The tech of giving back: an interview with Salesforce’s Chief Philanthropy Officer

Since its founding two decades ago, Salesforce has pioneered the Pledge 1% model of giving back one percent of equity, product, profit, and employee time to charity.

As EVP, Marketing and Chief Philanthropy Officer for Salesforce, Ebony Beckwith is in charge of identifying those service opportunities for more than 40,000 employees while also managing the Salesforce Foundation, which administers millions of dollars in community grants and programs supporting efforts that include workforce education, disaster relief and K-12 education.

Extra Crunch recently interviewed Beckwith about Salesforce’s ongoing efforts to create a culture that gives back and how Salesforce’s use of both a foundation and a fully-integrated business unit dedicated to nonprofits sets it apart from other corporate philanthropy efforts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ebony Frelix Beckwith Salesforce

Photo: courtesy Salesforce

Creating a culture of giving back

Extra Crunch: I want to start with what Salesforce is perhaps best known for: the 1% model. So can you talk about what it means and how it’s evolved over the years?

Ebony Beckwith: So literally the 1% model stands for ‘one, one, one:’ 1% of time, 1% of equity, and 1% of our products. Marc came up with this model based on the work he was doing at his previous company and how he really wanted to marry kind of philanthropy and doing good.

He’ll say, “doing well and doing good go hand in hand. You can do both.” [That’s why] when Marc and the founders started this company twenty years ago, they built giving back into our DNA as a core value.

They were betting on the success of our company before we had anything. You know one percent of employee time when you only have seven employees and not that much. But now we have over 40,000 employees, so one percent of their time is a lot. 

How has that model changed over the years?

Obviously, it’s become more formalized. My team and I are responsible for engaging our 40,000 employees to give back in the community in ways that are meaningful for them where they live and work. It’s part of the corporate culture. People know that [when] they come here, it’s part of the job expectation; [they’re] given seven paid days off to volunteer.

But our team is so small and we can’t get to every single employee. So we have a lot of programs and incentives for them to just really feel good about giving back. We match our employees dollar for dollar up to $5,000 to give back to the causes that they care about. [With] one program, Circle the Schools, our executives adopt a school in their local area, meet with the principal of the school and really work with them as community members to find out what’s needed. We have over 120 now.

Can you talk a little bit about about your identity? Do you see yourself as a philanthropy? As a nonprofit? As a company that services nonprofits?

The model has evolved over time. As of July 1st, Salesforce.org is a full vertical business unit within Salesforce. That is a dedicated social impact team working to serve nonprofits and higher ed and education institutions with our technology. 

At the same time, I am CEO of the Salesforce Foundation, which is the 501(c)(3) where we do all of our strategic grant making. We have a separate board that oversees [it and] a separate strategy. We’ll give away $30 million in grants this year.

[That’s also] where the employee giving programs like volunteer time off and employee matching are.

How do you decide on philanthropic areas?

Salesforce as a company believes in radical prioritization. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing. Our focus areas are K-12 education and workforce development, and any barriers that prevent those.

In education, Marc [Benioff] met with former [San Francisco] Mayor Ed Lee many years ago and asked him “What do you want your legacy to be?” And Mayor Lee talked about middle schools [being] a critical time for young people, and [how he] would really love for more corporate support. Marc [said] “Salesforce can help.” We were already in the schools doing volunteer work but that was the beginning of our formal partnership with San Francisco Unified School District.

Today we’ve granted over $43 million to San Francisco Unified School District, $23 million to Oakland Unified School District.

And [education] leads to workforce development programs. And it’s actually how I got my start in this role, because I was running a program called Year Up, which is a workforce development program that started in Boston. And they came to the Bay Area and came to Salesforce and said we are looking to close the opportunity divide for underrepresented youth, ages 18 to 24, and they wanted to provide six months of soft and hard skills training and then six-month internships in Fortune 500 companies. And [we said] great, we’ll take three. [We] scaled it and 10 years [later[, we’ve had over 500 interns come through Salesforce.

