STEP 3: Implementation

Hire Your Staff

The most important step is to hire dedicated staff that can run multiple programs and build out the volunteer and product donation efforts. Many companies have found that it is best to hire a dedicated person-not simply to enlist an existing employee charged with an add-on effort.

In the beginning, one foundation executive can oversee the various components of the program (volunteers, grants, and product donations). Over time, many foundations evolve to having one person dedicated to each philanthropic program.

What to look for in a foundation executive and staff positions:

The Council on Foundations also offers sample job descriptions, including:

Executive Positions

• Corporate Sample: Chief Giving Officer, Anonymous
• Corporate Sample: Director, Community and Philanthropic Affairs, United Airlines Foundation
• Corporate Sample: Director, Corporate Social Policy, The MONY Foundation
• Corporate Sample: Executive Director, Generic Description from Council Publication: Organizing Corporate Contributions: Options and Strategies
• Corporate Sample: Executive Director, The Blue Foundation
• Corporate Sample: Vice President, Corporate Social Policy, The MONY Foundation

Program Positions

• Corporate Sample: Analyst/Assistant Manager, Corporate Communications and Social Responsibility, McDonald's Corporation Foundation
• Corporate Sample: Manager, Corporate Contributions, Kraft Foods Corporate Contributions Program
• Corporate Sample: Program Officer
• Corporate Sample: Senior Research Consultant/Foundation Grants Manager, The Blue Foundation

Administrative Positions

• Corporate Sample: Administrative Assistant, The Cargill Foundation

When implementing your programs, leverage the experience, insight and resources of your employees. One way to encourage this participation is to great well-defined committees or councils with a simple application process. 

Program Development

Sage Advice: The best thing to do is to take one nonprofit and give it all of your resources-people, money, and product. It often makes a bigger impact to give to one organization than to spread smaller resources scattered across many organizations.

We saw the impact of this with Project Homeless Connect. This nonprofit engages the citizens of San Francisco to support and create lasting solutions for homeless San Franciscans. Services include medical, mental health, substance abuse, housing, food, clothing, wheelchair repair, and more. Tracking those services and monitoring the impact is essential in creating systemic change.

• 1% Product: We've donated and configured our application in order for Project Homeless Connect volunteers to track homeless clients.
• 1% Time: More than 150 salesforce.com volunteers have participated in the bi-monthly event, giving more than 800 volunteer hours.
• 1% Equity: We provided a $20,000 grant to SFConnect, which manages the "Connect" Initiatives. As one of our Community Action Team Grants, we also donated $3,500 to purchase several hundred pairs of socks and sweatshirts for the homeless clients who attended the event.

Volunteer Program - 1% Time

Our 1% of time commitment comes in the form of offering every employee six paid days off to volunteer. Employees are encouraged to use this time-and more than 75% of our employees volunteer (the national average is 18%).

Since July of 2000, salesforce.com employees have given over 60,000 hours of their time and expertise to improving their communities. They spend this time doing a variety of things such as feeding the homeless, tutoring kids, renovating structures, cleaning up the environment, and offering hundreds of helping hands when the world is faced with devastating natural disasters. For those employees who don't use this time, though, they loose it. The days do not accrue. Our policy is shared with employees in our PTO Handbook.

• Time off Policy Description

Grants Program - 1% Equity

Salesforce.com was able to start their programs early and move 1% of our equity into a nonprofit Foundation (see warrant transfer agreement). Small pre-IPO companies are eligible to do this as well and we highly encourage that. Regardless how you spend your grant money, even if you can not set aside pre-IPO funds, is important to getting good programs off the ground. Below are a few of the grants we have awarded along with their descriptions and links to documents.

Internal Grants: Volunteering time gives people a sense of great satisfaction. For those who go above and beyond the minimum, there are other rewards as well. The Foundation provides funding to organizations our volunteers are particularly passionate about in the following ways:

• Dollars for Doers Grants: Any full time salesforce.com employee who has volunteered a minimum of 10 hours in any given year with an organization is eligible to apply for a grant to help that non-profit in its work. For every 10 hours volunteered, the Foundation will donate up to $500 (or 50 hours).
• Community Action Team Grants: Community Action Teams (CAT) are foundation-sponsored and employee-led groups that partner with local charitable organizations to identify needs, plan, and participate in volunteer activities. The minimum requirement is four employees and 25 volunteer hours. These grants range from $1,000-$7,500 depending on the size of the project and its impact.

External grants. The most important thing that you can do is look what you do as a business and determine an appropriate and aligned grant strategy. We are a technology company focused on the future of the Web so we fund young people and technology solutions. Salesforce.com Foundation is dedicated to the success of nonprofit organizations that are customers of salesforce.com through the 1% product commitment. Our goal is amplify the success of the global nonprofit (NGO) sector by providing supplementary grants to visionary customers that will enable them to take their technology solutions to the next level of impact. Grant categories for 1% product donations are:

• Turn It Up Grant provides nonprofits with the financial resources to improve the implementation and adoption of the salesforce.com service.
  

• In one example, the Salesforce Foundation provided the UN World Food Programme, the international community's frontline agency in fighting hunger, with its SFA solution on a pro-bono basis for deployment across Asia. Configured with the assistance of Theikos, one of salesforce.com's implementation partners in the region, the Donor Team had the system up and running, customized, and ready to service the entire region in less than five weeks. Through the use of the salesforce application, the UN World Food Programme has been able to better manage donor relation activities and streamline fundraising operations-enabling it to raise funds significantly faster.

Sample (Generic) Request for Proposal (RFP)
Sample (Blank) Grant Budget
Sample Grant Agreement

 

In Kind Product Donation Program - 1% Product

One way to get your philanthropic programs started easily is to begin with providing your product or service for free or at a dramatically discounted rate to nonprofits. Gather a team of people together to think creatively about how your product might help answer a social problem or move a nonprofit's mission forward.

Putting salesforce in the hands of qualified nonprofits is a critical part of our Foundation's 1% model. The product donation allows nonprofits to focus more time on their social mission and increase their efficiency.

For more information on this program visit www.salesforcefoundation.org/product

 

Carbon Neutral Company - One with the Earth

Achieving Carbon neutrality is one of the first steps in reducing a corporation's environmental footprint.

These organizations can help get you started:

• Native Energy: www.nativeenergy.com/
• Clean Air-Cool Planet: www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/
• Conservation International: www.conservation.org/

There are many simple ways to become more environmentally responsible. For some easy solutions:

• Top 20 Ways to Go Green at Work. This is a great guide from Office Depot.
• 10 Ways to Go Green at Work from the Sierra Club

We started the Salesforce Foundation nine years ago with the simple idea to integrate philanthropy into our business model. The secret to our program’s success has been the model’s inclusiveness of all stakeholders. The difference we set out to make has been magnified by the efforts of our employees, partners, vendors, and colleagues. As companies continue to create integrated philanthropic programs and share the model, we can make a real difference—and achieve the power of us.