By Jason Payne, CEO of Ada Diamonds, the world’s first custom fine jeweler exclusively using laboratory-grown diamonds.

My wife and I founded Ada Diamonds in 2015 on the belief that diamond jewelry should brighten the entire world, not merely the recipient’s world. To achieve that goal, Ada Diamonds proudly utilizes real diamonds that are sustainably grown by mankind above the Earth, rather than mined diamonds that cost the Earth. In other words, we believe that powerful technology and new ideas can polish the diamond industry and create a more brilliant future for all.

Ada Diamonds is named in honor of Lady Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers. She was an audacious and brilliant 19th century mathematician, mother, musician, socialite, and philanthropist who is widely credited as the world’s first computer programmer.

On Giving Tuesday 2017, Ada Diamonds is proudly joining Pledge 1% and committing to a donation of at least 1% of Ada’s profits every year as well as a donation of 1% of our equity to fund philanthropic causes upon an IPO or acquisition of Ada Diamonds, Inc.

We call our CSR efforts the Sixth Element Program in honor of carbon, the sixth element of the periodic table of elements. Ada Diamonds proud to support the following six organizations in their efforts to brighten the world:

• Doctors Without Borders – Support of Mining Communities


• World Wildlife Fund – Ecological Recovery from Mining


• Direct Relief – Women’s Health


• Finding Ada – STEM Education


• Swords to Plowshares – Overcoming Substance Abuse


• Team Rubicon – Natural Disaster Response Efforts

Corporate and personal philanthropy are quite important to me. Before founding Ada Diamonds, I was the founder and leader of the Philanthropy Engineering Program at Palantir Technologies. In that role, I donated big data analysis software and forward deployed engineering resources to help data driven nonprofits better fulfill their missions. One my focus areas at Palantir, fighting modern day slavery, led me to start Ada Diamonds as there is still bonded and child labor involved in the cutting of diamonds into gemstones, as you can see in this AP report.

Many of the organizations Ada is supporting today are organizations that I had the pleasure of supporting while at Palantir. Here’s President Clinton discussing recovery efforts of Team Rubicon we supported after Hurricane Sandy, and here’s the CEO of Direct Relief discussing how they use data analysis to improve lives around the world.

On this Giving Tuesday, I encourage you to explore Guidestar or Charity Navigator to find a cause you believe in and support them with a donation of your time or resources.

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

What makes your giving program stand out?  Have you done a unique combination of time + product donation (or another combination)? 

As a newer player in the corporate social impact space, we’re focusing heavily on learning and listening. Okta for Good is still fairly limited in breadth right now – and intentionally so. We’re in early stages of our defining our program, and we’ve been very deliberate about what we’ve chosen to incorporate at each stage of our growth.

For example, for employees, we don’t yet have donation matching or a company service day, and instead we center our quarterly impact efforts on thematic volunteer events with clear opportunities for employee education. We want to root our employees in an understanding of community issues and help them develop their own personal giving strategies so that they are poised to maximize their impact as we roll out more programs. This is also why we’ve worked closely with experienced partners like Tides Foundation to develop educational resources for our global teams.

For corporate giving, in lieu of a large-scale grant program out of the gates, we’ve started with a deep commitment to a single grantee: NetHope. Our work with NetHope offers us a way to wrap all of our resources (people, technology and funding) around one partner, and we hope the insights from this first partnership will help inform our long-term approach to strategic philanthropy through our recently announced Okta for Good Fund, a donor advised fund of Tides Foundation.

We are also constantly learning from our customers: on the product side, we offer nonprofits 25 free licenses for all Okta products, as long as they’ll share feedback on our offering. Their insights are a critical piece to growing Okta for Good.

How is Pledge 1% integrating into the core values of your business?  Is it impacting other areas of your work (such as sustainability programs/sourcing/green policy, etc) and/or shaping your internal employee culture?

Pledge 1% has given shape and structure to our social impact efforts and was an important catalyst in taking the work to the next level. It has also been helpful in thinking about the ways in which we build a sustainable social impact practice and enable the work to scale with our company. This pursuit of a sustainable business model (as opposed to relying on a perpetual company handout) is a priority for us at this stage along with many of our Pledge 1% peers.

Have you collaborated with other companies in your local community or within your ecosystem on giving back?  What about leveraging your technology and skills to tackle a shared issue?

