This story is part of Pledge 1%’s Impact Award Winner feature series. Learn more about the Cloud 100 List and other Pledge 1% members that were featured on the list here.
Why did you first decide to join Pledge 1%?
Social impact at Procore first started happening through employee-led initiatives to create volunteer events and one-off product donations to educators that were referred to us by our customers. This culminated in Procore.org being formalized as the social impact arm of Procore in 2017, with a mission to advance the construction industry through advocacy, education, and technology.
Once we formalized with a dedicated team, we went through a benchmarking exercise with other organizations to help us get started. Throughout these conversations, rave reviews about Pledge 1% came up repeatedly. Pledge 1% has helped us maximize our impact on the communities we serve, providing invaluable learning experiences and networking opportunities from the first connection until today.
What does your Pledge 1% program look like in action? What does your program involve?
We’ve formally pledged to give 1% of our time via employee volunteerism, as well as donate 1% of our construction management software to nonprofit builders, educational institutions, and training centers.
Procore has various impact initiatives. Some of our programs involve:
Product Donations
Over 800 nonprofit builders, educational institutions, and trade association training and apprenticeship centers in 21 countries have in-kind donated access to Procore with unlimited users, data storage, and support.
Education
We provide product, training, and certifications to over 30,000 students in 10 countries. In fact, 96% of accredited construction management university programs in the US now have access to Procore through Procore.org.
- The Top Tool for These Leading Construction Management Programs: Technology
- Nelson Mandela University: Future-proofing talent in construction
Nonprofits
Procore.org provides in-kind donations to over 320 nonprofits dedicated to building for communities in need and rebuilding for those impacted by disaster. Nonprofit & NGO users leverage Procore to optimize efficiencies and make a difference where staff is spread thin and resources are limited in low-income housing projects, disaster response, religious institutions, and more.
Advocacy
In 2021, Procore.org began providing free product training and a discounted buying program to better partner with minority contractors to support and amplify the impactful work they’re already doing. By the end of the year, over 100 minority contractors had received free training on Procore.
We focused our advocacy efforts on taking action to increase the number of minority contractors and leaders in construction. We accepted AGC’s Education Research Foundation’s challenge to create a $250,000 donation gift to assist African American and disadvantaged minority students who are studying construction fields at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
- Videos/article: Procore and AGC’s Education Research Foundation Create a Scholarship Fund for Students Studying Construction at HBCUs
Procore Cares: Employee Volunteering
All Procore employees globally are encouraged to volunteer and give back to their local communities, with 16 hours of Volunteer Time Off (VTO) annually. All employee-led volunteering, donations, and other social giving opportunities are accessed through giving and volunteering platform Benevity.
Procore was the Cloud 100 Pledge 1% Impact Award Winner in 2019. We offered a $50 donation for every demo of our product–a program that helped raise over $30K for Team Rubicon to support relief efforts for those impacted by Hurricane Dorian.
How has Pledge 1%’s framework helped you scale your impact?
Since winning the award, the COVID-19 pandemic made us reimagine how we would run our programs. However, because of our partnership with Pledge 1% and Builders, we were able to learn from each other and adapt quickly to implement Benevity to scale our global employee volunteer efforts, build virtual classroom curriculum for instructors to use with students learning remotely, create our first large scale donation through the AGC ERF HBCU Matching Scholarship Fund, and start our program to support underrepresented groups in construction.
Has your Pledge 1% program changed since winning the Pledge 1% Impact Award?
We have not pledged equity or profit, however we have made a donation of $250K with AGC Education Foundation for HBCU students in construction management programs. We challenged AGC members – and the industry at large – to match our donation in order to double our impact, and we achieved our collection action goal of $500K within 4 months.
In addition, we implemented the use of Benevity so that our employees can give directly to the nonprofit causes they care about.
We also have invested in resources and new nonprofit partnerships that directly help our industry with a prevailing challenge, the labor shortage. Procore.org cares about the labor shortage in construction and the industry’s workforce development because Procore is built solely for the construction industry, and these are major top-of-mind challenges that the industry faces. Our new Workforce Development web page is a hub for construction professionals, educators, students and parents to access Procore’s workforce development resources and content in one place. In addition, we started a partnership with the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) as a founding member of CareerStarter, a new tool powered by NCCER’s Build Your Future (BYF) initiative that provides career-seeking individuals direct connections with local training programs and entry-level jobs.
What have been some of the greatest highlights or impact moments to date?
