits to them couldn’t be sweeter, meaning they do not have to compromise on any essential tools or technologies due to switching to a green marketing platform. We founded GoSquared in 2006, and offer a comprehensive range of tools so that businesses can intuitively send marketing campaigns to generate the right results. Our EcoSend customers also benefit from this broad range of features. 

Our original products, GoSquared Engage and Web Analytics are trusted by thousands of businesses, including Deloitte, GlobalData, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder and many more. We are now looking to inspire clients new and existing with EcoSend to tackle a section of the climate emergency that is yet to be addressed by other marketing platforms. 

Most importantly, everyone on our team has a genuine passion and enthusiasm for the climate. As part of our efforts to do our bit, we also organise regular team litter picks around London. 

“We are honoured to be a part of the 1% pledge, and it has been a springboard for us to learn about how we can make even more of an impact in the wider world, both in terms of our EcoSend product as well as individuals. The EcoSend, and the wider GoSquared team ethos very much aligns with how we are pledging our time, profit and most importantly our energy to helping our climate. “

-James Gill, CEO of GoSquared, creators of EcoSend.

Their #1 tip or advice for companies?

That doing good for others is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Every single person on the team feels far better than they ever expected after taking part in our Pledge 1% activities.

Get Agile

London, United Kingdom

Number of employees: #1

www.getagile.co.uk

Get Agile is a CRM and Salesforce consultancy. They have committed to pledging their profit, product, and time towards helping the community.

Get Agile is showing how diversifying impact can make a difference on giving back. From 1% of time to 5% product sales, we have donated to PepUp Tech, an organisation that offers computer science and technology programs to underrepresented groups to help diversify the industry and start careers in technology), donated to Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, and provided volunteer training to RefugeeForce (empowering refugees to find work)

The latest release: a cookbook, “FoodForce for Good,” is a collection of Trailblazer recipes, with all profits going to Action Against Hunger UK. 

“Regardless of organisational size and role, each one of us can make a difference,” The question is – are we willing to be part of the solution? Be part of the solution and take the #PledgeForImpact today. For anyone that may want a hand to get started, just reach out.

Their #1 tip or advice for companies? 

Start Small. Learn Fast

Thinqloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Pune, Maharashtra, India

Number of employees: #70

www.thinqloud.com

Our value discipline is to “deliver exceptional customer experience” Our Salesforce consulting services strength which is our differentiator lies in our “approach” to designing efficient business processes. This is supported by our exposure to diverse business domains, experience in solution architecting, and our platform development track record. Thinqcloud has committed to pledging their time towards helping the community.

At Thinqloud we work with a few select non-profits helping them with their technology using Salesforce NPSP. The work we do here is pro bono and we have developers assigned to these non-profits to get their processes digitized. The major impact is helping them keep their costs under control and moving them away from manual processes. Cancer care, mental health, and alcohol de-addiction are the areas these non-profits focus on.

Please find links to the blogs that discuss these initiatives here:

Donor, Donation and Impact Management

Mental Health Patient Management System

Alcohol De-addiction Patient Management System

Belmar

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Number of employees: #37

https://www.belmar.ca/

Founded in 2002, Belmar Consulting Group is an award-winning Salesforce consulting firm, who works with various organizations and enables them to succeed in their digital transformation journey. They combine our intimate knowledge of the public sector and the nonprofit industry with Salesforce to create and implement innovative solutions for our clients. They have committed to pledging their profit, product, equity and time  towards helping the community.

For the past 20 years, Belmar has consistently evolved to achieve impactful results for our clients, partners and community. As an organization, we work to both create and deliver unique business solutions – enabling organizations to perform at greater speeds, with greater efficiency so that they can achieve greater success. Our core values make up Belmar’s identity and can be broken down into five key pillars that we stand by: embracing excellence, fostering community, trusted partnerships, living with intergrity, and the use of a founders mentality. Each of these identifiers lead us to our goal of creating lasting impact through technology.

Although we have grown in terms of people and projects, our mission remains the same. Our identity is rooted in the fact that we bring technology, processes, and people together in order to facilitate a greater impact in the community. Throughout our time working with nonprofits, we have become well acquainted with the vastly different needs of a nonprofit organization. With this knowledge, we have been able to set our focus on the reduction of complexity, ability to scale, and an increase in donations. As a smaller firm with an experienced delivery team, we have the ability to support complex transformation projects while still being nimble, responsive, and laser-focused on client success. Due to this, we are able to maintain our expert ability in adapting to various changes in order to continuously fulfill our commitment of putting our projects and clients first.