We’re lucky that collaboration and connection is such a fundamental element of Okta’s business. This spirit translates directly to our social impact work, and we see tremendous potential to partner with like-minded companies and community partners to drive positive change together. In fact, we’re already engaged in many exciting efforts on this front.

From a global perspective, we’re working closely with NetHope as a founding partner of the Center for the Digital Nonprofit, which connects a strong community of technology and nonprofit leaders to enable large-scale digital transformation across NetHope’s global members. We’ve also joined forces with Box, Salesforce.org, DocuSign, Splunk, Tableau and Twilio as a part of ImpactCloud, a coalition of cloud vendors leveraging our technical savvy and business insights to help humanitarian organizations take advantage of the latest technologies.

Locally, we’ve teamed up with civic-minded companies in the San Francisco Bay Area to fight poverty through Tipping Point Community’s SF Gives initiative. We also recently partnered with Adobe, mentoring students as a part of the organization’s summer Girls Who Code program. And throughout the year, we’ve worked with a variety of other organizations in the areas where our teams live and work.

What is your advice to startups or companies that are waiting to give until after their IPO or reach profit?  What made your company decide to give, and when, and how has that shaped who you are?

One of the reasons I was proud to join Okta as the first social impact hire was the authentic commitment I saw from our leaders. Our co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest were very intentional about committing Okta to giving back pre-IPO. Establishing Okta for Good was an important signal to employees, customers and the broader community about what kind of company we are. As Todd said when we first joined Pledge 1%: “Whether you work at a multinational corporation or a nonprofit with three employees, every organization deserves the opportunity to bridge the innovation gap and build the best experiences for their people.”

Social impact delivers value when it comes to recruiting talent, building trust with customers and partners, and connecting meaningfully to your communities – at any stage. Our best advice: just start!

Have you integrated a specific product or service based on a nonprofit’s needs?

Not yet, but we are looking closely at our nonprofit offering in the coming year to better understand needs and opportunities for us to deliver more relevant solutions. Stay tuned!

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

From day one, our mission at Postmates has been to help people unlock the best of their cities. While some companies try to build a warehouse outside of a city and funnel goods into it — we know that our cities, our towns and our communities are our warehouses. A big part of what we do is help local brick and mortar businesses better compete against retail goliaths. But as we’ve grown to operate in more than 250 cities, we now want to re-invest in building a more sustainable future for the communities we serve.

This past summer, we hosted a town hall meeting where we sat down with teams across the company to discuss our core values:

Be eccentric: Do things differently — and better, do them your way. Inspire others to experience a different point of view.

Create things that last: There is incredible value in infrastructure & utilities others can rely on. We liberate people by creating it.

Embrace the new, new: Dream up new ways to see and live the future. Once upon a time, all we do today sounded like science fiction.

Out of many, one: Be aware of the responsibility we have to look out for each other — both within our own Postmates team and the larger world we live in.

Now, we’re taking a big step in fully realizing that last value — “Out of Many, One.”

We’ve recently formed a new team — Civic Labs, a social impact team with the mission to tap into Postmates ingenuity to build a thriving, sustainable future that works for everyone. The team is focused on developing programs and partnerships to promote climate action, food security and local business and independent workforce advocacy.

In addition, we are also dedicating 1% of our collective workforce time to support the communities and causes we care most deeply about. Postmates has joined Pledge 1%, a movement spearheaded by Atlassian, Rally, Salesforce and Tides, which is dedicated to making the community a key stakeholder in every business.

As part of the Postmates Civic Labs efforts and Pledge 1% partnership, teammates can now choose the nonprofit of their choice, and we’ll pay them for their workday — up to 24 hours per year. Postmates full-time employees can use 1% of their workdays days to join one of our company volunteer events — such as our recent community garden harvest or our upcoming project with Open Hand; or employees can volunteer at the local nonprofit that they’re most passionate about.

To kick off our renewed focus on enabling the Postmates community to give back, we were proud to partner with TNDC Tenderloin People’s Garden harvest — to help harvest fresh food for low-income residents in the SF bay area. TNDC Volunteer and Corporate Partnerships Lead Haley Caldwell was equally heartened by the turnout. “I’ve never seen so many people out at that front table before… It was really fun to have Postmates here. It’s not always easy for some volunteers to be in the Tenderloin, but you guys fit right in.”

Josh Phillips, Chief of Staff at Postmates and Civic Labs founder also echoed that sentiment. “Harvesting the Tenderloin People’s Garden was an incredibly rewarding way for our team to serve the community.”

