Marc Benioff’s technology company volunteers to reshape
philanthropy model
When Salesforce.com emerged on the technology scene in 1999 with
the novel concept of offering software as an online service, the
accompanying PR catchphrase was “the end of software.” Perhaps
less known was the parallel mantra, coined for the newly formed
Salesforce.com Foundation: “the end of philanthropy.”
“While this phrase shocked some, what we meant was an end to
corporations just giving away money” and that they should “get
more involved with the organizations they support,” says
Salesforce.com CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff.
Benioff, under whose leadership CRM leader Salesforce.com has
evolved in a decade from a disruptive idea into a public company
that projects more than $1 billion in revenue in 2009, is the
chief evangelizer—through books, conferences and the media—for
Salesforce.com’s 1/1/1 Corporate Responsibility model.
These numbers correspond to the three ways in which the
Salesforce.com Foundation contributes to the community,
providing 1 percent of employee hours, 1 percent of company
equity and 1 percent of its product.
“This is what we do, you can’t take it out,” says Benioff of
Salesforce.com’s philanthropy model. “It’s like trying to take
the blood out of the body. This is what we do every day.”
Creating a culture
Benioff created the 1/1/1 model at Salesforce.com after his
experience working at software company Oracle, where he says
philanthropy was less ingrained. Benioff recalls an Oracle
volunteer activity at a Washington, D.C., school where only two
employees showed up to transport some computers. Benioff says
that forced him to call Colin Powell, then chairman of volunteer
network America’s Promise, for help. In lieu of volunteers,
Powell enlisted a Marine battalion to do the heavy lifting,
Benioff says.
“I had learned from my experience working at my previous
employer Oracle that it is extremely difficult to establish a
culture of giving after the company has been formed and the
culture has been set,” says Benioff. “I wanted to leverage the
assets of companies in a more long-term and easily sharable way,
which was something I hadn’t seen before.”
Culture-building takes tone at the top, but also a bottom-up
approach.
That’s why three key players—Benioff, Salesforce.com Foundation
Executive Director Suzanne DiBianca and Salesforce.com
employees—are integral to making the model work.
“Our overall goal with the foundation…is to make it
representative of the passion and interests of our employees
versus something driven from the executive suite,” Benioff says.
DiBianca agrees. “We let go of control out of the executive
office,” she says. “It’s driven by employee teams; we give them
budgets, real power in where the support goes, and get to
cultural goals.”
The culture established in the foundation reverberates
throughout the company as a whole as Salesforce.com works on
more expansive corporate social responsibility goals (see
sidebar, below) with similarly high benchmarks.
“As with many things, focus can be a challenge,” Benioff says.
“Because of all the resources being dedicated, it is important
that organizations determine an area of focus, which in our case
is around youth development, and identify the organizations most
in need.”
Getting with the program
Salesforce.com Foundation’s 1/1/1 contributions are
predominately funneled into education programs, including
BizAcademy, an entrepreneurial workshop for high school
students, led by company executives.
Benioff knows something about entrepreneurship, having founded
his own entertainment software company at age 15.
Salesforce.com looks to place program participants as interns,
awards college scholarships and links the students with mentors.
Recruiting employees through foundation programs is part of the
model, which attracts business school graduates to
Salesforce.com, says Benioff.
“The next generation workforce wants to do more than just make a
paycheck,” says Benioff. “They want to do good in the world, as
well.”
Similarly, DiBianca counts “doing good” as about “80 percent of
the conversation” when hiring staff, noting that in a 2007
Deloitte survey, Generation Y participants cited ethics and the
environment as key considerations in employment.
After new employees are hired, Salesforce.com capitalizes on
this convergence of values, setting aside six paid days (or 1
percent of staff time) for employees to volunteer in the
community.
Since July 2000, 85 percent of employees have collectively
donated more than 80,000 community service hours, says Benioff.
Employees choose where to volunteer and activities have ranged
from feeding the homeless to tutoring children.
They have also volunteered in the wake of natural disasters,
including Hurricane Katrina.
Monetary donations are integral in these circumstances—and to
the philanthropy model—with 1 percent of Salesforce.com capital
going to the foundation since the company went public in 2004.
The donation of time and products, however, are intended to set
Salesforce.com apart from its check-writing peers.
“Fundamentally, giving money is not enough,” says Benioff. “We
have seen that nonprofits benefit the most from the synergies
that come with providing all three [tenets]: volunteers and
product donations, in addition to the money. That’s when you can
really make a difference.”
Share and share alike
An important element of Salesforce.com’s efforts is that it
shares its model with start-ups—and longer-established companies
that can “retro-fit” the design—through a Salesforce Foundation
website at www.sharethemodel.org.
