By Lauren Coberly, Box.org
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
A January meeting at the Health Emergency Operations Center in Democratic Republic of the Congo. The center was established in 2017 with support from PATH and is now being used to coordinate the country’s COVID-19 response. Photo: PATH
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
A letter from our CEO:
Hello from Houston. Our city has been on lockdown since mid-March and the Endiem team watched as the world and economy responded to the pandemic.
There are few things we cannot control just now – but we can control how we choose to contribute during this uncertain time. At Endiem, we are choosing to contribute with intention.
This means taking care of our community, which not only includes everyone in the extended Endiem family but also our beloved Houston area as a whole. That’s why we are thrilled to be part of the #GivingTuesdayNow movement.
In response to the CO-VID crisis, Endiem doubled its monthly donations to local non-profit Kid’s Meals, which feeds thousands of pre-school children in Houston every day. With schools closed many kids have lost the two regular meals they depended on each day. Kid’s Meals stepped up to fill that void by packaging and delivering thousands of extra nutritious sack lunches to homes to make sure Houston’s kids are fed. Endiem’s stepped up to provide extra funding for those lunches and snacks.
Throughout the year the Endiem team is granted paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO). Last week, Advantage by Endiem analyst Laura Martin used her VTO to bag lunches at Kid’s Meals. And off of our team members have been given an extra half-day of VTO this week in solidarity with #GivingTuesdayNow.
“At Endiem we believe in deeds, not words. Our community is suffering and we must act. The need is now so we’re taking action to help however we can – with cash, with time, and with hands-on volunteering,” says Geraldine Gray, Endiem’s CEO.
We’re creating an environment where compassion and flexibility rule while fulfilling customer needs and keeping in mind that everyone’s struggling with new routines and, for some, unsure futures.
Every Thursday we hold an “open mic” session that welcomes employees, partners, and clients to Zoom into as a space to be human and vulnerable during this crisis. Yes, we talk about our feelings. The feedback regarding these sessions has been phenomenal – we laugh, we pray, we send good thoughts, we sometimes shed a tear but we always end on a hopeful note.
Join us as we support #GivingTuesdayNow. We’ll get through this together because we’re in this together and because you know us at Endiem you know that we’re all in. Stay safe, stay well, and stay sane.
Endiem is the largest independent Salesforce consulting partner in Houston. We help organizations discover, design, and build Salesforce solutions that help businesses achieve their goals. Find us on Twitter.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
ShoppingGives is a commerce platform that enables conscious brands to streamline their giving process so that they can focus more on doing good and less on how to do it. Right now, brands are putting giving back and social impact at center stage to provide aid to their customers, those on the frontlines, and the global community.
For #GivingTuesdayNow, ShoppingGives has worked with their network of stores, or The Giving Economy as they’re more affectionately known, to raise donation amounts and enable every purchase to make an impact. ShoppingGives’ partner brands are all getting creative with giving back to the community, from featuring COVID-19 focused causes all the way to 5% give back on every purchase.
In addition to flash giving for Giving Tuesday Now, most ShoppingGives partners give back to causes of the customers’ choice. When you shop their Giving Economy, you can select the cause closest to your heart to receive a donation. If you’re stumped for a cause, all retailers have at least one feature that they believe in, and you can always select that! Donations powered by ShoppingGives are made by the brand on the customer’s behalf. When you shop the Giving Economy, you never have to spend more to make a difference.
Join ShoppingGives in making a difference by shopping conscious brands like Huron, Natori, Koio, Kenneth Cole, The Sis Kiss, JR Dunn, and Everyday California. For more sites giving back extra visit ShoppingGives.com or follow @ShoppingGives across all socials.
ShoppingGives has already raised thousands in their effort to provide relief, and they look forward to continuing the trend in this time of abundant need. Happy Giving!
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
When news broke about the pandemic, Selfless.ly, an all-in-one corporate philanthropy management software startup sprang into action.
