As originally published on prnewswire.com

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — As part of its drive to remove paper from the process of doing business, DocuSign Inc. (NADSAQ:DOCU) today announced its ‘DocuSign for Forests’ initiative—a broad commitment to help protect the world’s forests that includes financial donations, broad scale support of non-profit organizations, and a commitment to donate 1% of expanded revenues earned from customers that pledge to improve their paper-use practices.

The initiative was unveiled at the ‘Fighting for Forests’ session during the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2019 in Davostoday alongside several sustainability luminaries—including Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and United Nations Messenger of Peace; Thomas Friedman, author and New York Times columnist; Paul Polman, outgoing Unilever CEO and co-founder of the Tropical Forests Alliance; and Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce.

As part of the DocuSign for Forests initiative, DocuSign will initially commit $1.5M this year to support organizations doing critical work to preserve the world’s forests—and it will continue to donate more over time.

This includes an immediate grant of $1M to the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation—a non-profit organization announced today to ensure that Dr. Goodall’s tireless work to protect the environment can continue to benefit future generations. The commitment to the Foundation will come in equal parts from the DocuSign IMPACT Foundation and from company CEO Dan Springer in his personal capacity. The remaining $500,000 will then be earmarked for other forest-focused organizations.

DocuSign will also invite new and existing customers to improve their environmental and paper-use practices by taking a pledge at docusign.com/forests, and by moving more of their paper-based processes onto DocuSign. In return, the company will donate 1% of the expanded revenue from those customers to forest-protection causes. It will also add a calculator into its core eSignature product to showcase how people are reducing waste and positively impacting the environment—and they can also evaluate their green score at docusign.com/esign/green-score.

“As a company whose core offering is inherently forest-friendly, we are helping to save hundreds of trees every day as our more than 450,000 customers around the world decrease their use of paper. As a result, we believe we can galvanize even more people to act to protect the world’s forests,” said Springer. “We want everyone to ask whether it’s necessary to print documentation, and if so to print as little as possible. We want them to recycle all their discarded paper. And we want them to continue embracing technology to digitize as many of their business processes as possible.”

In terms of the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, for almost 60 years Dr. Goodall has pioneered our understanding of the animal kingdom and the environment at large—as well as the harm that humanity is inflicting on it, and solutions for protecting it as a result. The Foundation seeks to support innovative, scalable global solutions that serve to address the critical balance between preserving nature and meeting the needs of humankind.

“I have launched the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation in the hope that we can create an endowment that will enable the programs I have developed to continue, new ones to be initiated, and so that the fight for the good of the natural world will continue beyond my lifetime,” said Dr. Goodall. “DocuSign and Dan Springer are among the first supporters of the Foundation, and I am delighted to partner with them in our goal of protecting and restoring the planet’s resources.”

“DocuSign’s new initiative is an impactful commitment to environmental causes that reinforces the mission of Pledge 1%, while addressing one of the world’s most urgent and important challenges: climate change,” said Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce. “At Salesforce we believe that every business can be a platform for positive change and we co-founded Pledge 1% with the intention of evangelizing that message. We’re thrilled to see DocuSign implementing a bold commitment like this and hope others sign the pledge to make early-stage philanthropy the standard.”

For more information please visit docusign.com/forests.

Qalaxia and Pledge 1% have partnered to make it convenient for existing members and new members of the Pledge 1% community to  pledge and fulfill 1% of their time at their leisure from home or office by helping provide the best answers to student-questions posted online.

Pledge 1% members can help solve a pressing problem via ten-minute bite-sized chunks. Many students leave their questions unasked because they are afraid of ridicule by peers, are concerned that they are wasting their teachers’ time, or do not have access to experts at home who can answer. Qalaxia changes that. Qalaxia, a Pledge 1% partner and an NSF funded startup, is working to ensure that no student question goes unasked. Qalaxia provides schools, afterschool programs and non-profit organizations that are working with underprivileged students with a free online student Q&A service that provides a safe environment and answers students questions on topics ranging from homework to career choices.

Many companies can only afford to start in the Pledge 1% community by pledging 1% of their time (1% of a 40 hour week is just 20 minutes!). Even this can be burdensome for early-stage startups looking for opportunities to give back to the community. Qalaxia changes that. With Qalaxia, members who are pressed for time can make a meaningful impact in students’ lives by doing it whenever and wherever they can find ten minutes in their calendar. Qalaxia’s downloadable reports also make it easy for members to measure their impact.

To learn more about Pledge 1% or to see how you can participate, visit pledge1percent.org or email the team at members@pledge1percent.org .

To learn more about Qalaxia and how to give 1% of your time in bite-sized ten minute chunks visit qalaxia.com, or email Raji at r@qalaxia.com.

After almost 30 years in the nonprofit sector, TJ Warfield created her own company, Data Geeks Lab, which provides Salesforce setup, coding, and consulting services exclusively for non-profits. Because community is part of Data Geeks Lab’s core values, TJ joined the Pledge 1%.

But when she recently audited her contributions, she realized she was way off track. While her company makes annual charitable donations equal to about 1% of gross income, her direct service hours are way over 1%. In fact, donated staff time makes up 17% of billable hours.

And TJ isn’t planning on reducing this amount anytime soon.

Why such a big commitment? For TJ, it’s about giving back, but also about building community and pushing the Salesforce non-profit tools forward. And, of course, it’s also good for her relationships with existing clients.

Almost all of TJ’s direct service hours go to providing community support for non-profits around the world who rely on Salesforce to keep their operations running.

When TJ started in the Salesforce world, non-profits were on their own to figure out how to make the platform work for them. Documentation was slim, the user groups and forums didn’t exist, and there wasn’t even a universal platform that solved the basic needs of most non-profits. That changed, though, when Salesforce.org made a major commitment to its non-profit users, and built out an ecosystem to support them.

Having access to resources and knowing how to use them are two different things though.  That’s where TJ and Data Geeks Lab comes in.  TJ answers questions in “The Hub,” the online forum for Salesforce non-profit users, participates in the Salesforce.org Open-Source Community Sprints, and participates in meetings for the Bay Area Non-Profit Salesforce Users Group.

Participating in the Hub forums takes up a lot of the volunteer hours donated by Data Geeks Lab. Often TJ can help a user solve their problem more quickly and thoroughly than the standard Salesforce support people can, just because she has spent years dealing with the specific kinds of problems non-profits encounter. Sometimes she’s even jumped in and worked one-on-one with a user to solve their actual problem – no charge. When she can invest just a few minutes of her time to get an organization back on track to fulfill their social mission, that’s a lot of leverage, and it provides a lot of satisfaction.

One of TJ’s most rewarding contributions is the time she spends at the Community Sprints. These events, held 3 times a year, bring together in-house Salesforce developers, non-profit and education users, and implementation partners like Data Geeks Lab to discuss issues, write documentation, discuss and spec out new functionality, and sometimes even build new features. These in-person events are hosted by Salesforce and free to attend. The same people often attend each Sprint, and it becomes almost like a family reunion.

Contributing to the community is its own reward, but also brings benefits in Data Geeks Lab’s relationship with its customers. For example, TJ lets her clients know she’ll be unavailable during the Sprints, but her customers know she’s working on making their non-profit Salesforce experience better. And when they see her in the Hub forums helping others, they get proof of her depth of knowledge with Salesforce’s offerings, which leads to deeper trust.

One of the core values of Data Geeks Lab is to “Lift as you climb,” meaning that the company sees helping others as an integral part of its own success. The Pledge 1% program has been a natural fit, even if it has been hard to stick to just giving 1%.