“In addition to providing fresh food to low-income residents in a food desert less than a mile and a half from our office, we got to explore our complicated relationship with food. We spend our lives far removed from the production of what we eat. When you get even just an inch closer you naturally start to ask questions about our food system’s equitability, the impact it has on our health, the role it plays in climate change, and, ultimately, our dependence on others to feed ourselves.”

With Harvest Day down, there’s still more to come for Civic Labs and the volunteers at Postmates. You can find out more about the larger Pledge 1% effort here.

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

An interview with Jill Harrison, Innovation Programs, Silverline CRM

How do you contribute to the non-profit community? *

2017 marked Silverline’s 7th consecutive year sending a team of volunteer consultants and technology experts to the annual New Orleans Entrepreneur Week conference in partnership with Salesforce. This team of ten spent a week in March donating hundreds of pro bono consulting hours to advise six fast-growing start-ups and non-profits on how they can leverage cloud technology to grow their businesses and to build apps to help them achieve greater impact in their communities. Also as part of the engagement with the festival, Salesforce Chief Philanthropic Officer Suzanne DiBianca delivered an inspiring keynote talk addressing local organizations looking for advice on how to build their own Pledge 1% programs, using our team’s engagement as a model example. As this amazing festival has grown like gangbusters over the last several years, NOEW now plays host to over 13,000+ entrepreneurs and 185 organizations each year. Silverline is humbled and grateful to be a part of this great tradition and can’t wait for next year.

Why should partners join the global Pledge 1% philanthropy movement? *

Pledge 1% is a movement that reaches beyond your business to connect your employees with the greater mission of community impact. This movement empowers your organization to reach out locally and globally, and find inspiration and meaning through volunteerism and giving. By working together and pledging 1%, we are all affecting positive change.

What’s new or in the pipeline for Silverline’s giving program?

Our participation each year at NOEW has been such a fun team-building experience that has had broad impact across Silverline. It led to the foundation of Silverline Cares, which is a program at the heart of the social events we do with our team and with our partners like Salesforce. We now incorporate volunteerism and philanthropy into each of our all-hands meetings with more than 200 teammates from all over the country. We’ve packed back to school supplies, created care packages for orphanages, built RC toy cars for kids in the hospital with new cancer diagnoses, and more. We’ve even started to extend these programs and share them with our new clients! Recently we hosted a big event in NYC with a brand new client to build bikes for local school kids. What an amazing experience to get to know each other and do good for the community!

NOEW also helped us realize a few years ago that we wanted to formally roll out a VTO program for all employees to make sure our teammates know that we value and encourage their contribution to local communities. Giving back to others is so important for our culture, and so important for our world.

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

It’s the season for sharing and service and for the last three years 97th Floor, along with thousands from around the globe, have shared ways a simple $20 dollar bill can serve others during this holiday season with our 20 Helps campaign. But whether it’s 20 dollars, 20 minutes, 20 acts of service or 20 days of mindfulness — #20Helps.

This year, along with our Pledge 1% commitment and the Pledge 1% Gives Community, we are launching the biggest and newest feature in #20Helps history with the #20Helps Track Your Impact app.

Watch the video and learn more about the app here: http://20helps.com/

Available on the Apple Store and Google Play November 28, the app allows you to see the good you can do with a single bill as you watch it travel through the lives of others.

We encourage you to watch the video, download the app, and learn how you can lend a hand to someone who might otherwise go unnoticed. After all, even if this is the most charitable time of the year, a little bit more giving can do an entire world universe of good.

Get started now: http://20helps.com/

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

By the team at LoSoMo.

When our founder, Scott Romney, first heard of the 1% Pledge through a contact at Salesforce last year, it immediately resonated with his desire to make a difference as a business owner. He brought the idea back to our team, and we all jumped on board and took the pledge on May 25, 2016. Then, we began brainstorming ways to implement the 1% Model at LoSoMo Inc.

As a digital marketing agency that focuses on local businesses, we have a unique perspective on interacting with those around us, and we knew we wanted to incorporate our space, our skill set, and our local community into our pledge. When we decided to donate 1% of our profits to a local South Florida non-profit organization, we reached out to our community for nominations the best way we know how—on social media.

By calling out our community on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we reached over 19,000 community members and received over 250 nominations of South Florida nonprofits! It was a thrill to see so many interact, share, and nominate organizations that they felt deserved our 1% donation.