Awards:
- Procore Named Philanthropist of the Year by the United States Minority Contractors Association
- Procore Earns a 2021 Tech Cares Award From TrustRadius
- Procore Recognized with Forbes Cloud 100 Pledge 1% Impact Award
- AGC & Procore Meet Initial Goal of Raising $500,000 To Launch a New Scholarship for Minority Students Studying Construction at HBCUs
- Launching New Workforce Development Resources to Combat the Construction Labor Shortage
- Featured Company in National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) 2021 Report to President
- Procore’s commitment to customers in response to COVID-19
- Procore Promotes Construction Safety With Third Annual Procore Safety Qualified Program
- Procore.org Provides Construction Software to Habitat for Humanity
Children are some of the biggest victims of climate change, and almost every child will experience environmental hazards caused by our changing planet in the near future (UNICEF). Despite the huge implications for them, children have little power to limit the changes happening around them. A landmark study last year found that the majority of youth experience eco-anxiety and 81% of children who responded said that when they try to speak about climate change, they feel ignored or dismissed (University of Bath).
Many of us are not just corporate leaders – we are parents and family members. How we do business isn’t just about how we impact the climate; it’s about how we build the world for future generations. As a parent, discussions about climate change can be difficult for a variety of reasons, but it’s critical that we inform the next generation on the issues and lead by example – teaching them how we can live and work more sustainably, especially as we work from home.
If you don’t know where to start, that’s OK! One great resource is NASA’s Guide to Climate Change for Kids. This website provides a lot of useful answers to frequently asked questions about climate and covers themes, like weather and climate, atmosphere, water, energy, and plants and animals, using easy-to-understand graphics and cartoons to help explain things.
You can also refer to Talking to Your Kids About Climate Change by The Climate Reality Project. This webinar is a roundtable discussion with four leading experts who share their unique insights and best practices for having meaningful conversations about climate change with kids.
Do you have any advice for other parents beginning to talk about these issues with their children? We’d love for you to share helpful resources on our Climate Action Discussion forum.
Wildfires, drought, flooding, and more – by now, we are all familiar with images of the devastation caused by the ongoing climate crisis. If you’ve ever experienced a moment of worry caused by our rapidly changing planet, you aren’t alone. According to the APA, more than two-thirds of Americans have experienced anxiety over the effects of climate change, or what we now refer to as ‘eco-anxiety’.
While there is no medical diagnosis for eco-anxiety, it is defined by the APA as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” and can include fear of observing these changes and experiencing a concern for coming generations. Some of the symptoms include feelings of hopelessness, depression, frustration, and PTSD.
Eco-anxiety may be on the rise, but so are methods to understand the concerns caused by these events and how to handle them in a meaningful way. In the business world, understanding the impact of eco-anxiety means understanding how to help co-workers or employees who are struggling with these worries. Knowing tools to mitigate this specific stress means being able to take action and help overall employee mental health, which in turn boosts productivity and creativity within the workplace.
Here is a list of articles and resources to help manage eco-anxiety for yourself and for others:
- This article by Medical News Today discusses what eco-anxiety is, how it affects us, and how to cope with it.
- Refinery29 provides more insight into specific worries caused by climate change, especially parental guilt, generational anger, and policy despair, as discussed with a climate psychology researcher.
- Organizations like The Good Grief Network work to boost mental and physical resilience around climate change anxiety. Their platform offers a virtual, community-based 10-step program to help people work toward acceptance and recovery from eco-anxiety and climate grief.
- Finally, Ecoanxiety.com offers several ways to mitigate eco-anxiety, such as engaging with nature and nurturing your ecosystem.
Do you or does someone you know struggle with eco-anxiety? What steps do you take to refocus and recharge in today’s world? If you have resources we would love for you to share them in the comments below or our Climate Action Form.
In honor of Earth Month, we’re launching a Pledge 1% series all around Climate Action!
With the help and support of our members, we’ve developed some of today’s top tools and resources for companies to take climate action in a way that’s sustainable for their business and that’s aligned with their values. Every day in April, we will use this blog to build on these materials to share new case studies from our members, facts and tips from climate experts, and other actionable steps our teams can take today – at home and/or at work – to combat climate change.
We understand that the world is facing unprecedented challenges at the moment. Unfortunately, geopolitical tensions are only accelerating an already critical climate crisis. As teams and businesses, taking action has never been more urgent and needed.
