By the team at Salsify.
“I definitely see technology in my future.” Enthusiastic 6th grader, Mario Umana Academy, Boston
As with most of the best ideas, it started with a bunch of smart women in a room. Some of the women at Salsify get together occasionally to share experiences, strategize about thorny problems, and perhaps enjoy an adult beverage.
Over dinner a couple of years ago, they were focused on a familiar and distressing theme – the lack of diversity in tech.
With all the discussions, diversity committees, and tech pub op-eds, we’re still in an industry where women are on track to fill only 3 percent of the projected 1.4 million jobs opening in computer science by 2020. Currently, Black and Latinx workers make up just 5% of the workforce, according to a recent study by Atlassian.
The coworkers/dinner companions decided that it wasn’t enough to be talk about the problem – they resolved to do something about it. They reasoned that to really bend the curve towards long-term diversity, the enthusiasm for STEM careers needs to start early. In middle school, where a sense of the possible can take root.
And thus, Guppy Tank was born.
If the lawyers ask, the name has nothing to do with Shark Tank, the television competition series where entrepreneurs pitch their tech ideas to crabby investors. However, the women at Salsify did come up with the inspiration to bring middle school kids into Salsify, armed with their own ideas for apps that could help their peers. Split into groups, they huddled with teams of Salsify employees from engineering, sales and marketing that guided the students to design, build and pitch initial prototypes of their own problem-solving software to a panel of judges.
It’s magic. But don’t take my word for it – watch the video of our latest iteration. You’ll see the joy, the savviness, the perception, and enthusiasm of these kids from local Boston schools. Throughout the morning, they were exposed to all the major steps that it takes to bring a tech idea to life. How will it change someone’s day? Who’s the customer? What should the experience be like? How you do bring it to market? How do you make money?
In fact, Guppy Tank worked so well that this fall the Boston Foundation teamed with TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good) and the Boston Public Schools to develop a formalized curriculum and scale it to 10 other companies and 250 students for this past October’s Tech Gives Back day. In addition, school systems from Los Angeles to Chicago have expressed interest in introducing the model into their schools.
Salsify’s employees are always the engine of our philanthropic efforts. The passion of a few inspires action by the many. That is why we are so proud to be a Pledge 1% Gives company through the commitment of one our co-founders, Jeremy Redburn. It reinforces our philosophy that seemingly small efforts can reap tremendous impact over time. If your company is interested in sparking a Guppy Tank crusade in your community schools, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. #givingtuesday is a perfect day to start a STEM revolution in your community.
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
Submit your Referrals, Receive a Reward & Give to Charity
Today is Giving Tuesday, A Global Day of Giving! As such, the time seemed perfect for Pledge 1% member Geopointe to launch its new Referral Rewards Program to help usher in a givingholiday season. For every qualified referral you submit, a $50 Amazon Gift Card will be sent your way. On top of that, all referrals submitted during the 2017 holiday season will provide food to those in need.
Champion a Worthy Charity
In addition to the $50 Amazon Gift Card for each referral submission, we’ll send a $50 donation in your name to Rise Against Hunger, an international nonprofit fighting to solve world hunger. Each referral that gets accepted will be matched with this charitable incentive.
#2030isPossible
According to the official Rise Against Hunger website, they are “an international hunger relief organization that distributes food and life-changing aid to the world’s most vulnerable, mobilizing the necessary resources to end hunger by 2030.” To provide further perspective, here are just a few of their humanitarian accomplishments:
- 1,824,424: Meals Packaged This Week
- 362,955,535: Total Meals Packaged
- 74: Countries Served
- 1,040,351: People Served in 2016
- $17.6: million Gifts in Kind Distributed in 2016
Our Pledge at Dreamforce 2017
As Geopointe continues to grow, we continue to strive to further our philanthropic efforts and give back to the community. This made our decision to participate in the Pledge 1% Program at Dreamforce for the second year in a row an easy one. For every badge scanned at the Geopointe booth, a dollar was donated to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Additionally, members of the Geopointe team volunteered to help the Pledge 1% team spread awareness of the program at Dreamforce. During this season of giving, philanthropy is on our minds more than ever which is why we’re excited to extend our philanthropic efforts through the end of the year with the announcement of our Customer Referral Rewards Program.