We recognize that nonprofit organizations are integral to our community fabric and we are committed to helping them transform and achieve greater success through the use of Salesforce. We have completed over 500 projects focused on both public and nonprofit sectors; clients we have worked with consist of various nonprofit organizations such as Housing Matters, Oceanwise, Trans Canada Trail, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, JABC, Small Business BC, Innovate BC, YMCA of Greater Vancouver, Coast Funds, HeroWork, the BC SPCA and the BC Centre for Ability. A few examples of our digital transformation projects include:

• Enabling the BC Centre for Ability to deliver an integrated client experience while tracking key outcomes required for reporting across multiple departments


• Alleviating the YMCA of Greater Vancouver big pains of reporting, collecting data, and tracking a client’s entire journey in a program from intake, to enrollment, to exit


• Supporting Coast Funds’ continued growth and operations through implementing Salesforce so their staff can now seamlessly capture and record grant/fund applications and consolidate these forms for board review.

Belmar has undertaken the Pledge 1% commitment as part of a global movement to inspire, educate and empower entrepreneurs, companies and employees to be forces for good. We pledge 1% of our time, equity, product and profit to organizations that help communities in need. To execute on this commitment, we donate $1,000 for each completed project in addition to our ongoing community initiatives and activities. In the past few years, our Founder and CEO has also held internal dollar matching donation initiatives toward nonprofit organizations, fulfilling our mission towards the profit sector of the Pledge 1%.

One of our most hands-on and impactful initiatives was created through our partnership with Ally Global Foundation, a local charity that works with local partners in Nepal, Laos and Cambodia to create safe homes, education and job training to help survivors thrive. We’ve partnered with Ally in 2021 and 2022, and on August 6, 2022, the Belmar team took part in Ally’s annual charity event called Move for Freedom.

For Belmar’s Move for Freedom event, we planned a Spikeball tournament. With over 100 attendees joining us from all across the Lower Mainland, we surpassed our goal of $10,000 and raised $11,058 toward Ally’s inspiring initiatives – nearly tripling last year’s fundraising efforts. We were featured on Daily Hive, and also recruited generous local donors to sponsor our event. Some local businesses that supported this event were Evo, Steve’s Poke, Vancouver Mysteries, and Grounds for Coffee. Along with other Move for Freedom participants across the globe, we’ve helped raise $607,564 to support survivors of human trafficking.

Our goal this fiscal year is to promote our growth in giving back and to make sure that our staff are well informed and equipped to provide the best service possible. Now, how better to do that than to get involved in our own communities?

Through our close working relationship with Ally Global Foundation over the last two years, we have learned all about the inner workings of fundraising and the importance it holds to nonprofit organizations. To generate more impact across different communities, we are excited and committed to partner with Palm Beach County Food Bank as our charity of choice this year. Additionally, during our team annual retreat, we all took part in assembling school supply kits for North Shore Neighborhood house. These school supply kits will be distributed to various students whose households do not have the means to afford school supplies.

At Belmar, we are executing our growth in community contribution through the recent introduction of a new Volunteer Time Off Policy for all employees. Paid volunteer days are available to Belmar staff with the intention of fostering community both within and outside of the organization. We believe this will help spark community engagement as well as provide motivation for busy working individuals to simply take time to give back. We also recognize that participating in volunteer activities enriches the lives of our team and their communities, while directly contributing to the community culture we strive to emulate as an organization.

How we define success at Belmar directly correlates with the impact we can contribute to those around us. To solidify this, we chose to commit to the Pledge 1% to even further this impact. Our business model allows us to help nonprofits thrive with technology, but we are adamant in providing opportunities to directly help our communities as well. By embracing all four pillars of service through acts like paid volunteer days for our staff, matching campaigns, and fundraisers, we are working towards this reality; we are excited for these upcoming initiatives and cannot wait for our team to experience it together! 

Their #1 tip or advice for companies?

Get buy-in from your team, choose a cause that resonates with your team.

Originally posted on Greenbiz.com

Sustainability is becoming a mainstream practice, and a wave of new companies are entering the space of creating positive social and environmental impact. The result? Many companies start a sustainability practice or social impact department, often with one person spearheading much of the foundation building alone. I’m one of them.

As part of the newly formed social impact team at Braze, a leading customer engagement platform, and the company’s first sustainability hire, I understand firsthand the challenges of building a team from the ground up. Over the last year, I’ve focused on building out the environment and ESG strategy and programs. Here are the things I wish someone had told me when I first started, based on my own experiences and learnings.