When it comes to the climate, our collective 1%s can have a real and immediate impact. We are so grateful for all that you are doing – please use the Social Impact Forum to share your tools, strategies, plans, and ideas for how we – as businesses and individuals – can combat climate change.
Want to learn more about how to incorporate climate action into your business? Download our Brinkwire
The Duke of Sussex has issued a new rallying cry, stating that quitting should be ‘celebrated.’ The fact that more people are deciding to put their mental health and happiness first by leaving jobs that don’t make them happy should be “celebrated,” according to Prince Harry.
In a new interview, Prince Harry discussed how certain job resignations can benefit one’s mental health.
For the first time, the Duke of Sussex discussed his role as chief impact officer at BetterUp, a coaching and mental health firm founded in California eight years ago. Harry touched on job resignations and burnout as one of the topics he discussed.
These issues, according to the Duke, were “brewing for quite some time” before Covid brought them to the forefront of people’s minds. People are “finally paying attention” to the importance of mental fitness in the workplace, according to Harry, who believes we are in the midst of a “mental health awakening.” “I’ve actually discovered recently, courtesy of a chat with [BetterUp science board member] Adam Grant, that a lot of the job resignations you mention aren’t all bad,” he told Fast Company. “In fact, it’s a sign that self-awareness necessitates change.” “Many people all over the world have been stuck in jobs that don’t make them happy, and now they’re prioritizing their mental health and happiness.” “This is a cause for celebration.”
In March, Harry became a member of BetterUp, a company that provides mental health services and coaching to individuals and businesses. The Duke, who has long been an advocate for mental health and has spoken openly about his own struggles, has a wide range of responsibilities as chief impact officer, including public advocacy on mental health, philanthropy, product strategy, and advising the company on how to use capital raised through its commitment to Pledge 1 % – an initiative that encourages companies to donate 1% of staff time, profit, or equity to charitable causes.
During the interview, Harry also revealed that BetterUp worked with his former patronage, the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, “earlier this year.” In 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were named President and Vice President of this organization, which supports young leaders throughout the Commonwealth. They resigned in February after informing Her Majesty that they would not be returning to their full-time positions as senior members of the Firm.
Less than 8% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated compared to more than 60% in high-income countries. That means 1 in every 13 people in a low-income country has received their first vaccine compared to 1 in every 2 people in high-income countries which continue to stockpile more vaccines while others continue to wait. With the risk of mutations and a ripple effect on the global economy, vaccine inequity and rising COVID-19 rates impact us all.
By donating $5 to Go Give One, you can fund one COVID-19 vaccine for someone most in need and help end the pandemic. We’re all on the same team in the fight to end the COVID-19 pandemic. What gift could be better?
https://gogiveone.org/coalition/
https://gogiveone.org/coalition/
Interested in engaging your employees and external partners in this campaign? Check out our Marketing Resources for the Go Give One Donation Giving Season Communications Toolkit . Make sure to subscribe to the Marketing Resources for updates on toolkits and collective action!
Now—more than ever—our 1% matters, and we are excited to announce that we are joining 15,000+ Pledge 1% members around the world in rallying our teams and partners to give back.
Our profit donation went to SOS Children’s’ Village (SOS Dječje selo, part of the largest international NGOs SOS-Kinderdorf International.) which is a nonprofit helping children who can’t live with their families anymore, as well as children whose parents are about to lose custody. They provide a warm home and quality care with professional support. Their work also focuses on strengthening families in order to prevent child abandonment and child neglect.
“We are excited to hold a Pledge 1% badge as a multiple pledger, as we’re dedicated to giving away our time, our product and our profit to co-create a better future for everyone. By participating in GivingTuesday, we’re further spreading the idea of giving back as well as aligning Maven Mule with Pledge 1% values of making the world a better place – one community at a time.”
-CEO, Dragan Vujnović
In today’s digital economy, seconds matter. For mission-driven organizations, seconds can be a matter of life and death, and service reliability can make or break access to suicide and safety hotlines, disaster relief, time-critical health care, food assistance, and more. That’s where real-time digital operations comes in. At PagerDuty, we’re also helping nonprofit organizations achieve their missions by maximizing uptime at critical times like GivingTuesday, the largest annual global day of giving.
To maximize this critical fundraising opportunity, it is important to ensure your organization has the tools to manage your digital operations most efficiently. Improving incident response and maximizing uptime boosts the overall experience for donors. Furthermore, with a reliable incident management plan and tools in place, you can minimize the need to pull team members away from family gatherings and celebrations throughout the holiday season. Because uptime is money, PagerDuty is proud to support the global generosity initiative #GivingTuesday with digital operations tips and through the efforts of PagerDuty.org.
