Why We Joined The 1% Pledge—And The 3 Ways We Are Supporting Philanthropic Initiatives

Since the launch of Place Technology, almost two years ago, a key priority of our company’s culture has been to give back. 

From the very beginning, we wanted to be than just a software company—and instead play an active role in impacting our local community, our customers, our vendors, and the planet. When we hire, we look for people who are passionate about giving back. When we choose company-wide events, we look for ways to donate our time and energy to meaningful causes. And most of all, when we look for ways to improve the business and provide more value, we do so by keeping an eye on how that work can be in service of the greater good.

For example, there is a reason companies like Salesforce have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to schools, nonprofits, and hospitals in the Bay Area of San Francisco. They don’t just see themselves as a business—they see themselves as residents of the community and helping build that community as part of their duty.

We live by the same philosophy.

At the start of 2020, Place Technology joined Pledge 1%

Pledge 1% is a model companies adopt so that giving back is baked into the business’s DNA. 

Spearheaded by Salesforce, Atlassian, Rally, and Tides, the model entails the company pledging 1% of equity/profit, product, and employee time in service of their community. Salesforce was one of the companies that pioneered what has become the “1-1-1” model, setting aside 1 percent of the company’s equity for philanthropic donations, 1 percent of employee time for volunteer work, and 1 percent of products or services to give away to nonprofits. Thousands of companies all over the world have adopted the model, and we believed it was important for us to do the same. 

We are upholding our 1% Pledge in each of these areas, by doing the following things:

Providing heavily discounted access to our software for nonprofits 

Place Technology CEO, Brandan Metcalf, has been actively involved in fundraising efforts in the support of nonprofits such as AIDS/LifeCycle, which raises money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and the Hill Country Ride which supports AIDS Services Austin.

To further extend these philanthropic efforts through the company, Place is providing a heavily discounted version of their flagship product, PlaceCPM, to support nonprofits to work in conjunction with the nonprofit edition of Salesforce products. In addition, Place teams will work with these nonprofits to help them implement and utilize the software in order to simplify and better execute their day-to-day operations in fundraising for meaningful causes.

Pledge 1% of company profits

More than just donating money, we believe allowing employees to be part of the company’s donation process is integral to our culture.

We want to hear from team members what initiatives and causes are most important to them. This is why we look to hire individuals who express a desire to have a larger impact in the world outside of just their day-to-day responsibilities so that together we can decide where we should be donating our time, who we’re giving our product to, and where we are giving our profit. 

Our only requirement is that the causes we support are within the communities in which we live and work. 

Volunteering within the communities where Place holds company offices: Austin, Chicago, Jaipur.

Each quarter, communities where we have offices are required to hold some type of non-profit event. 

Local teams vote on the initiative they want to spearhead, and typically it is either a day or a half-day of donated time. The event is intended to be a team-building exercise as well, where we come together in service of a cause outside of the office, working with some type of non-profit organization for the day. This could be everything from helping deliver food to homeless shelters, cleaning up underserviced parts of the city, or participating in a local nonprofit fundraising event.

This month, we will be working with the incredible team at Mobile Loaves & Fishes by helping with landscaping, working in the gardens, tending to the chicken coups and whatever else we can get our hands dirty with.  They have an incredible mission and we are thrilled to be a part of it.