Do you have a specific approach for your programs?

One of the things we do really well at Salesforce is taking a program or a process, piloting it, and then creating a playbook for us share with with other people, companies, or departments [within Salesforce].

We are a true partner with our community. It’s not just our check, it’s the people going and volunteering. It’s our technology. And also, it’s being a good community partner. I think the philanthropy of old was great because it got us to where we are, but especially for corporate philanthropic organizations who have a product or a service to offer, it’s about about asking “How can we help?” 

There’s a school in Oakland where I’ve seen this.They have a whole room of equipment that someone donated. But if you give me something that’s not valuable, that I’m not going to use, it just sits there. It’s like that bad wedding present that only comes out when the people are there. And we want to be useful. So we listen to our stakeholders and we’ll say, “what do you mean?”

The Sustainable Development Goals have been a priory for you. What do you do as a company to further those?

We care a lot about the SDGs because not everyone is aware of them. So we’re trying to help educate more and bring to life with Dreamforce [Salesforce’s annual conference]. We do a ton of programming [there] and it’s literally brought to life throughout the whole campus.

We’ve been measuring ourselves against the SDGs for a little while now. They’re the world’s to do list, the 17 things that we should all be doing by 2020. So in our grant making, we ask our grantees to identify where they track against the SDGs.

And so, because we do a lot in education, workforce development and, homelessness we track against SDG 4 [Quality Education] a lot, SDG 8 [Decent Work and Economic Growth], SDG 11 [Sustainable Cities and Communities], and Reduced Inequalities [SDG 10]. So we measure and track against it  in terms of dollars and hours. And it’s been really important to us for, so we really want to educate others at Dreamforce because we only have a decade more to deliver.

Measuring impact

How do you measure impact? Is it money dispersed? Is it number of nonprofits helped? Is it volunteer hours?

Salesforce can’t do everything. We focus on these areas, which helps us to be very intentional in our impact. We are very targeted and there are others in our community we can [point to], which I think is amazing. 

We track many measures and metrics, [but it has] evolved and changed over the years. So, for example, when we first started our relationship with San Francisco Unified School District, it was number of iPads delivered into the classroom. It was widgets and stuff like that. Those are important metrics, but then what? So we have a theory of action attached to our three programs with specific metrics for all of them and objectives, [which]we measure against. And our grantees go through a rigorous process where they have to tell us how they’re measuring, how they’re tracking, who they’re serving, how frequently they measure.

And we use our technology – and it’s not just on the grant side to measure and track our impact, but it’s on the employee engagement side to measure how many hours we’re doing across each of our regions. How are we tracking against our goal, to volunteer 1 million hours this year collectively? 

And then we also measure our participation rate in our programs. We have 40,000 employees who have questions about their grants, how to volunteer. We get about 16,000 questions a year, and that’s a lot for a small team to manage, so we use service cloud to manage that. We definitely drink our own champagne here. It’s the only way to do this.

I want to get to the technology, but in a moment, but I’m curious how do you try and solve for the right problem and guard against picking the wrong metric?

I have a wonderful team. We have a woman who came from the Gates Foundation who goes out and meets with all of our grantees and then meets with me and we meet with the board. And so we have a very rigorous process by which they look at all of our grant proposals, and I have to defend why we’re picking this over that. And so that’s how it’s evolved over the years. 

And sometimes to get to the more impactful metrics, you have to start with the ones that may seem soft, so number of devices installed in the classroom seven years ago is what we needed to start in our relationship [with the schools]. Then having devices in the classroom led us to working with the district to have a K-12 computer science curriculum, which enabled us to then measure and track the efficacy of the teachers and the quality of the instruction. It’s a process. [You have to] take the long view.

The technology of philanthropy

One of the really most interesting things about Salesforce.org is the fact that a big part of your philanthropy is essentially servicing nonprofits as clients. How do the technology needs of nonprofits differ from the normal paying corporate customers? Is there a different strategy?