How to Send Referrals & Claim Rewards
To take part in the program, you must submit your referrals using our online submission form. Once submitted, we will review your referral based on the official contest guidelines. Once approved, you’ll receive an email with a $50 Amazon gift card (digital) and a $50 donation will be sent to Rise Against Hunger, in your name. If you choose, you also have the option to donate your reward as well.
Seasonal Offer Deadline
Don’t wait – the additional $50 will no longer be available once the ball drops at midnight, Jan. 1, 2018. And, if your holiday schedule gets as crazy as most, we recommend you send your referrals today, or as soon as you have a free minute. Don’t put off this chance to Rise Against Hunger!
For more information and to submit your referrals, head to the link below and help us make a difference!
https://www.geopointe.com/referral-rewards-program/
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
By Amanda Deol, Addteq
In the last blog on Spotlight on #BeBoldForChange Campaign at Addteq, we talked about our individual 2017 goals for the Women in Tech movement, and Pledge 1% growth at Addteq. Our goals were to empower women’s advancement, promote women’s education and promote gender equality. Now that we are nearing the end of 2017, Addteq is proud to say that we have succeeded at our mission. With minimal to no effort, the program is organically growing within our culture.
We feel that everyone can play an integral role in helping drive better outcomes for all genders. Through result driven actions we can all be responsive in creating a more gender inclusive workplace. The World Economic Forum predicts that the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2186. This is just too long of a wait. This is how Addteq shapes their company culture to help in closing the gender gap.
Our Journey with #BeBoldForChange
We are continuing to Empower Women’s Advancement while driving more focus on education and gender equality.
Promote Women’s Education
Addteq wanted to offer the opportunity to continue education with a tuition reimbursement program and flexible work schedules. We were set out to allocate one tuition reimbursement for the year. However, we over succeeded and allocated three tuition reimbursements for employees. 2 out of the 3 recipients were women. According to the Department of Labor, “only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women. Among computer programmers, the situation is better – but not much. “Women account for only 26% of all American coders.” (via Wired).
Sneha Sheth was one of the employees at Addteq to take benefits of the tuition.
“I am a firm believer that women must have the opportunity to get educated and earn success in life. The tuition flexible schedule helped me achieve my education goals without the burden of paying a large sum of money at the same time. It eased my worry as I could concentrate more on the actual studies than being concerned about the cost”. Sneha Sheth, Atlassian Implementation Expert at Addteq.
We also re-elected, for the second year in a row, a female student from India to receive the Iris Foundation’s International Scholarship award. Suvarana Maji was the first and second year recipient of Addteq’s very own, scholarship award. Addteq continuously works toward our goal to bring more women into technology by promoting women’s education.
Promote Gender Equality
In October of 2016, we launched the gender equality program at Addteq and introduced paternity leave. This was in hopes that the men have equal opportunity to take time off with their loved ones. In October, we had one of the first male employees who took advantage of this new benefit at Addteq. We also allocated flexible work schedules to allocate extra time to the new parents.
Addteq hopes that this new benefit will take the pressure away from new mothers to have to take time away from work. With the new fathers being able to also take time away from work, it alleviates the family’s pressure of missing out on paychecks.
How is Pledge 1% shaping our company’s culture?
We noticed that since we have taken the Pledge and associated Addteq with Room to Read interest by our teammates to give and volunteer has sparked. A few of the employees volunteered to donate a portion of their paycheck toward the Iris Foundation Scholarship Fund. Leaders are becoming philanthropy role models at Addteq by utilizing 1% of their time to volunteering efforts.
Recently Himanshu Chhetri, CTO at Addteq, presented a “DevOps with Atlassian Tools” talk session at nPower. Motive for his presentation was to bring awareness of DevOps to students in the IT field by showing real world examples of DevOps and Atlassian tool usage. Himanshu also wanted to set an example for his team, that you can utilize your day to day work and still volunteer. To continue his effort, Himanshu is interested in setting up an internship program at Addteq to support the nPower students.
Also, while Himanshu is taking leave to visit his home country of Nepal, his goal is to visit ECDC. ECDC’s goal is that “No child should grow up behind prison bars.” Himanshu’s goal is to build an education partnership with ECDC to help promote their cause back in the states.
Pledge 1%, Room to Read and the addition of the Iris Foundation has shaped our company’s culture and allowed the leadership team to look into different causes and programs from another perspective.
