Giving Tuesday: AppExchange Partners Pledge 1%

It's Giving Tuesday, and in the spirit of the holidays and helping others, the AppExchange team recently sought examples of how Salesforce partners are giving back to their communities, whether it be through product, equity, or the gift of time. In fact, we recently selected partner stories based on creativity, repeatability, overall impact, and their ability to inspire the reader to take action. Many of these partners addressed

Pledge 1%

, a movement to change the world through inspiring early-stage corporate philanthropy.

Winning stories will be featured in various content such as the

Inside the Salesforce Ecosystem

Medium channel, and right here on this blog. In no specific order, here are the winners, and their stories, in their own words.

Classy

Classy is a social enterprise that creates world-class online fundraising tools for nonprofits – so serving the nonprofit community is at the core of everything we do. However, each year, we seek to elevate that promise through our 1% pledge – by putting our platform to the test. As we approach the year-end giving season, we're once again kicking off our staff fundraising initiative, called Classy Gives (

#ClassyGives

), where we rally around a previous Classy Award winner and execute a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign on their behalf, using the Classy platform.

The Classy team gets incredibly passionate about banding together as a community and trying to smash our goals. Last year, the team set a goal of $30,000 for Classy Award winner,

buildOn

, and we ended up raising over $122,000. Because we more than tripled our fundraising goal, the funds not only supported a school build in Nepal, but they were also used to provide an adult literacy program for the community and build additional schools in Burkina Faso and Malawi. If that wasn't rewarding enough, we took the experience full circle, with our top fundraisers taking a trip to Nepal to build the spaces with their own hands.

As of mid-November this year, we're fundraising for Days for Girls, dedicated to strengthening women and girls' sense of dignity and self-esteem by making sustainable feminine hygiene solutions and health education available around the world. And similar to last year, once fundraising is completed, we'll send our top Classy staff fundraisers to an area in need to distribute kits on behalf of Days for Girls. But first, it’s time to put our money where our mouth is and get to fundraising with the power of the Classy platform.

DocuSign

Taking the 1% Pledge in 2015 was simple, as it aligned with our values.

DocuSign IMPACT

is based around the concept that our responsibility as a corporation requires more than simply donating funds. In the words of our DocuSign’s Chairman Keith Krach, our goal is to transform lives by transforming charitable causes.

Our Philosophy

We believe character is defined through action. With DocuSign IMPACT, we are committed to putting this character into action by harnessing the power of DocuSign’s people, products, and profits to make a difference in the global communities in which our employees and customers live and work.

Our Business

Since our founding in 2003, DocuSign has enabled millions of customers around the world to realize productivity and efficiency gains in their businesses while reducing their impact on the environment. We appreciate the opportunity to expand and grow the impact we can have on our communities and our planet through this integrated program.

Employee Volunteerism

We believe in promoting a culture of giving back and community support throughout our organization. Our employees are encouraged to take action in their own communities by volunteering with organizations and causes they believe in. And we are proud to support that action by providing up to 24 hours paid time off a year for these pursuits.

DocuSign for Nonprofits

By embracing DocuSign’s fully digital electronic signature solution, nonprofits are not only improving productivity and efficiency, they are ensuring more value gets to the communities they serve — where every dollar and minute is more important than ever. DocuSign enables nonprofits to have measurable impacts on their businesses, such as improved ROI and customer satisfaction. DocuSign offers an industry-leading eSignature solution to qualifying nonprofit organizations at a discount and donates designated web products to organizations with more limited budgets through our partnership with Techsoup.

The DocuSign Impact Foundation

The

DocuSign IMPACT

Foundation matches employee donations to qualifying 501(c)(3) organizations and global equivalents. Our Foundation is advised by DocuSign’s Chairman Keith Krach, Founder Tom Gonser, and General Counsel Reggie Davis, as well as a board of senior business and nonprofit executives.

Please see our

IMPACT series on the DocuSign blog

for more examples of how we contribute to the nonprofit community through our 1% pledge.

Enxoo

The past five years have been an interesting journey for Enxoo. We managed to grow from a small consulting company with 10 employees to a Salesforce partner with over 200 projects delivered for nearly 100 customers. This wouldn't have been possible without motivated and engaged employees that believed in our vision. We were able to get here today because from the very beginning, one of our core values was to get better every day. We knew our strength was in serving our customers but we also wanted to serve and support our local communities.

We decided to build solutions on the Salesforce platform that were geared toward non-profit foundations. We currently have solutions on Salesforce that helps nonprofits improve their operating activities.

With our non-profit solution, we were able to help the Gajusz Foundation, Empowering Children Foundation, Jim Foundation and Foundation for Children “Kolorowy Świat” non-profit foundations. Helping others is contagious. Such initiatives have grown in our organization at the grassroots level. We regularly organize collections of the most needed things for orphan homes and animals shelters.

This holiday season, we are preparing something special for our employees where we will gather funds to support the Empowering Children Foundation. We are planning a Christmas lottery and bake sales for fundraising in our office. If we are able to raise a certain level of funds, our board members may perform in superhero costumes! We can't wait to see our founder dressed up as Spider Man and our head of developers in The Lion King disguise. Expect pictures from us!

Watch the video of our story.

Sage

Sage Foundation is committed to transforming lives by investing our time, money, expertise and technology to create sustainable social, economic and entrepreneurial opportunity in our local communities around the world. Sage Foundation provides all 13,000 Sage colleagues around the world with up to five days of paid leave per year for volunteering in their local communities.

Sage Foundation provides grants that create social, economic and entrepreneurial opportunities for the young and disadvantaged as well as grants to match colleague charitable donations and fundraising efforts. Sage Foundation provides donated and discounted software to support charities, social enterprises and nonprofit organizations like we do any other business.

SalesFix

At Salesfix, our culture is still evolving. We are a SMB business with big dreams; not just for the business, but also 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 dollar figure beside the 1% Pledge items of profit, services and time. Then we strategize how we are best able to fulfill 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 partner, we are well positioned to provide valuable support to the administration of our Australian based Not 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. Our CEO Jason Lawrence actively promotes a workplace culture of respect and equality and is at the forefront on our philanthropic endeavors. He sleeps under the starts every year for the CEO Sleepout (supporting our homeless community), sponsors all our individual charitable endeavors by donation matching, and more.

SpringCM

SpringCM gives back to our hometown of Chicago by spotlighting two or more organizations each quarter through at least four events. Since starting our initiative earlier this year, we've worked with a number of wonderful Chicago organizations including:

• Alliance for the Great Lakes
• Cradles to Crayons
• Chicago Greater Food Authority
• The CARA Program
• I.C. Stars, and
• Junior Achievement

We will add even more amazing organizations in 2018.

We contribute to these organizations by donating our time, money and goods. For example, we were able to generate a large amount of books and clothing need for Cradles to Crayons, as well as funds and adult clothing for the CARA program. Employees have also contributed personal funds to two campaigns for United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation and the National Hemophilia Foundation. Springers’, whose family members are affected by blood and mitochondrial disorders, ran these initiatives. Our donations attributed to making our Springers' campaigns the most funded in the state.

Pledge 1% has truly sparked a culture of giving back in our company. We're honored to be part of such an amazing organization and feel even more connected to the Salesforce Ohana and our teammates at SpringCM now that we are invested in giving back to our community.

We hope these stories inspire you to join Pledge 1%. Take the pledge now.