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.

At Optimizely, we love seeing customers being bold in driving impactful business results with their experiments. To celebrate these inspiring and creative ideas, we are thrilled to announce the finalists and winners of the 2019 Outperform Awards.

MOST DRAMATIC BUSINESS IMPACT

Summary: HP has been a strategic customer with Optimizely since 2015. In mid-2017, they developed aggressive goals for increasing experimentation velocity by expanding their program globally and set out to double their revenue benefits within two years. By defining a differentiated service offering for digital stakeholders across the company, there are now eight full-time members in the team supporting multiple functional groups across the Americas, EMEA & Asia Pacific markets.

After exceeding the two-year targets within the first 12 months, year to date HP has successfully executed over 1000 experiments marking year on year growth of over 65% in experimentation volume and are on track to deliver directly attributable revenue growth of over 30% for 2019.

Finalist:  Credit Union Australia, Chris Russell, Senior Manager Digital Optimization

MOST CUSTOMER-OBSESSED COMPANY CULTURE

Summary:  IBM has been undergoing a methodical digital transformation, injecting technology into business practices, in an effort to provide users the best experiences.

Championed by IBM Global Marketing, and led in large part by Ari & Suman’s efforts, experimentation began building momentum and grew from ‘none-to-ton’, with current adoption across 20+ BUs, 6,000+ marketers. Despite the rapid rate of adoption in a relatively short period of time, the internal cultural shift was perhaps the greatest challenge. IBM has always strived to be customer-centric, but an increasingly digital user journey required an otherwise traditional GTM model to adopt a deeper audience-driven methodology. This inevitably paved the way for a comprehensive experimentation program, powered by Optimizely’s technology in conjunction with IBM’s existing tech stack. There is still more to be done, but through Ari, Suman and team, IBM is evolving to meet market demand.

Finalist:  The Wall Street Journal, Peter Gray, VP of Product Optimization

MOST TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION

Summary:  StubHub uses Optimizely Full Stack to experiment deep in their product. By testing multiple iterations of their search engine algorithms, they were able to improve the conversion rate by 20% and increase revenue. StubHub also used Full Stack to test different versions of a new auto-pricing option for sellers. These improvements doubled the rate of sellers using the new auto pricing option which drove a significant lift in sell-through rate. Optimizely impacts StubHub’s whole business, and Marilyn and Todd are the heroes behind this innovation.

Finalist:  Hudson’s Bay Co., Ivy Lee, Director of Product & Insights

MOST INSPIRING SOCIAL IMPACT 

Summary:  Sierra Club, one of the world’s leading environmental nonprofits, has increased online donations by a 830% since 2015, and experimenting with Optimizely has been instrumental in fueling this growth. Partnering with Cro Metrics, they have used Optimizely to run tests around home page design, donation forms, and email signups. After seeing a dramatic improvement with their initial web and form tests (to the tune of two million dollars), Sierra Club has tripled the size of their internal team to nine and are running more complex tests like actions around advocacy, petition signups, and even encouraging members to write letters to Congress.

 Congratulations to all of the 2019 Outperform Award winners, finalists, and our customers and partner community for the outstanding work they have accomplished.

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.

Education is a human right. We believe that all people deserve the opportunity to grow, access quality learning resources and build their skills. And this is especially true for the 70.8 million people displaced around the globe right now.

When people think of the needs that people fleeing conflict have, they often think of them in a hierarchy—food, shelter and water. But equally important is access to consistent, quality education. Education enables continuity, agency, development and a path toward employment. It creates agency among youth and adults, so they can make informed decisions, access services, advocate for their rights and build a new future for themselves and their communities.

That’s why on this Giving Tuesday, Pluralsight One is proud to deepen our partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a humanitarian, non-governmental organization that protects the rights of people affected by displacement.

Our Giving Tuesday campaign is focused on raising awareness for NRC’s children and youth education programs. And we’re asking you, our community and team members to join us in support of children and youth who have been displaced by conflict by making a donation to the NRC’s education programs, which we’ll match dollar for dollar up to $50,000. 

The NRC works hard to empower refugees and spread awareness about their situations by sharing stories from some of the most challenging and volatile places in the world. In 2018, the organization helped 8.5M people in need by providing them with life-saving resources like food, clean water, warm clothes, shelter, education and legal assistance to help them claim their rights.

Pluralsight One’s strategic partnership with the NRC was formed to help create sustainable social impact for displaced and crisis-affected populations around the world, while increasing the efficiency and efficacy of the NRC staff who serve them. We’re helping the NRC digitally transform and improve its ability to use data for decision making. We’re also focused on helping all displaced people gain access to education opportunities.