On December 15th, we put all the nominations into a random generator and selected a winner, on Facebook Live, of course! We were so pleased to donate 1% of our 2016 profits to Speak Up For Kids Palm Beach County, an organization that supports the Guardian Ad Litem Program to advocate for and protect the lives of children in the dependency (including foster care) system – facilitating their development, ensuring their right to a safe and permanent home, and building their future.

In addition to our pledge to Speak Up, we were also able to give away a brand new website to Redland Rock Pit Abandoned Dog Project, Inc. as 1% of our Product. While taking advantage of social media was an awesome and effective approach for one piece of our pledge, we wanted to involve our team and the causes they support too.

If you come to our office on any given day, there’s a good chance you’ll meet Lola, Theodore, Kota, or Ponce.

No, they aren’t interns, they are a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, a Catahoula Leopard Dog, a Bichon, and a Chihuahua! That’s right, every day is bring your dog to work day at LoSoMo, and none of us are complaining. Animal rights are important to our team, so when the opportunity arose to giveaway a new website to a nonprofit dedicated to saving abandoned animals in South Florida, we said YES! It was a privilege to design a new site for an organization whose cause was so dear to our hearts.

We would like to thank the Pledge 1% organization for inspiring us to give back in a very tangible way and creating a platform that allows us to put our unique spin on making a difference. The entire LoSoMo team looks forward to finding more creative ways to donate our time, product, and profits for 2017.

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

SpringCM became a member of Pledge 1% in July 2017, and we’ve been hard at work giving back to our community since then. As a company, we’re proud of a lot of things, but two things in particular: our Chicago roots, and our team-focused culture. When we joined Pledge 1%, we wanted to make sure that we were supporting organizations that made a big impact on the city of Chicago as well as the people that make our company so strong.

Springers have cleaned up beaches with Alliance for the Great Lakes, donated food and clothing to children and families through the Cara Program and Cradles to Crayons, and volunteered in classrooms doing job shadowing and career day presentations with Junior Achievement and IC Stars.

 

 

 

Employees have also contributed personal funds to two campaigns for United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation and the National Hemophilia Foundation. These initiatives were run by Springers’ whose family members are affected by these disorders, and the response was amazing. Watching the SpringCM family come together to support one another is truly inspiring and has led to a more tight-knit dynamic.

All of our efforts have been meaningful, but our favorite so far is #BenioffMeetJames. Leading up to Dreamforce 2017, we launched a campaign to help our Digital Media Guru, James Serra, meet Marc Benioff. Using the hashtag #BenioffMeetJames and a series of videos, we spread awareness across social media. If you missed the videos, you can find them here.

 

While this campaign is one of our favorites because of how fun it was, the best thing about #BenioffMeetJames is the cause behind it. For each retweet of the hashtag, we planned to donate $1 to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. And, if Marc actually met James at Dreamforce, we’d double that donation (spoiler alert: it happened!) To top it off, for each booth scan at Dreamforce, we’d donate another $1. All in, SpringCM was proud to donate $10,000 to the Children’s Hospital.

“Marc Benioff and his team are extremely gracious to charities and nonprofits. SpringCM really wants to help and contribute to the culture of giving that they’ve started.” – Greg Buchholz, President and COO at SpringCM.

We were blown away by the support of this campaign, from Salesforce employees, Partner companies, and people we had never met before on social media.

If you’re a newer Pledge 1% member or a small startup, you don’t have to wait until you’re more established to start weaving in a culture of giving back at your company. #BenioffMeetJames has proven that the power of social media and a little creativity can go a long way, and do a lot for people in need!

Originally posted: November 28, 2017

By Scott Cunningham, Head of Alliances with a focus on Salesforce at PandaDoc.  Scott’s an entrepreneur, investor, and child rights activist, with a love for emerging technology, start-ups, and innovative ideas.  He, his wife, and 3 children live in the heart of Silicon Slopes, Utah. Follow him on Twitter: @1c

Many businesses have the desire to get involved in philanthropic initiatives, but there are many hesitations that companies have to overcome before doing this successfully.  As a small, but quickly growing company, resources and time are scarce, so how do you make the jump to building a scalable, truly impactful corporate giving program, and maybe more importantly, embrace giving as part of your corporate identity and culture?