What Is GivingTuesday?
Nearly a decade ago, people started to look at the holiday shopping season in a different way. Black Friday represented a major shopping opportunity for retailers. The growth of GivingTuesday (which takes place on the Tuesday following Black Friday) from $10 million in nonprofit donations in 2012 to more than $2 billion in 2020 shows that many people in the U.S. and other countries are looking for an alternative to the consumerism of Black Friday shopping.
Today, GivingTuesday’s focus to encourage a day of radical generosity has spread to more than 70 countries. In 2020, GivingTuesday saw 34 million donors give over $2.4 billion to nonprofits and charities, according to Charity Navigator. More than 3,000 organizations rely on this event to raise critical funds that power their direct services to communities and the environment.
On GivingTuesday, your website will likely attract traffic from far more potential donors than any other time of the year. Keeping your digital operations up and running is crucial. More uptime means more donations on this critical day, as well as the ability to focus on delivering great digital experiences as opposed to remediating outages.
Giving platforms Global Giving, Kiva, and DonorsChoose leverage PagerDuty to maximize uptime of their systems to reliably connect donors to projects or causes they care about.
To make the most of GivingTuesday’s fundraising potential, taking the time to prepare your organization is essential.
Getting Ready for GivingTuesday Fundamentals
Site traffic for Charity Navigator, the world’s leading independent evaluator of nonprofits, increased 27% from 2019 to 2020. With significant increases in traffic and donor activity, you’ll want to be sure your website and digital operations are ready for the load.
From a technical point of view, there are a few fundamental ways to achieve high uptime. Start by reviewing your alert management program and services. PagerDuty reduces the noise of less critical alerts so your team can solve real problems fast. Once you filter the noise in your alerts, consider adding automation to your alert management using Event Intelligence.
The next step is to review the key systems likely to face significant strain on GivingTuesday.
- Donor-facing websites
It is essential to review your organization’s website and any third parties you might rely on, like Charity Navigator. For example, ask about their capacity to handle a sudden increase in traffic. If there are no plans in place, investigate if you need to add additional short-term capacity before, during and after GivingTuesday.
- Back-end systems
Your back-end systems also need high uptime to track performance, issue receipts and send thank-you messages. For this analysis, focus on back-end systems directly impacted by donor activity, like Classy, Click & Pledge or Give Lively.
- Uptime of payment processing systems
A sudden increase in payment activity may alarm some payment processors. To avoid surprises, reach out to your payment processing providers early and tell them about your GivingTuesday goals. If you anticipate unusually high payment volumes, set up a secondary payment processing provider.
4 Ways for IT to Prepare and Plan for GivingTuesday
Evaluating critical systems is an excellent first step because it will help you identify vulnerabilities and weak points in your operations. Once you understand those weak points, here are some additional steps to consider.
1. Define your “hypercare” model
Before asking your IT staff to work extra hours around GivingTuesday, have an open discussion with your team about your concerns. You might be worried that downtime will make the organization look bad and cause a critical year-end fundraising goal to fail. Acknowledging these concerns in an authentic way can help ground your proposal to launch a hypercare support model. Use this checklist to help your team prepare.
Meet with IT staff in advance and ask them to be ready for the demands of the holidays. For example, you might temporarily increase your incident response standards to maximize uptime and donations during this crunch period. This might include asking people to expand their on-call responsibilities or work longer hours than usual for a short period of time.
Once GivingTuesday is over, look for ways to reward IT for their extraordinary contribution. At a minimum, offset the heavy demands of hypercare by easing IT workload in the days following GivingTuesday or offering additional time off during the holiday season.
2. Reduce alert fatigue before the holidays
Reducing alert fatigue before the holidays is important because it means your teams can take time off without being interrupted. Specifically, consolidate your alerts and events into a single platform so staff can easily respond. With PagerDuty, you can leverage machine learning and your organization’s business rules to quickly identify which alerts require action and which are noise.
3. Practice makes perfect
Scheduling dry runs and simulations is helpful to prepare your team for the stresses of GivingTuesday. For example, you might simulate a crisis event like your primary payment system failing at 10:00 a.m. on GivingTuesday. Tailor the scenarios you practice based on your organization’s specific technology and weak points. Reviewing past incident reports can give you clues about where to focus your efforts.
To further inform your efforts, read our post: Uptimes During the Holiday Shopping Season.