Together, we can ensure everyone has the ability to learn and develop the skills they need to create their own future and build a stronger global community.

Join us to ensure access to high quality education for refugees, internally displaced, and people escaping conflict this Giving Tuesday. Help us reach our goal by donating today at this link.

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.

Pledgeling’s purpose is to build technology that allows companies of all sizes to integrate social impact into their core business. We joined Pledge 1% because we believe that giving back can and should be an integral part of every business.

We also believe that real change can happen if we put resources in the hands of nonprofits by making it as easy as possible for companies to give back and support their missions.

We’ve found a like-minded community in Pledge 1%, and are excited to be part of such an inspirational network of companies harnessing the power of business to create positive change in the world.

The Pledge 1% ethos is essential to Pledgeling, and below are some of the ways that we are actively giving back our time, products, and profit back to communities around the world.

While employee and customer engagement are essential, we fundamentally believe that a company can also give a portion of their equity, time, product, or profit to nonprofits who are working on causes around the world that matter most.

Giving Through Time & Product

We are first and foremost a technology company, and we feel strongly about giving back through our technology. We made the commitment early on in our company journey to provide our fundraising technology for free to nonprofits.

Our impact so far in 2019:

• Funding: Pledgeling’s technology platform has powered over $10MM in new funding sources to our nonprofit partners enabling them to further their mission. These resources have helped to accomplish the following outputs, including planting 325,678 trees, providing 1,735,160 meals to families in need, providing over 545,700 people with access to clean water and removing over 6,126 pounds of trash from the ocean.


• In-Kind: We have provided over $283K in-kind to support over 3,000 nonprofits, including text to donate technology, fundraiser pages, and access to our digital Impact Hub to track donations in real-time.


• Time & Training: We have invested over 4,000 hours of time, including allocating 2 full-time employees, to training and supporting our nonprofit partners on the best practices in fundraising and how to quantify their impact to improve their storytelling and ability to increase funding for their missions.

Giving Through Collaboration with Pledge 1% Members

Through the Pledge 1% network, we’ve partnered with other Pledge 1% Builders, including Box.org and DocuSign, to engage 178,000 attendees at the BoxWorks and Dreamforce to support nonprofit organizations including NetHope, PATH, Friends of the Urban Forest, The Wilderness Society, and Rainforest Trust through mobile donations. This is the potential of the Pledge 1% network, sparking collaboration between members to multiply our individual efforts into a cohesive collective impact.

Box’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel making a donation via Apple Pay to NetHope and PATH using Pledgeling’s Text to Donate product on the main stage of BoxWorks ‘19.

Giving Through Our Customer Network

In the spirit of Giving Tuesday, here are a few holiday partnerships that Pledgeling forged through our network of mission-driven businesses and nonprofits:

Cost Plus World Market launched a donation at checkout program with Rebuilding Together to ensure that people across the United States have a safe place to call home. All 276 Cost Plus World Market stores nationwide, consumers are able to make a donation benefiting their local community and see the real-time impact of their donations printed out on every receipt.

Warner Music Group is donating ten trees for every employee towards replanting projects in the Amazon Rainforest as an end-of-year holiday gift. This will be approximately 40,000 trees planted with the help of One Tree Planted.

The Erdington spirits portfolio, including brands such as Macallan, Highland Park, Brugal and Partida Spirits are supporting eight nonprofits that align with each brand and their core values. Each of their bottles will be #WrappedInGood with hangtags on every bottle sold empowering their customers to select a nonprofit that Edrington will make a donation to on their behalf.

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Thank you to Pledge 1% for creating a community for companies around the world to meaningfully give back throughout the year. We look forward to the impact that will be achieved together!

Happy Holidays & Happy Giving from Team Pledgeling!

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.

Defy Colorado is a nonprofit organization that helps individuals with criminal histories — who they call Entrepreneurs in Training — create legal business ventures outside of prison. Within a growing network of three Colorado prisons, Defy runs a rigorous eight-month program focusing on reentry planning, employment readiness, entrepreneurship and character development, culminating in a Shark Tank-style pitch competition. Operating in concert with the Department of Corrections, Defy is demonstrating a model to reduce recidivism that emphasizes rehabilitation over punishment.