“It became clear to us that a lot of resources would be going toward COVID-related issues, however there are many nonprofits that still need support and may not have a mission that relates. We asked – What can we be doing to help these causes stay sustainable?” – Joshua Driver, Cofounder of Selfless.ly.
Selfless.ly reached out to partner with Serve Indiana, a division of the Department of Workforce Development for the State of Indiana, and launched Virtual Giveback. The partnership centralizes nonprofit-focused resources and created a webinar series with subject matter experts to provide information on pressing issues being experienced during this time. In addition to informational sessions, Virtual Giveback provides instruction on self-care techniques and a communication channel for nonprofits to be heard.
“We know these amazing people are pouring from an empty cup, and we need to let them know that someone is here for them.” Said Driver.
After learning more about the current struggles facing the over 60 nonprofits that registered to be a part of the Virtual Giveback program, the team at Selfless.ly began to schedule free consulting sessions on helping nonprofits transition their volunteer opportunities into virtual ones. In addition, Selfless.ly removed the paywall for nonprofits to use their volunteer management system, meaning Selfless.ly is currently free for nonprofits!
Currently, the team at Selfless.ly is volunteering with several nonprofits to help deliver masks to hospitals from the Million Mask Challenge Indy, support Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana, foster dogs from the Indiana Bulldog Rescue, consult on virtual event management and more.
If you have an hour to volunteer virtually, let us know!
About us– Selfless.ly is based in Indianapolis and is Indiana’s first Domestic Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corp. To learn more visit www.selfless.ly or join the movement here.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
At Rodan + Fields, people are at the heart of our business. As the impact of COVID-19 is felt around the world, we will continue to support relief efforts to do the right thing for the health and safety of our loyal customers, global consultants, home office employees and R+F global communities.
To date, we have protected our people by elevating safety protocols throughout our supply chain, shifted home office employees to work remote, and championed healthcare workers on social with our #RFLove campaign. We have also donated more than 13,000 R+F skincare products to frontline healthcare workers to soothe skin irritation and are now making hand sanitizer for Bay Area hospitals.
We have also expedited $1.5M in payments to our nonprofit partners to help them stay open and adapt their youth programs and are giving more than $420k to the American Red Cross.
Today, for #GivingTuesdayNow we’ll match your donation!
By Matt Gretczko, Senior Vice President & GM, Healthcare Practice | Silverline.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
At Silverline, our hearts go out to the many individuals, their families, and friends that have been impacted by this virus and all those that have lost their life in this battle. We support our first resp onders, healthcare workers and employees working for essential business. Without them, we would not have been able to fight against, survive and hopefully emerge stronger from this pandemic.
Silverline’s focus in Healthcare and Life Sciences has put us at the front line of ensuring that our customers, the Healthcare ecosystem, and their consumers have the tools, capabilities, and support to rapidly and effectively address the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, we have seen that organizations that have either historically, or recently, made certain technology investments have demonstrated a unique agility to adapt to the immediate needs.
Specifically, Silverline has worked with many healthcare organizations, especially in New York City, to help them react quickly to a changing business models and needs of patients in their community. A few examples of what we have been doing with customers include:
- Largest urgent care in NYC — We’ve leveraged Salesforce marketing cloud to establish COVID-19 specific patient communications both before, during, and after interactions.
- Largest provider in New York State — We already helped them deploy a patient access solution on Salesforce, and due to this infrastructure, in partnership with them they were able to deploy a new patient access application in 24hrs to address massive increases of COVID-19 related triage via inbound calls. Further, we’ve leveraged native chat capabilities for internal communications and external call deflection to focus on the highest priority patient inquiries.
- Largest independent multi-speciality medical group in NY — We’ve leveraged Salesforce marketing cloud to adjust, increase, and extend patient communications to at risk patients, following emergency room visits, and to educate around telehealth capabilities.