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
By Zak Kaufman, Co-Founder and CEO, Vera Solutions
Each November, staff at Vera Solutions nominate peers for annual Recognition Awards, tipping their hats to teammates who have exemplified the company’s five values: Impact, Excellence, Sustainability, Teamwork, and Leadership. The five awards are announced publicly before the holidays on Veraforce, the company’s Salesforce-based system for managing everything from projects to expenses to performance reviews. But award recipients don’t just receive acknowledgement, they help direct which organizations receive a portion of the company’s profits from the year. Over the years, Vera has donated to a range of charitable organizations, including Gardens for Health, GiveDirectly, Planned Parenthood International, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Grassroot Soccer.
“We were already giving back from the beginning,” says Vera Co-Founder and CEO Zak Kaufman. “We created the Recognition Awards to say thanks to our MVPs and to let them drive how we give back as a company.”
And staff are into it. In 2016, Vera staff made over 150 nominations. Carol Ernst, a Vera Consultant who has worked in Mumbai and Geneva, received the 2016 Recognition Award for Excellence. “I think it’s a really unique initiative,” says Ernst. “It feels great to work for a company that not only focuses its work on social impact but also goes further to give back and to recognize staff.”
This is just one way that Vera, a member of the Pledge 1% Movement, is giving back to social sector organizations around the globe. Vera also discounts its consulting rates for non-profits as well as license fees for its Salesforce-based performance indicator management app, Amp Impact. “In reality, we put 100% of our time, energy, and knowledge towards helping social sector organizations,” says Kaufman. “We joined the Pledge 1% movement because we wanted to join other great companies in giving back and setting an example.”
Part of the Vera Solutions team on a 2017 retreat in Western Massachusetts
To learn more about how Vera is amplifying the impact of the social sector, visit www.verasolutions.org.
About Vera Solutions
Vera Solutions is a global social enterprise and Certified B Corporation using cloud and mobile technology to help social sector organizations better track their impact, streamline their operations, and put data in the hands of people who need it. With teams in Mumbai, Cape Town, Geneva, Boston, and Washington DC, Vera works with both implementers and funders, building their capacity to collect, manage, analyze, and utilize data to deliver better results. Since 2010, Vera has worked with more than 220 organizations in 45+ countries, delivering over 140,000 hours of consulting services.
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
By the team at Stiltsoft.
StiltSoft is an Atlassian Silver Solution Partner from Belarus. Being a Pledge 1% member since June 2016, the company is committed to giving back to its local community. The income from the sales of all new $10 licenses is donated to charities, nonprofit organizations and health institutions in Belarus. Part of the company’s giving program is a dear-to-heart tradition to participate in Christmas and New Year festive events that are organized for children with challenges in life. This season is a great time of joy, love, and holiday spirit, when we are grateful for what we have and feel a heartfelt desire to share it with others.
This year, StiltSoft joined up with two Gomel (city the company is based in) organizations that have planned something special for 300 kids. Belarus Red Cross has invited orphans and children with disabilities to a performance in the puppet theater. Unfortunately, life doesn’t often pamper the majority of these kids with amusements and treats. So this event is an extraordinary thing for them, which brings up a lot of positive and uplifting emotions. Gomel nonprofit organization Children’s Hematology will hold something similar for boys and girls who are getting treatment or are in recovery from a blood disease. These kids have been through a long term challenging medical treatment and need support to sustain their body and spirit.
StiltSoft donates money to Belarus Red Cross and Children’s Hematology to support these great activities. Thanks to this financial aid, organizations can purchase decent gifts that will be given to children at the events. The presents will nicely complement a joyful experience and will be something that kids can take back home to prolong their pleasure. It is incredibly rewarding and humbling for the StiltSoft team to be part of what nonprofits do to bring laughter, cheer, and magic into the lives of children who need that big time, especially during the holiday season.
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
As a Munich-based software consultancy, anarcon endeavors to provide its customers with the highest quality services. Since summer 2017, we also dedicated ourselves to help people for whom it is not going so well in life and to contribute our part to environmental protection by joining Pledge 1%.
Already via Pledge 1% our employees have taught German to refugees, drove ambulances with care-dependent people, or liberated rivers from trash. When we heard about#GivingTuesday and #Pledge1Gives we knew we had to establish a whole new way of giving back. For this reason, we are launching a one-of-a-kind campaign where we as a company invite socially deprivedpeople and refugees to our business training facilities in Munich in order to facilitate their way back to a better life.