Techstars has been a longtime supporter of Defy Colorado (along with its founding organization, Defy Ventures) because we support the mission of creating second chances through entrepreneurship. And we believe that we are uniquely positioned to help, precisely because of who we are. In fact, the first principle in the Techstars Code of Conduct is: “We give first.” That means that, at Techstars, we help others whenever possible by responding quickly to requests for help to intentionally create an ongoing cycle of virtue. We appreciate the help of others, respect “no” as an answer and share talent and business opportunities.

Breaking the Cycle of Recidivism

Defined as “a tendency to relapse into a previous condition or mode of behavior, especially criminal behavior,” recidivism creates a revolving door to prison and a legacy of poverty, dependency, violence and incarceration that is passed down from generation to generation.

Here in Colorado, the prison population is expected to increase by 20% by 2025. And of the approximately 9,000 individuals expected to be released from prison this year, more than half (54%) are estimated to return to prison within the next three years. Difficulty in obtaining employment and housing are two of the largest correlating factors.

Humanizing Connections

When it comes to our work with Defy Colorado, we’re focused on how we can bring Techstars’ unique insights and the power of our network to people with criminal histories, helping to break the cycle of recidivism. By collaborating with Defy to help people with criminal histories create legal business ventures, the Techstars Network is helping break the cycle of recidivism, and there are so many ways to get involved: employment readiness, character development, and entrepreneurship training inside prisons, as well as robust post-release services that include job placement and executive mentorship, startup incubation, and pitch competition judging.

Techstars Foundation advisory board member and Google employee Amanda West and Techstars’ EVP of Operations Scott Ford have each offered their expertise to help Defy’s Entrepreneurs in Training improve their ideas, hone their pitches and ultimately, to equip these incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals with the resources and connections they need to succeed in post-release life. Both Amanda and Scott were blown away — and inspired by — their experiences with Defy Colorado.

“These humanizing connections offer a very uplifting way for our network to get involved, both contributing to the rehabilitation of currently and formerly incarcerated individuals and impacting the injustices of our legal system,” West said.

That human connection is crucial.

“When discussing individuals with criminal histories, it’s easy to come in with preconceived notions or stereotypes, but actually sitting down and interacting with currently and formerly incarcerated individuals helps you realize that they’re just like you,” Ford said.

Best of all, it’s not a heavy lift to help out. Both Scott and Amanda noted how rewarding it was to make such a significant impact on someone with minimal effort. Sure, volunteering takes time, but everyone has the ability to help in some capacity.

Utilizing our network’s privilege in order to drive personal and economic growth for people with criminal histories allows us to drive a meaningful impact and provide a ray of hope. By harnessing the talents of the state’s currently and formerly incarcerated individuals as well as community and business leaders like Amanda and Scott, Defy Colorado helps individuals with criminal histories to defy the odds.

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. 

At Nextep, we want to empower our employees to give back to the community through the Nextep Charitable Foundation. This is why we joined the Pledge 1% movement and are committed to giving our time, dollars, and expertise to organizations in need.

This year, we got even more serious about our volunteer efforts. In addition to giving employees eight hours of paid volunteer time each year, we created Nextep Gives Back Days. Twice a year, all ten of our offices set aside their to-do lists and volunteer with the rest of their team. It’s a great way to rally our people behind Nextep’s culture of giving, while also sending out hundreds of volunteers to lend a hand to organizations in our communities.

 “We created the Nextep Charitable Foundation to encourage our employees to give back to the community,” said Brian Fayak, Nextep’s founder and CEO. “The addition of Nextep Gives Back Days is our opportunity to bring together the entire organization for one day to serve our neighbors and make a big impact on a handful of deserving organizations.”

 From local food banks to community shelters, we’ve packaged meals, built furniture, and organized homes. Our main focus for Nextep Gives Back is to serve children and families and to break down the barriers holding them back. We’ve found incredible partners to serve who share the same mission.

However, Nextep Gives Back Days are not solely focused on our volunteer time. We also make a monetary donation to each organization we serve. In 2019, we donated $17,000, served 873 volunteer hours, and impacted 15 organizations. But those are only the donations from our two Nextep Gives Back Days. Giving back is a year-round initiative for Nextep. Since joining Pledge 1%, we’ve donated $200,000 to organizations in need, served 2,800 volunteer hours, and serviced 10 nonprofits with free services.

Our employees have had an overwhelmingly positive response to Nextep Gives Back Days. Not only do we have nearly 100% employee participation, but our people also talk about their experiences giving back throughout the year.

 “Nextep has allowed me the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than just collecting a paycheck,” said Carrie Henry, benefits account manager. “Giving back to the community is a rewarding feeling and something I have always felt I was missing out on due to time constraints.”