We’re trying to democratize technology. We’re making it available to nonprofits just as we would to large enterprise clients because we know that technology, when used for good, will change the world. But often the barrier to entry is the cost for the technology.

[If] you are a small nonprofit or you’re a distributed model like Girl Scouts or NAACP, you don’t know to bring all this technology into your organization. So what we do is we offer ten free licenses. It’s the same technology. It’s not a Salesforce Lite or a beta version. It’s like the same superpower. It’s everything that Salesforce customers get and we make it affordable.

And then after that it’s offered at a significant discount. And then we enable them with customer relationship managers and account executives who help [them] implement the technology for them. So we’re making it easier for them to achieve their mission.

Salesforce as role model

Moving on to philanthropy more generally, you mentioned homelessness and housing, and so a couple of things on that. So obviously Salesforce, and your founder Marc Benioff, have taken number of bold stances on that, and been politically active not just on homelessness, but on LGBT rights and numerous other issues. What does the calculus about getting involved in these more contentious social issues look like?

We are fortunate to have a CEO, a co-CEO, a very passionate CEO in Marc Benioff who believes doing the right thing is always the right thing. And where he sees an issue, he’s going to speak up. And I think it’s one of the things that really draws people to the company as employees. One of the things Marc says in his book is “values create value.” I think that we’re very fortunate that he leads from the front; whenever he is speaking publicly, he talks about the issues that he cares about.

It’s deeply ingrained in our company because it’s deeply ingrained in him. We did a fireside chat recently and he said, “how can I walk past homeless people when I walk to work and not want to get involved?” He really cares deeply about these issues. When you think about the future of work, how can Salesforce not lend its power, its position, its employees, its time, its money to help education. 

They’re our future employees. Whether they go to Salesforce or not, we don’t care; we want to democratize that as well. 

Do you think that tech companies have both a special responsibility to solve the problems that they might help create?

It’s a great, it’s an interesting question. I do believe that all companies can and should be doing more to help out. I think it is our obligation to give back to the communities where we’re getting so much benefit. And [as] a San Francisco native, it’s really special to me that I get to do this job. It gives back to San Francisco and all over the world. 

And one of the things that we pioneered was Pledge 1%. And over 9,000 companies have taken the pledge. And that’s where we share our resources. You can do all or part of the pledge, you can do time or money to give back.

Smart companies realize doing well and doing good go hand in hand. this. Especially when you think about the future of work and who are workers are now, you know, like we have, you have employees on all ends of the spectrum. You have your millennials and you have your boomers.

How do you get other companies to consider the 1% model?

It’s now managed by Tides [Foundation] and they work with [companies] one-on-one and tell you exactly what to do. We’re meeting with companies all the time who want to know more about how we do what we do, how do [they] get some of that Salesforce culture, [or] learn more about out technology. So I’m often called in to talk about our model and how to do more. And so they may not be interested in education, workforce development, and barriers; maybe they are interested in financial literacy because they’re a bank. Part of my role is to help them implement that in their own companies.

How can people in tech – especially those at companies that don’t necessarily practice the 1% model or something similar – give back? Where should they start?

I think intentionality is very important. I think most people innately want to give back and they want to do good. So starting with what you may have a natural affinity towards or something you’re good at [is] always easier because it’s less scary.

When I started volunteering way back, I saw a listing in the paper to be a journal session leader for the Starlings volleyball team in Oakland.

I know how to journal, I wrote in my own journal as a kid, and so that was easy for me. And so, a lawyer may be able to give pro bono advice. For me, I love mentoring because I can give career advice all day long because I have the experience.

So that’s for an individual. And then for, for corporations, just thinking about that intentionality about where do you want to focus: pick a thing. We didn’t pick everything [at Salesforce]. We picked something that was felt true for us and then institutionalized it by starting small, and then it grew over time.