1. Understand the business and assess gaps

This one sounds obvious, but you will need to spend time getting to know the company and the business model. Sustainability should not work in a silo. The goal is to integrate sustainability into the business, and for that, you need to deeply understand the product, the technologies and the supply chain. 

Successful sustainability practitioners and innovators are business savvy. You can create a sustainability benchmark to thoroughly assess any gaps and how your company is performing compared to leaders (my former training as a sustainability strategist at Futerracame in handy for this). You won’t be able to fill the gaps at once so figure out what is most critical to address first. Understanding compliance and emerging regulation, customer and investor motivations, speaking to colleagues, as well as conducting a materiality assessment will help. I developed a benchmarking tool that we updated throughout the year which served as a helpful progress tracker. Starting off, it’s about filling the gaps and mitigating risk so that you earn your license to be a leader. 

2. Get to know your stakeholders and their motivations

Driving sustainability progress at a company is like being a politician and a diplomat. It’s a cross-functional job, and you will need to build relationships to succeed. You need to influence others, balance different needs and wants, all while driving towards your goal or vision. There is a reason you were hired to do this work. Talk to your colleagues. Be curious. 

Identify who might be an advocate and who might be someone you’ll need to work harder to convince. Understand how sustainability priorities at the company emerged and connect with those who were involved in creating them. It’s important to understand how this work was getting done before there was a formal team. It will help you identify motivations, key stakeholders and internal champions. Identifying an executive sponsor will also make a big difference and give you the support needed to launch new programs. 

3. Yes, you need the business case, but make sure it is unique to your company

There are good resources to make the business case for sustainability (for example, this Reconsidered resource is full of good proof points). However, it is even more impactful if you go beyond generic stats and dive deeper into what this looks like for your business specifically. Questions that can help push your company’s ambition around ESG or climate commitments include (from the perspective of a B2B company): 

• Who among your investors are asking about ESG, and why? 


• How many of your customers have set climate or DEI goals? What percentage does that equal in terms of revenue representation? 


• How often do RFPs include sustainability related questions? 


• How often do sustainability initiatives get asked about in the recruiting process? 

You should expect some resistance to change, so having data in your back pocket that is tied to your specific company is useful. The more you can translate this into financial terms, the better.

4. Leverage the right tools and establish efficient processes early to save time 

Creating a company’s first greenhouse gas emissions footprint or an Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) report is no small feat. But there are certain things that can help you save time, especially if you don’t have a big team under you. 

In my first year, I worked on everything from developing high-level mission and strategy frameworks to drafting sustainability guidelines for company events to setting up internal processes that answer request for proposal (RFP) questions.

Leveraging the right software to help automate data collection for greenhouse gasses or ESG reporting can make things more efficient. Although having a level of human support is still valuable for internal education and building the business case. Don’t forget to also look internally to see what resources you already have. Do you have a great in-house marketing team? Writers? Project managers? Leveraging those resources when publishing your first ESG report or onboarding a new software can save you weeks. 

5. It’s OK to start small

Our first ESG report was 14 pages, definitely on the shorter side in the world of ESG reporting. We focused our report on metrics that catered towards investors, raters and rankers. Our first report included a materiality assessment, a GHG footprint for Scope 1, 2 and 3, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) data as well as Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) metrics, which is pretty ambitious for a first report. However, it is perfectly fine to keep content tighter and to start small. For example, I’ve seen many first time ESG reports only include GHG emissions for Scope 1 and 2.

Beyond length, you can also innovate with form. We decided to let a number of blog posts do the storytelling around our sustainability and ESG programs throughout the year rather than including everything in a packaged ESG report. 

6. If it’s a first, bake in extra time for feedback and collaboration

For big first projects such as ESG reports, your initial timeline will likely be too ambitious. Try to get alignment with key stakeholders early on and err on the side of overcommunicating with colleagues, leadership and the board, treating all parties as collaborators rather than approvers. It may be the first time for some of your stakeholders, too, which can require extra education and hand holding. This was an important lesson for us this year with our first ESG report. By using a highly collaborative approach, we were able to publish a stronger report and develop better relationships with key stakeholders, which we anticipate will make this process more efficient with every subsequent year.

7. You will need to be a doer and a leader 

Being a sustainability practitioner is a very varied job. If you are building from scratch, you will be working on both the strategic and the operational. In my first year, I worked on everything from developing high-level mission and strategy frameworks to drafting sustainability guidelines for company events to setting up internal processes that answer request for proposal (RFP) questions about sustainability. 