4. Plan a continuous improvement session
After your organization finishes GivingTuesday, don’t lose the opportunity to improve. Start by reviewing your uptime results and incident response information. Next, reach out to your key stakeholders to ask them how GivingTuesday unfolded. This type of informal feedback is essential because it may reveal technical problems that didn’t rise to the level of a formal incident.
Delivering hypercare and high uptime is much easier when your organization has the right tools. That’s why PagerDuty offers special support for nonprofits.
How PagerDuty Helps Nonprofits
PagerDuty’s commitment to nonprofits goes deep. Through PagerDuty.org, we donate 1% each of company equity, employee working time, and product to accelerate change in our local and global communities. In 2020, PagerDuty gave over $1.1 million to more than 400 organizations and provided discounted product to 255 nonprofit and social enterprise customers.
In addition to grants, matching employee donations, and paid employee volunteer time, PagerDuty also helps nonprofits by making its products available through Impact Pricing. Eligible organizations include 501(c)(3) organizations and B Corporations. For additional information, see the Eligibility Guidelines.
Global Giving, a nonprofit organization that connects donors and nonprofits, uses PagerDuty to ensure its digital services are accessible in communities all over the world. The organization has already achieved impressive results: raising over $500 million for over 25,000 projects worldwide. Kevin Conroy, Chief Product Officer at Global Giving, recently shared the impact of PagerDuty:
“GivingTuesday kicks off the giving season for many nonprofits where they raise 30% or more of their total annual donations. It’s vital to make sure that your donation processor is ready to accept every generous gift from your supporters and that teams find out about any problems when they are only warnings and not waiting until critical failures. PagerDuty helps GlobalGiving stay ahead of the curve so that we can celebrate how much our project partners have raised on ‘Thank You Thursday.’”
How To Work With PagerDuty as a Nonprofit
Make the most of GivingTuesday and the holiday season by maximizing your organization’s uptime. Learn more about PagerDuty for nonprofits and apply for PagerDuty’s Impact Pricing so you can keep your digital operations up and running all year round.
Imagine a world where everything you do makes a tangible, positive impact. Imagine if every time a coffee shop sold a coffee, someone in need receives access to life-saving water, or for every book an author sells, a tree gets planted or every time you’re on Zoom, a child in need gets access to game-changing education….
B1G1 is a business giving initiative with a unique platform that makes these things possible by helping businesses ‘embed’ giving into their everyday activities, creating a long-term habit of giving and growing impacts that are measured, tracked and shared easily. And collectively, 3,000+ B1G1 Businesses have already created more than 260 million giving impacts.
Today, more of those businesses are also joining in the Pledge 1% movement to expand their contributions beyond monetary giving. Here are a few examples.
CRED
CRED joined Pledge 1% in 2019 and incorporated the contribution of 1% time, 1% product and 1% revenue in what they do. They implement B1G1 in their 1% revenue contribution.
CRED gives their time to run programs to support people with mental health issues (this has been especially important since the start of the pandemic), to mentor youth start-ups and to create awareness for the Sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs). They have also integrated various micro-giving with their programs and have created 23,381 giving impacts including 528 days of access to vocational training for women and provision of skills training to vulnerable youth.
Image Credit: CRED (https://cred.global/)
FOUR POINTS CONSULTING
Four Points Consulting pledges more than 1%, in fact 2%, of their revenue from their consulting services to causes that they and their team align with. Their top priorities are the SDG 1: No Poverty and the SDG 4: Quality Education. And they have already provided special education programs to children, youth and families in Cambodia, India, Uganda and the Philippines. They also offer pro-bono work to support important causes.
Image Credit: FOUR POINT CONSULTING GIVING STORIES (https://cred.global/)
B1G1
The B1G1 initiative itself is run by two entities: a Singapore-based Social Enterprise (also a BCorp) that manages the business program, and a US 501(c)(3) charity that manages its Worthy Cause program.
As a Pledge 1% Member, the social enterprise arm also pledges more than 1% of all its revenue to support a wide variety of causes in all of the SDGs. For example, every email their team sends, every meeting they have and every special occasion they celebrate results in a giving impact, while supporting other businesses to implement effective giving in their own unique ways.
So, on this GivingTuesday, B1G1 is sharing the #PLEDGE1%GIVES campaign with their members to encourage more of them to consider joining the Pledge 1% movement.
Together, we really can create a world full of giving where businesses with a real sense of purpose can change our world. For good.