Germany is facing huge social challenges these days and therefore we believe that
this campaign comes exactly at the right time. Furthermore, we are convinced that this activity will have a great impact on our company culture and our employees.
The campaign kicked off on Tuesday 21st November with a couple of young women–all with completely different social backgrounds. What they all had in common was that they shared a lost control over their lives due to diseases, nursing cases or emigration caused by war in their countries. In a one day workshop, our director of consulting and two more consultants took the chance to teach them how to write a letter of application, to perform well in a job interview, and last but not least, helped them gain confidence. It was great fun to meet such courageous and determined women and to discover the story behind their faces.
This is just the beginning. At anarcon, we will definitely proceed with this campaign, spread the word and tell our business partners to join us in giving via Pledge 1%.
By Chirag Mehta, Founder and CEO, Satrang Technologies
We are especially excited to participate in Pledge 1% Gives this #GivingTuesday, and plan to do a cloth donation drive at office and/or visit a local orphanage to teach children about recycling and waste management. We will also provide lunch to all the kids of orphanage.
At Salesfix, our culture is still evolving. We are a SMB business with big dreams; not just for the business but for the impact we are capable of making on our community and the individuals within, including our own people.
Our philanthropic values have become an integral piece of our day to day business, being driven from management and as a core piece of our annual business planning days. It is at our annual conference that we put a $$ figure beside the 1% Pledge items of profit, services and time. Then we strategize how we are best able to fulfil these targets.
Every year is different, 2016-2017 included a week in Cambodia for a team of 11 out of 13; we packed hampers for Foodbank, we ran up and down the beautiful Sunshine Coast for Cancer, we supported our beautiful Maria as she cycled the mountains of New Zealand for the Smiddy Challenge to name just a few.
It’s not always fun packed days though. As a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, we are well positioned to provide valuable support to the administration of our Australian based Non for Profits. This can include Salesforce implementation, Salesforce support and/or Health Checks along with pro-bono sessions supporting our general NFP community. We also support our Melbourne and Brisbane NFP Salesforce User Groups, in fact Wyan Carter is the Melbourne NFP User Group leader and a valued employee of SalesFix.
In addition, our CEO Jason Lawrence actively promotes a workplace culture of respect and equality and is at the forefront on our philanthropic endeavours. He sleeps under the starts every year for the CEO Sleepout (supporting our homeless community), sponsors all our individual charitable endeavours by donation matching, and has a swag of NFP’s that are thankful for his regular donations and services.
Why should partners join the global Pledge 1% philanthropy movement?
Community involvement improves not only the world in which we do business but also the world in which we want to live. Our community is us, we are our community. In fostering respect and equality both internally and beyond, staff appreciation is high, team participation and collaboration comes easier, and the SalesFix business is a happier, and more successful workplace.
By Joel Markoff, General Manager, Nexus Notes
Founded in 2011 in Adelaide Australia, Nexus Notes is a peer to peer marketplace that allows high performing university and professional students to monetise their course summary notes by selling them to students across the globe. Buyers get the benefit of seeing how the top students prepare for exams, and sellers make a passive income from selling their notes and helping other students learn.
We started Nexus Notes because when we were at university – we found it much easier to learn from other students, as opposed to university lecturers and tutors. We believed (and still do) that students are often the best teachers, yet there was no collaborative platform that enabled students to learn from each other.
And so from humble beginnings the company grew and yet in early 2014, we recognised that a lot of our high performing students were less interested in monetising their services and more interested in helping other students learn. We went back to our founding vision and looked to determine the best way to help our top students to give back to the student community through our platform.
After many late nights brainstorming how we could give back to the student community, we decided to partner with a charity organisation and allow students to donate their sales commissions directly to that organisation. After doing significant due diligence we eventually settled on partnering with AIME, Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience. AIME is a not-for-profit with a simple mission: to get Indigenous students finishing high school and going on to university, further study or employment at the same rate as all Australians. Like Nexus Notes, AIME puts facilitates anyone to learn from top performing students and mentors.
Since introducing the option to donate commissions to AIME, 11% of our note sellers have opted to donate part or all of their commission to ch. Our generous sellers have been amongst our top performing students, resulting in a massive 16% of total commissions occurring through our site being donated to AIME.
The model of donating commissions in a marketplace is something rarely seen across the world and we are proud of have come up with such an innovative way to give back to the student community.