How Salesforce Gave Back in the First Quarter

At Salesforce, giving back is in our DNA. In fact, we recently reached half a billion dollars in all-time giving — a huge milestone for our team.

In the first quarter of fiscal year 23 (Feb. 1, 2022 through Apr. 30, 2022), we continued this important work, leveraging our 1-1-1 model to drive giving strategy in areas including climate, education, and workforce development. The impact of these efforts are reflected in our latest giving totals:

• In Q1 of fiscal year 23, we gave more than $11 million in grants to charitable organizations.
• As of the close of Q1 (April 30, 2022), we have now donated a total of $543 million in grants (life-to-date). 

Read on for highlights of where first quarter funds made an impact.

Salesforce grantmaking drives impacts for nonprofits around the world

Our Philanthropy+ model came to life through grants made in the first quarter. This includes donations from the Salesforce Climate Fund, which will invest a total of $100 million over 10 years toward key climate initiatives, and giving to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. Other grant recipients included nonprofits focused on education, workforce development and community resilience. Highlights include: 

• Fundación Natura: Fundación Natura works to restore and conserve the ecosystems of Colombia, safeguarding endangered, endemic, and emblematic species, while supporting the livelihoods of local communities and the ecosystems on which they depend. 
  • The Salesforce donation will support the continuity of the conservation and restoration efforts under the Amazon 2.0 project, with a focus on addressing deforestation and improving climate and water regulation in the Colombian Amazon rainforest, while strengthening relations between local farmers and local indigenous communities.
• Restor: Restor is a science and community driven platform whose mission is to support and accelerate the restoration of Earth’s ecosystems. 
  • The Salesforce donation will support Restor’s continued growth, including advancing and integrating scalable biodiversity monitoring on the platform to serve responsible restoration projects around the globe. 
• Flexport.org: Flexport.org enables organizations to deliver global aid and impact—and meet their sustainability goals with greater ease and lower costs.
  • In March, we partnered with Flexport.org to send the equivalent of a plane load of supplies — including hospital beds, medical kits and school supplies — to Eastern Europe in support of the refugee crisis.

Salesforce employees donate their skills and time 

Additionally, Salesforce volunteers reached 6.9 million all-time service hours. 

How some employees spent their service hours:

• SuitUp Multi-Region Hackathon: Salesforce partnered with SuitUp, an organization focused on equipping students for life beyond the classroom through educational competitions in communities across the US, Canada, and the UK. Forty-five Salesforce volunteers from across the nation partnered with 61 students to help them craft business pitches for their own curated, student-friendly podcast on Spotify.
• Techgrounds x Salesforce Training & Coaching Program: Techgrounds is a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands that helps diverse & undiscovered talents gain practical career experience. Over 40 Salesforce employees are engaged in this program as coaches, trainers and mentors with a goal to have 75 participants complete the Salesforce program this year. 
• India Giving Week: Over 300 Salesforce volunteers packed and distributed 70,000 meals to the most vulnerable communities across India. We partnered with Rise Against Hunger India, a nonprofit organization with a mission to end hunger and malnourishment in India. 

Salesforce provides free and discounted products to nonprofit, education customers

In addition to monetary and employee-based giving, Salesforce has, since 1999, provided free or discounted product to 55,800 nonprofit and education customers. Pro bono customers have used Salesforce product to further their missions, including: 

• Airbnb.org: Airbnb.org is a nonprofit organization focused on fundraising, partnership, and temporary housing initiatives. Due to the influx of donations associated with their Ukraine refugee response, Airbnb.org needed to fast track a planned MVP rollout of NPSP to support donor management and gift entry. 
  • In addition to advising on best practices and core configuration, the Salesforce team developed a light-weight custom solution to solve for a unique business case in light of high profile major donor efforts such as the Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher GoFundMe challenge.
• Guide Dogs for the Blind: Guide Dogs for the Blind enlisted Salesforce to provide research, design and technical support to build an app that makes monitoring and guiding a dog’s progress faster, more collaborative and easier to analyze. 
  • They will rely on this work to reduce the amount of time it takes to train their dogs. This initiative won the Business Charity Awards Project of the Year.

As Salesforce grows, so do its giving efforts

Even with giving back so deeply woven into our culture and processes, there’s always an opportunity to do more.

This year, we have a lot of exciting plans in store, and we’ll provide regular updates on the ways in which Salesforce’s growth is helping serve as a platform for change.

Learn more about Salesforce Philanthropy.