8. Your ability to prioritize and delegate will be put to the test

There will be a lot of opinions on what should be done at the company. As the expert, you’ll need to prioritize and understand what to deliver first, otherwise it’s very difficult to succeed. This is where your expertise and experience comes in. Being able to prioritize what needs to be addressed immediately, versus what can be on the back-burner, as well as delegating and forming the right partnerships will be critical to delivering impact. Importantly, your colleagues should be partnering with you on sustainability priorities even if they don’t have sustainability in their titles.

It can be a lonely job in the beginning. I have relied a lot on my external peer network. Cultivating a sustainability practitioner network that you can discuss with, seek advice from, or simply validate your solutions, can be very powerful in keeping you going. Many of us are working on similar issues and are likely facing the same challenges as you are so these conversations will also save you time. Pay it forward when you can!

Pracedo

London, UK

Number of employees: #80

pracedo.com

Pracedo is an award-winning Platinum Salesforce.com Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers. With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce from offices in London, Amsterdam, Milan, Rome, Belgrade, Melbourne, Brisbane and Amsterdam, they work with customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. They have committed to pledging their profit, product and time towards helping the community.

Pracedo is committed to helping make a difference in the world. After being one of the first European partners to make the 1% pledge, we knew that we could do more. And that’s why a large proportion of our team’s work is for charities and non-profit organisations, with more than 5% of our billable hours being pro-bono work. Pracedo also offers volunteer days for its employees, in which they can use their talents to assist a charity of their choosing.

The commercial team recently used their volunteer day for the Make A Wish walk, while others in the operational team intend to utilise theirs by assisting in creating and fulfilling a child’s wish.

For us, it is important that everyone has an opportunity to get ahead, and so whether we invest our time by up-skilling charities, provide opportunities for local people in our community through apprenticeships, or help non-profits better their offering with Salesforce through our pro-bono work, we know that every small act can make a big difference.

Their #1 tip or advice for companies?

Make sure that community is at its heart.

Change isn’t effective if it doesn’t help build a sustainable future for those around you. When we think about how we can make a difference, we look closely at who will benefit, how it can sustain future growth and how it might elevate others to thrive as future leaders who can give back to their community. Impactful change is more than what we do as individuals; it’s also about how we rise together as a team. We all have a role to play in making our communities better places to live, work and play. And when we come together to make positive change, we can achieve so much more.

Language Lizard

Basking Ridge, NJ United States

Number of employees: #10

www.LanguageLizard.com

Language Lizard (www.languagelizard.com) is a leading publisher and distributor of bilingual products in over 60 languages. The company provides award-winning bilingual books and audio resources to schools, libraries, literacy organizations, and families. They have committed to pledging their profit, product, and time towards helping the community.

Language Lizard Supports Literacy and Education 

Language Lizard is a small woman-owned business that publishes and distributes children’s resources in over 60 languages to promote language learning, multicultural education, and culturally responsive teaching to schools, libraries, and literacy organizations. We remain committed to giving as part of our company culture and continue to support our core causes of global literacy and girls’ education. 

As a Pledge 1% member, Language Lizard supports literacy and gifting organizations such as Reach Out and Read and ParentChild+ throughout the year by providing bilingual books and materials to those in need. Most recently, we hosted a special sales promotion to raise funds and provide resources for refugees affected by the events in Ukraine. The promotion’s success enabled Language Lizard to make a monetary donation to the International Rescue Committee and donate sets of bilingual books to the Reach Out and Read Program at the Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, RI, and Friends of Refugees in Clarkston, GA. In addition, we are continuing our efforts to offer free resources such as guided education activities that parents and teachers can use to help children learn in a multicultural context.

We also continue to support the non-profit Room to Read in its efforts to improve children’s literacy and gender equality in education in 16 countries across Africa and Asia. Working directly with our local New Jersey chapter of Room to Read, we support Room to Read’s Book Publishing Program, which trains writers and illustrators worldwide and has published over 1,500 original titles in 35 languages and distributed 20 million books to students. 

Their #1 tip or advice for companies?

Our impact program helps us support and build relationships among organizations with like-minded goals (in our case, literacy and multicultural education).

Passage Technology

Lake Forest, IL

#35

https://www.passagetechnology.com/

Since 2008, Passage Technology’s apps and development services have been used by admins and developers for building solutions on the Salesforce platform. Ranging from time-saving admin apps, to productivity tools for sales and service, their solutions meet the competitive timelines and stringent security standards required by Salesforce and the industry. They have committed to pledging their product and time towards helping the community.

Their #1 tip or advice for companies?

Volunteering and participating in events like Giving Tuesday is a great way to help others, and it’s also a great way to practice gratitude. Practicing gratitude also has health benefits. Psychology Today reports, “Feeling grateful boosts happiness and fosters both physical and psychological health.