The Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud makes it easier for employees to give something back

Find out how Salesforce AI’s Philanthropy Cloud uses to provide one and a half million ways for employees to participate in corporate philanthropy.

The Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud makes it easier for employees to give something back
Find out how Salesforce AI’s Philanthropy Cloud uses to provide one and a half million ways for employees to participate in corporate philanthropy.

At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic spoke with Nick Bailey, vice president of innovation and product at salesforce.org, about the new Philanthropy Cloud product from Salesforce. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Bill Detwiler: Today, philanthropy is a big part of what companies do, and not just at management level, but they are really trying to push that towards their employees. I am delighted to be here with Nick Bailey to talk about the philanthropic efforts of Salesforce and their new Philanthropy Cloud product. Tell me a bit about Salesforce’s efforts in the field of philanthropy and how philanthropy has been built into the company’s DNA from the start.

Nick Bailey: It is awesome. Philanthropy is really the center of the Salesforce culture. When the company was founded in 1999, Marc Benioff had this great idea for the 111 model, which is 1% of our product, 1% of our time and 1% of our equity that the company is in philanthropy and back to the community . He joked, it was easy at the time because we didn’t really have a product; we didn’t really have much time; and we didn’t really know how much money. But that has grown considerably over the years.

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That has really been the anchor in the Salesforce culture. One of the things that customers often ask us is: “How has Salesforce built the culture it has?” The answer really cuts to our core, because we are focused on giving back and making sure that it is part of who we are as a company and that we are grounded in the communities where we live and work.

Bill Detwiler: Expand that and discuss how that has been, how executive leadership has pushed it down throughout the organization. Some ways in which Salesforce employees and people at salesforce.org, the philanthropy arm for Salesforce, get involved on an individual level.

Nick Bailey: Everything kind of starts with Marc. He is a great philanthropist. He sets a good example; that is who he is in the world, and he really encourages his employees to be too. When we think of corporate philanthropy, we say that there are four pillars. There is your culture, of which Marc really is the center of our attention. There are your programs, which is what you do for your employees to actually encourage them to give back to the world. For Salesforce, this means that everyone gets 17 days a year off to do volunteer work. It means that we match your donations and double your impact. Other companies have different ways in which they do that.

It is your internal marketing, is the third pillar. That’s not about going into the world and talking about how well you’re doing. It is really about communicating with your employees about what is important to us, what are our values? Why would you get engaged and participate in your other employees?

The fourth is the tool. For a long time we had our own internal tools at Salesforce, but other customers of ours started asking, “Can we have those tools?” For a long time the answer was no, and now we are really excited that the answer is yes, actually, you can, with Philanthropy Cloud.

Bill Detwiler: Tell me about Philanthropy Cloud. How does that tool work? How does it fit into the rest of Salesforce’s growing ecosystem of products, services and platforms?

Nick Bailey: Philanthropy Cloud – we launched it a little over a year ago, actually at Dreamforce. We now have more than 100 customers participating. It comes from the box with one and a half million ways for people to participate, and we use Einstein and AI in our recommendation engine to do two things.

First, the company wants to share with employees what they care about and what is important to them and what we all want to collect, but employees also need to understand ways in which they can deal with ways they are passionate about. Einstein looks at things such as what causes you, what skills do you want to do volunteer work with, where do you live in the world? It examines those one and a half million ways to participate and recommends the ones that are right for you.

It is the perfect balance to help people get together around something within the company, but also to respond to individual needs and passions of people who may or may not be consistent with what the companies do. Our customers have been very successful. We have seen the engagement ratios rise. We have seen the number of dollars given rise. We have seen volunteer hours rise. It has been a really great trip so far.

Bill Detwiler: Is it about adjusting the efforts – the options that employees have, that people have, to embody philanthropy, to do the things they want to do, what they are passionate about and to adapt it to them – that you think that it has led to that increasing involvement? Let Einstein be the AI ​​platform that does that without anyone having to do it themselves?

Nick Bailey: Yep. That’s exactly right. So I think there are two things to say about that. The first is that we have been at both ends of the spectrum at Salesforce. All the way from top to bottom. This is what we do. Everyone should do this. When companies do that, their engagement decreases.