Still, companies can’t mirror what Salesforce.com does. Benioff
says companies must find what works for them and set priorities.
Nonprofits are the primary recipients of the company’s
software-as-a-service product donations, the third piece of the
1/1/1 pie that currently serves 4,000 NGOs in 56 countries.
The organizations use the customizable online applications for a
variety of clerical and organizational purposes, as the
principal at the Bronx Lab School in New York City did to manage
student information. The San Francisco Bay Area arm of the
American Red Cross is another user, managing and tracking
volunteers and supplies for disaster relief through a
Salesforce.com application.
In another case, the San Francisco-based Project Homeless
Connect is an NGO that understands the power of numbers and
Salesforce.com tools to bolster donor and public support.
In its mission to transition the homeless from the streets,
PHC’s use of Salesforce.com’s data tracking services and
donations have helped the NGO serve almost 24,000 clients—12
percent of which are now permanently housed—since September
2004, says Director Judith Klain.
Following the model, Salesforce.com also contributes employee
time to the organization.
As with all volunteer assistance, the foundation tracks these
contributions and goals through annual “V2MOM” (Values, Visions,
Methods, Obstacles and Measurement) reports in which employees
outline their individual and company volunteer plans and
expectations.
Nonprofit grantees also benefit from a Salesforce.com
partnership with Google. The company works with Google to align
its on-demand products with Google AdWords, a service that
allows companies to purchase online ads based on Google keyword
searches. Through the alliance, some of this targeted marketing
is available to nonprofit grantees at no charge.
Salesforce.com’s share-the-model message is rooted in its own
early practices: Other corporate philanthropy successes helped
shape the model’s original design.
“We researched a number of corporate philanthropy models across
different industries and from that research built a new model,
which we felt combined the best of the best,” says Benioff.
“Hasbro has a phenomenal employee volunteering program. Cisco
has been a leader in the technology industry in providing
product donations to underserved communities, and eBay was one
of the pioneers in providing equity in the company to fund their
philanthropic goals.”
In turn, companies like Google, LiveOps and BlueWolf have
adopted the Salesforce.com model, and Benioff’s two books, “The
Business of Changing the World: 20 Great Leaders on Strategic
Corporate Philanthropy” and “Compassionate Capitalism: How
Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral
Part of Doing Well,” encourage other companies to do the same.
“I talk to a lot of CEOs and many tell me that they are already
engaging in one or two of the three tenets of the model. Either
their employees volunteer in a program, or they give products
away to those in need,” says Benioff. “Even though there is much
more commitment in this area today then there was five years
ago, I don’t know that the business community is really aware of
the power of an integrated model yet.”
Oracle, he said during his keynote address at the CRO Summer
Conference in San Francisco June 18, recently announced a
volunteer goal of 25,000 hours of employee service. Benioff took
issue with the depth of the program, given Oracle’s
80,000-member workforce.
“That would be 15 minutes [per employee],” Benioff said. “That’s
a very quick trip to the food bank.”
Model employees
Salesforce.com’s commitment is what attracted Alana Kadden, now
an account executive at Salesforce.com, to the company.
“If I was going to work for a company, I wanted one that
represented the values I have,” says Kadden. “That was coming
from the top down at Salesforce.”
In February, Kadden and Benioff attended a Jewish Community
Federation Business Leadership Council event and Benioff invited
Kadden onstage to share her experiences about the integrated
program.
“It’s demonstrating that he cares about what each person is
doing even though he can’t necessarily be involved in all our
projects,” Kadden says. “When I got up with Marc on stage… it
was my first opportunity to personally say to Marc, ‘Thanks for
this opportunity.’”
The blended model of work and volunteering can be a “tricky
balance” for employees, Kadden says, but the flexibility of
different projects and time frames levels out priorities.
Meanwhile, internal Vounteerforce software aids staff in
tracking the available activities.
“There are two kinds of employees: One is excited and passionate
about the model before they get here,” Kadden says. “If not,
they are turned onto the model when they get here.”
Benioff’s program has garnered media attention beyond his
speaking engagements and books. CRO named him CEO of the Year
for Mid-Market Companies for 2008.
“He’s amazing, a great inspiration,” says DiBianca. “Not only
with a radical and powerful vision, but he puts resources behind
it to make it real; integrating the philanthropy message, and
[he] lines up everyone.”
Now that philanthropy is becoming a higher—and more
integrated—priority in the corporate world, Benioff finds his
offensive-minded campaign occasionally playing defense.
“What really irks me is the negativity that sometimes comes out
when a company reveals something positive it is doing,” says
Benioff. “I don’t think companies should act responsibly simply
for good PR; those add-on type programs aren’t sustainable.
“However,” he adds, “making an effort to do good is the first
step.”
Source: Danielle Lee
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