 Our partnership with Pledge 1% and the addition of Nextep Gives Back Days have made a difference in our culture and in the lives of our people, which is why we are ramping up our efforts in 2020. We have big volunteer goals to meet, days of giving to plan, and many more organizations to help. To learn more about our philanthropic efforts, visit nextep.com/foundation.

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.

What happens when 500+ professionals spend one hour collaborating to creatively support one nonprofit’s success? In May of 2019, New Relic did just that.

New Relic is the industry’s largest and most comprehensive cloud-based observability platform built to help customers create more perfect software. The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. As a new member of Pledge 1%, New Relic has committed to leveraging our platform and talented employees to create partnerships and programs to enable nonprofits in their digital journeys. This means not only continuing to provide free licenses of our platform, and discounts to the nonprofit sector, but digging in and understanding nonprofit challenges so that we can better enable and support them.

This spring, our product organization gathered for our yearly offsite, a technical conference and opportunity to engage with one another out of the office. We were thrilled to leverage this gathering to support our NewRelic.org social responsibility program – enabling employees to give back time and talents to a nonprofit partner who was using our product through our free and discounted licenses program.

At the event, we were joined by Jared Chung, Executive Director of CareerVillage.org, a community where students get free personalized career advice from real-life professionals, and also.a recipient of New Relic.org’s product donation program. We invited Jared and CareerVillage.org to engage in an (never before attempted at this scale) exercise to leverage our technical talents, professional advice and passion to help this charity. 500+ employees participated in a session in which nearly 400 gave career advice on their digital platform while the other 100 participated in pro bono round activities. These activities included assessment of current usage of New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring capability, design thinking activities around the organization’s toughest challenges, live content moderation and UX bug review and ticketing. When we all worked together to bring advice and technical assistance to this nonprofit customer, we not only had a huge impact on their organization, but we created their “biggest day ever,” which is exactly what our product was designed to support.

For CareerVillage.org, knowing that 500+ people would be using their platform at once amounted to their biggest digital moment; it was no less important to their mission and success than when retail customers need to keep their websites running during Cyber Monday. It required them to bring on additional servers, and spend days testing to ensure that their site would be able to take the volume of users we were about to throw at them. This is part of what we at New Relic are inspired and excited to support for the nonprofit sector.

 “New Relic was a major driver of the biggest day in CareerVillage.org history. Thursday May 9th, 2019 saw the most career advice provided to students since the site launched: over 1200 pieces of advice in 24 hours,” Jared Chung shared.

Keeping a charity’s website up and running on Giving Tuesday, (when $400M of donations were made online in the US alone last year), or ensuring that 500 professionals can use the CareerVillage.org platform at once – these are the biggest moments for nonprofits, and these are the moments that New Relic is uniquely positioned to support.

 For more information about the NewRelic.org program – and how we’ve operationalized our 1% pledge of time and product – head to www.newrelic.org

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.

Increasing Access to Innovation

Silicon Valley Bank is the bank of the innovation economy, helping innovators, entrepreneurs and investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB has long believed in the power of giving back, and became a Pledge 1% member in 2017. Through programs in its offices around the world, SVB seeks to support its communities with time and resources. Aligned with the company’s role as a champion of innovation, it recently launched Access to Innovation, a new initiative to expand opportunities for underrepresented individuals at all career levels in the innovation economy.

“We believe everyone should have equal access to great careers and business success,” Greg Becker, CEO of SVB, said. “The innovation economy, the ecosystem we help fuel, is full of opportunities. Through a range of programs, partnerships, volunteering and financing, we have a companywide goal to increase access to innovation for everyone.”

Why is SVB doing this?

Tech companies report that it is challenging to find people with the skills needed to grow their businesses, and it is hampering how fast they can innovate. SVB believes there is talent to be found in nontraditional places. SVB also believes that a diverse workforce makes companies stronger.

The numbers help underscore the size of the challenge:

• 83 percent of tech executives are white


• 47 percent of U.S. startups have no women in executive roles


• <1 percent of venture funding goes to African-American founders


• 12 percent of venture dollars are invested in startups with a female founder

Core focus areas

SVB’s Access to Innovation program has distinct goals and partnerships in three areas to increase diverse representation at all levels:

Educational Opportunities: Training emerging talent and creating workforce opportunities for individuals without four-year degrees. 

Connections and Funding: Developing networks, partnerships and events to bring founders and investors together to increase funding for female and minority entrepreneurs.