On the other side of the spectrum, everyone does what you want. We don’t care, just go and do well. If you do that, your engagement numbers go up, but you don’t have a great story, a fascinating story – a kind of identity of what you all do together. Finding that balance, that beautiful place in the middle of this is what we want everyone to gather around, but if you have something else, we want to be a platform for you to do good in the world with those things that you are passionate about.

One of the things that I loved about my career is how hard it is for people to find ways to get involved. You may know what you care about; you may know what skills you have; you know for sure where you live; but taking and combining to find a cause that you care about in your community or region you care about – that uses your skills, where you can actually get involved and take action and make a difference in a way that is tailor-made for you, and letting you have that level of impact that you want – is extremely difficult.

That’s where the power of technology comes: we can say, here are all the things you could do. Let’s help you find the thing that was made especially for you so that you feel compelled to go again and again.

The old stereotype of corporate philanthropy is that we all go one day a year and paint the same wall and then call it a day. What we really want is for people to find things that they are passionate about, that connect and are forced to go over and over again to really get deeply involved as citizen philanthropist.

Bill Detwiler: And reduce the analysis paralysis that you sometimes get, right?

Nick Bailey: That’s exactly right. There are just too many

Bill Detwiler: Too many options that I can do. Talk a bit about philanthropy in general, in the future with this Philanthropy Cloud. Where do you see Salesforce, salesforce.org, and how do you help customers integrate Philanthropy Cloud into their existing Salesforce implementations, what they do and tell that compelling story to get everyone on board so it’s not just ‘ let’s go out one day a year and do volunteer work ‘. This concerns business donations to a specific cause wherever the head office is located.

Nick Bailey: That’s right. The point is that you really make that a core part of your culture and not a ‘we have a number of values ​​that we hang on the wall and leave there’, but in a way that the company breathes throughout the day. Marc Benioff has a great quote that I love, namely: values ​​create value.

All we see in the world of corporate philanthropy is that it has completely changed because it is no longer from above. It is not only a necessity for the boardroom; it is actually employee-driven. They demand that companies offer them this platform to participate in things they are passionate about. What that really means is – for companies, in terms of creating value and being part of their culture – this is not like snacks and ping pong tables, right? This actually helps companies to recruit and retain employees.

Consumers are willing to pay 6% more for products from a company that matches their values. They are more likely to recommend these products to others. Investors such as BAWAG come forward and say: “We are only going to invest in companies that deliver value.”

The Business Roundtable that came out a few weeks ago, has just made a very powerful statement about it. It is truly holistically integrated into the company, and I think there is not only a different expectation and demand from the community, but also from every other area: employees, investors. This has really led companies – even those who have not had a really strong program here historically – to realize that this must be at the center of their culture and how they work. When it comes to employee engagement, it’s a two-way conversation between leadership and employees.

It’s a kind of old school corporate philanthropy – what the CEO cares about at head office, as you said before. New school is really employees say, “Well, here’s what we care about.” The sweet spot is when employees can take action on the things they are passionate about, that are relevant to them, and the company understands what all their employees are doing and can align what the company strategically cares about — what the values ​​of be the company – with the values ​​of their employees, and meet in the middle and use the company as a platform to eliminate the things that are most relevant and meaningful to those employees, and choose the kind of things that stand out.

We have a new position that we are launching on Dreamforce this year, called the employee champion. Every company has people who bring everyone together naturally – let’s do something good – but they do this together. It is like spreadsheets and emails and paper registration forms, and maybe we all do something. In Philanthropy Cloud there are tools that are built especially for them, so that they create content on the platform. They can recruit people; they can organize; they can inspire all their colleagues; and actually they will do it in the world. But because it is all in that one simple platform, the company has full insight into what is happening in all their offices.

Bill Detwiler: That allows them to tell that story and to make sure that – as an organization, as a group of people – together they can be more effective as opposed to just one person doing this, one person doing this, or one day a year. .

Nick Bailey: That’s right. Every individual can see what his contribution is, but you can also look at that collective contribution from the entire company, and you can view that through our costs; you can look at it through sustainable development goals. That is something that companies spend thousands of dollars every year. What were our contributions to the goals of sustainable development, to understand how everyone came together to create collective impact.

What really fascinates me is that it is not just one employee and one company; that is hundreds of companies, and all non-profit organizations and schools that we collaborate with at salesforce.org come together to create this marketplace where people work together to create this impact that is considerably greater than a person in itself.

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