- Large Workforce Health Solution Provider – We’ve leveraged Salesforce community capabilities to create a self-service access point for employers to provide tailored, validated, and useful information regarding COVID-19 as well as the opportunity to submit formal inquiries to be followed up on by Health Professionals
Further, as part of our partnership with Salesforce, we were identified as a preferred partner to help organizations leverage their free care response trial offering. We have already successfully deployed this for Truman Medical Center (click here for the full story) in Missouri to track inbound inquiries from patients and consumers, survey their condition and history and route them to the appropriate care setting, while providing collaboration tools for the community at large to receive information on the virus. We continue to have conversations on a weekly basis for other organizations looking to capitalize on this capability as well.
We will continue to support our employees, our clients and Salesforce and our other partners to ensure we can help engage consumers to support their health during this time of crisis.
By Randall Ward, Appfire CEO
“Be Human” is our guiding core value at Appfire. Now, more than ever, our team has been reminded of the importance of remembering that we’re all only human. I have been so inspired and encouraged by our team’s response to this unprecedented time.
Another one of our company values is “Light the way” and I hope that sharing the ways we’ve extended special care both within and outside of Appfire will inspire other organizations to do the same on #GivingTuesdayNow.
Here at Appfire, we’re well-practiced in remote work. As a global team, we were able to quickly pivot to 100% remote several weeks ago thanks to the efforts of our amazing business systems and operations teams. Beyond the technical side of supporting remote work, our HR team also provided resources on managing stress and leveraging the connection between wellbeing and productivity.
Since a global pandemic is no normal work-from-home situation, our team has also adjusted our benefits to include additional paid time off not only for personal and family illness but also simply to care for our children and take a breather on occasion.
Staying connected is essential for people and, as an organization, we know that taking care of both our health and that of our families is the number one priority. So we’ve cut back on business meetings and also introduced other ways for our team to feel connected and supported.
For instance, we’ve instituted daily “family lunches.” These short, 15-minute Zoom calls are completely optional and are often joined by kids and pets. The only rule? No work talk. We even have themed lunches (yes, our team fell “prey” to the Tiger King craze).
Amidst all that’s happening, our Appfire team members have also found ways to extend support to their communities. Sharing updates via our #LivingThePledge Slack channel, our employees have donated to local food banks, dropped off supplies to neighbors in need, and helped fundraise for hospitals.
On the customer side, we know we’re not the only ones adjusting to new difficulties every week. That’s why we offered an extension to our grandfather pricing program so customers can maintain their pricing from 2019. Additionally, as an Atlassian partner, we’re fully supportive of their efforts to offer work-enabling technology for free and we’re continuing to partner with Atlassian to find more ways to support teams that may be struggling.
If there was ever a time for empathy, that time is now. We know our teammates and customers are working under exhausting circumstances, and we want to continue to offer support in creative and considerate ways.No person, and no company, is an island. We exist in a very interconnected ecosystem and during this time, we know that the way forward is together.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
Our thoughts go out to anyone who has been personally impacted by the COVID-19 virus, and we wish you and your families all the best.
The first thing Addteq did in response to the pandemic was providing our team the ability to work from home. Being a leader in the DevOps industry allowed us to easily implement the trends, like cloud hosting, to maximize collaboration among the entire global team.
Our CEO, Sukhbir Dhillon explains further, “Earlier this decade we pivoted to cloud products and services. When we all walked out of work on March 11th, we didn’t have to do anything special to enable our employees to work from home. Our natural design helped us stay distanced while remaining as one team working together. Our consistent touch points and best practices enabled our team to provide the best Addteq experience to our customers during this difficult time.”
By allowing virtual gatherings during this mandated work from home time, Addteq has seen an increase in team morale. We are also noticing that new ideas are being surfaced daily from other team members. Addteq implemented a bi-weekly Friday all hands meeting where our founders, Sukhbir Dhillon and Amanda Deol, fill the team in on the latest Addteq information and offer some lighter conversation opportunities. We also have daily stretch/coffee breaks, monthly beer & brag sessions and we are working on a virtual ping-pong tournament. (Ping-pong is sort of our thing!)