Representation in Leadership: Increasing representation of female and minority founders, investors, and board members.

Recent examples of progress

• With the goal of increasing the talent pool available to its clients, this year SVB identified one of the most needed entry-level positions among its clients: business and data analytics. Working with EdTech startup, Pathstream, it introduced a business and data analytics certificate program to be offered through community colleges. The program teaches high-demand skills such as SQL, Tableau, and Python. The four-course certificate program is up and running now at Cañada College and Foothill College in Silicon Valley and is scheduled to expand to additional U.S. cities in 2020.

Students in the SVB Business and Data Analytics Certification course met for a development roundtable in San Francisco

• Teaming up with Year Up, SVB encourages urban young adults to reach their potential through a corporate internship and support for transitioning to a job in technology. SVB hosts interns throughout the year and asks its clients to mentor and host Year Up interns as well. Today, 26 former SVB interns are now working full-time at the bank or leading tech companies in a variety of roles, such as information technology, cybersecurity, global operations and project management.

AfroTech Cup Semifinalist team. From left, Erik Young (Audios), Crystal Evuleocha (Kliit Health), Ty Lisha Summers (Spendebt) and DeMarcus Williams (Director, Startup Banking, Silicon Valley Bank). Photo credit: Semharyohannes

• SVB was thrilled to partner this year with AfroTech to create an onsite career village for prospective clients and employees to engage with SVB and its clients. The bank also supported the AfroTech Cup, which offered prizes to founders of early-stage startups. Shown above are this year’s incredible crop of semifinalists – Audios, Kliit Health and Spendebt.

Learn more about  Access to Innovation to join with us to build a more inclusive and diverse tech workforce ready to invent the future.

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.

By the PagerDuty team.

PagerDuty is in the business of enabling people to take action. As a company, we have been able to assist thousands of customers in a multitude of fields to support their end users. This approach of empowerment has translated to PagerDuty.org, with the aim of mobilizing our people and product to accelerate the impact of mission-driven customers and nonprofit partners across our global communities.

When we took the Pledge 1% in September 2017, we committed one percent each of product, employee working time, and company equity to accelerate the work of nonprofit partners like the Trevor Project, where real-time response is critical.

As a result of this equity commitment, we recently launched our philanthropic foundation, the PagerDuty.org Fund, with a focus on Time-Sensitive Global Health and a vision to help organizations bring essential medical care to people who need it, in the hardest-to-reach places, in the moments they need it most. We are proud to invest in the work of Medic Mobile and VillageReach, two organizations improving response times for medical care.

In honor of our customers today on #GivingTuesday, we have made a $25,000 donation to these two organizations to pay the monthly salaries for 200 community health workers and ensure 700 individuals receive life-saving vaccines. To date, people in over 150 countries have donated more than $400 million on #GivingTuesday. Additionally, as part of our #GivingTuesday pledge, we are launching an internal giving campaign. Each of our employees, interns, and contractors have been granted $25 to contribute toward these two organizations—or any other cause they care about.

Medic Mobile

Medic Mobile is on a mission to improve health in the hardest-to-reach communities. They build world-class, open-source software that supports health workers delivering equitable care that reaches everyone.

“Reaching everyone on the planet with high-quality care, when and where they need it, will require redesigned health systems with care teams supported by world-class technology. I’m thrilled that PagerDuty is stepping up to contribute to this effort. The speed of care delivery is critical—our progress on speed may determine whether or not we meet overall goals for health equity,” shared Josh Nesbit, Medic Mobile CEO.

Donations to Medic Mobile can provide tangible impact:

• $2,800 educates one Pharmacy Assistant (who will treat 25K-100K people per year)


• $200 equips a community health worker with a smartphone, supports training, and covers data and airtime for a year to enable them to deliver real-time care to ~100 families in remote communities

VillageReach

VillageReach works to increase access to quality healthcare in low-resource communities.

“We must build people-centered health systems [that] reach people where they are, with the products and services they need. We are proud to partner with PagerDuty.org for the advancement of rapid response technologies that can connect health systems to innovations that withstand unpredictable change,” said Emily Bancroft, President of VillageReach.

Donations to VillageReach can provide tangible impact:

• $100 pays one monthly salary to a full-time Community Health Worker (a demonstrated 10:1 social return on investment)


• $33 covers necessary vaccines for one person in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

PagerDuty is proud to play a small part in supporting two such organizations. We hope you’ll join us on #GivingTuesday to support Medic Mobile, VillageReach, or a cause close to you. Whether you give your voice, your time, or your money, your generosity matters.