PandaDoc was founded in 2013 with the goal of making it easy for businesses to transact faster.  Over the last few years PandaDoc has grown and now counts over 7000 businesses as customers, and recently raised a $15.5 Million Series B led by Rembrandt Ventures, with participation from Microsoft Ventures, HubSpot, and others.  Through this time PandaDoc has maintained a focus on three primary values: Impact, Learning, and Fun.

• Impact – We’re building something big. Something that will have a huge impact on how people do business.


• Learning – While we are all experts in our relevant fields, we always make time to continue to expand our minds.


• Fun – We work hard. But we also like to have fun while giving it our all.

Since inception, the mantra of giving back has lived and breathed throughout the PandaDoc culture but wasn’t ever defined.  In full transparency, many excuses were made around why PandaDoc wasn’t able to formalize these programs.  PandaDoc was growing too quickly to divert focus on areas other than revenue generation or channel development. Team members were already working long hours, and nobody wanted to add to their workload.  The marketing team was small and stretched thin as it was, and creating additional content about giving back wasn’t immediately revenue generating.

Looking back, Mikita Mikado, PandaDoc CEO, says that, “We’ve always been a philanthropy driven organization, although it hasn’t always been expressly spelled out.  Even though we may be perceived as late to the game when it comes to our corporate philanthropy, it’s important for every company to realize it’s never too early, and never too late to initiate a giving program. Pledge1% enables organizations of any size to build and track their programs with turn-key resources.”

As PandaDoc has grown, partnerships have expanded, and relationships with key industries have been developed.  Specifically, PandaDoc integrates with over 20 of the top CRMs, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, & Microsoft Dynamics. These channels are driving the PandaDoc growth. I recently joined PandaDoc as Head of Alliances focused on growing the Salesforce channel.  One of the key things I advocated early on was the necessity of creating a philanthropic culture. 

In short, there are three important reasons that a philanthropic corporate culture is essential, especially when working with Salesforce:

Business Necessity

Although it’s not always spoken of publicly, it is commonly understood that being a cause-driven company has an impact on the revenues and success of businesses. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, pioneered the 1, 1, 1 philanthropic model.  This model is core to the culture and methodologies at Salesforce.  If PandaDoc wants to transact and develop a deep synergistic relationship with Salesforce, it’s a necessity to not only externally exemplify what Salesforce wants as a partner, but to indeed live and support this values-driven culture internally.  Marc Benioff has said, “To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit.”

Marketing Alignment

Ensuring that the areas of focus for a company’s corporate giving initiatives align with your brand is extremely important.  It’s also important to ensure that your team members, investors, partners, and customers care about and support your initiatives as well.  At PandaDoc, the critical areas of our focus on giving relate to Human Rights and Gender Equality, as well as Social Equity.

Experience-Driven Partnerships

PandaDoc is experience focused.  Not only does PandaDoc have a beautifully simple and well-executed product (shameless plug….check it out at www.pandadoc.com), but is also focused on creating valuable experiences for employees, investors, customers, and partners.  If an organization exhibits a high degree of purpose in its mission and objectives—taking a stand to benefit society—there is a an excellent likelihood that employees will more easily demonstrate meaning in their roles at work, become engaged, while adding to their sense of purpose in life as well. (Pontefract, D. (2017, January 09). Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Says The Business Of Business Is Improving The State Of The World. Retrieved November 19, 2017, from https://goo.gl/pbBnTK​)

Before joining Pledge 1%, we were giving financial support to a number of organizations that our team members were already working with or supporting.  Since joining Pledge 1%, we’ve been able to simply structure our programs to give 1% of profit, time, and product to benefit society.  Formally we have launched this program as Pandas Helping People.

Britnee Laughlin, the Talent Manager at PandaDoc, has said regarding joining Pledge 1% and establishing the Pandas Helping People program, “While talking with prospective employees from diverse backgrounds across multiple geographies, we received questions all the time about our focus on giving back.  It’s so great now to be able to share specific details about our corporate giving program with applicants, and our membership in Pledge 1%.  Speaking about our giving and core values to applicants has allowed me to have much deeper and personal conversations, and  get to know them better.”

Although PandaDoc is a recent addition as a Pledge1% partner, our focus is continuing to grow and ensure that the core business has increased success, the messaging is aligned with the needs of stakeholders, and genuinely impactful moments will be experienced together. Over the next few months, we will be launching programs to engage with our partners in experience-driven ways, while supporting some incredibly meaningful causes. We are extremely optimistic about the future and are humbled and honored to be supporting our employees, partners, investors, and customers through giving back.

Originally posted: November 28, 2017