Some of Australia’s most successful founders and investors are not only addressing their carbon footprint, and social justice and equity issues, they’re also building businesses that look beyond their core focus to leave the planet a better place.
One easy path to help set the values of a growing startup is Pledge 1%.
It’s a global philanthropic movement – founded by Australian tech giant Atlassian – that encourages and empowers burma telemarketing database companies of all sizes and stages to donate 1% of their staff time, product, profit, and/or equity to any charity of their choosing.
Globally, some of the biggest names in tech from Slack to Adobe, Zoom, Bullhorn, Twilio, Yelp and Salesforce, have taken the Pledge.
More than 1000 Australian companies, from new startups to tech unicorns have signed up to Pledge 1%, including Canva, Envato, SafetyCulture, Humantix, NextDC and Blackbird.
It’s an easy way for early-stage companies to leverage a portion of their future success to support their communities, because important thing about Pledge 1% is that it’s not always about cash.
There are four pledge types – product, equity, profit, or staff time – and companies and their teams can commit in any combination to the charity of their choice. And it can change over time as your startup grows and scales.
Canva’s big picture
When it comes to Australian tech startups taking on and changing the world, it’s hard to go past Canva.
Head of Social Impact, Robyn King, is straightforward about the company’s goals: “One: Build the world’s most valuable company. Two: Do the most good we possibly can.”
With more than 30 million people around the world using the platform, Pledge 1% is central to Canva’s approach.
“Two of our core values at Canva are ‘Be a Force for Good’ and ‘Make Complex Things Simple’,” King said.
“Pledge 1% seemed like a transparent and simple way to hold ourselves accountable to these values by making a public pledge about our commitment to social impact work.”
Everyone at Canva has pledged to commit 1% of the company’s time, product, profit and equity towards making the world a better place.
Achieving that goal adds another layer of engagement in the team.
“There are no hard and fast rules, which means we were able to bring a unique approach to how we wanted to live out the pledge,” King said.