“The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the definition of normal for the entire world. At Addteq, with all the employees globally working remotely, we have come closer to each other as an organization. We have our amazing teams working hard and positively to achieve better customer service satisfaction in these difficult times and helping all our customers in every way possible.” – Sneha Sheth – Chief Delivery Officer
We’ve also created some ways to cope in quarantine.
As the number of cases from the pandemic grew across the country, Addteq realized the need to help the community and local small businesses. Addteq is currently working in collaboration with the local Princeton Municipality to create a Fund to help the local business community. In addition, Addteq has decided to:
- Donate 1% of Addteq Software sales during the pandemic to various philanthropic efforts & organizations
- Offer free remote work products for Atlassian tools to non-profit or organizations with less than 500 users
- Accessibility and compliance app for Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence called Unstoppable. Find out how to make your Confluence accessible.
- Confluence spreadsheet creation & collaboration with Excellentable. Stay collaborative while working remotely with Excellentable.
- Extended employee volunteer time off opportunities so our employees can provide any assistance that is needed
- Virtual training for DevOps & Atlassian and technical assistance by our employees
As the situation continues to unfold, Addteq is committed to adapting and persevering for you and with you, during this time. From all of us at Addteq we hope you keep calm, stay productive and remember, this too shall pass. Stay Safe.
If you want to learn more about the solutions Addteq is providing for our team, customers, local businesses, and Americans alike, please reach out to sales@addteq.com.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
At ActiveCampaign, one of our core values is “grow with gratitude.” In this present moment, we feel fortunate to be in a position to both give back to our communities and take care of our global team.
Our employees, our customers, and our communities are always top-of-mind, and as we continue to navigate COVID-19 alongside the rest of the world, we’re inspired by the countless ways in which we’re seeing people come together to support one another. Here are a few ways we’re providing support at ActiveCampaign:
Support for our Employees
We are fortunate that the work we do can be done from the safety of our homes. However, we appreciate that a fully remote work situation is not without its challenges. As we transitioned to a fully remote workforce, we implemented:
- New wellness programs focused on nutrition, social well-being, and mental health
- Employee, manager, and parent resource groups
- Guided live yoga and meditation
- One time reimbursement for WFH equipment
Helping our Customers
ActiveCampaign serves thousands of small businesses every single day, and we always strive to support them with best-in-class solutions and resources. Though we can’t be together in-person, we recently launched Digital Study Halls for our customers to continue to learn from our Education team and each other, no matter where they’re located.
Small businesses have been hit hard by recent events, and while we always offered consultative support to every level of customer, this crisis has asked our team to dig deep, and reach new levels of creativity to help customers meet the challenges they are facing. Our Support and Success teams will continue to work with every ActiveCampaign customer to navigate this unpredictable time and help them do the same for their own customers.
Giving Back
As a company, we use Bonusly to recognize our teammates, but it’s also a tremendous vehicle for giving back.
With a number of organizations to choose from and the ability to create custom rewards, we’re able to empower our team to give back by donating their points to causes they care about.
Inspired by the Giving Tuesday Now movement and the generosity demonstrated by our employees, we’re matching employee Bonusly point donations during the month of May made to the local and global organizations that they care about and who need support now more than ever.
Supporting Local Businesses and Communities in Need
Upon witnessing the immediate impact of COVID-19 on small businesses and local communities, our employees sprung into action. A few of the things we’ve seen:
- Campaign tracking spreadsheets can help individuals track which campaigns need the most help, and prioritize their efforts. This tracker, created by our own Kelly O’Connell, lets Chicagoans track over 500 businesses that need support.
- In addition to the company match, employees are donating their birthday Bonusly points to fundraising too. Sarah Nicholaev and Colleen Bowe, on our Education and Marketing teams, recently raised a combined $849.25 for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. That’s 2,547 meals for Chicagoans facing hunger!
We’re proud to join Pledge 1% and its members on this global day of giving and unity to be a force for good.