Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Small Business Trends post, consultant Brent Leary discusses how virtual assistants powered by AI and strategic philanthropy will impact the private industry.

• What might this mean for the future of Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives? How can we merge technology and volunteerism in an intuitive way?

• Here what small businesses can do to align with the Sustainable Development Goals.

In December, I had the opportunity to host a “diversity in tech” session at Salesforce’s World Tour stop in Atlanta. These world tour events are a great way to get a taste of the what goes on at the company’s huge annual user conference — Dreamforce — if you can’t make it to San Francisco to be with 170,000 attendees.

A few themes from the event — which I originally heard at Dreamforce in September – reinforced my thinking that a couple of trends are going to be important for small businesses to consider in 2019. Particularly from customer engagement and employee satisfaction perspectives ...

One of the things Salesforce did from its beginning was to include philanthropy and volunteerism as part of its business model. They called it their 1-1-1 model — meaning they committed to give 1% of employee time, 1% of company profits and 1% of company product to make a difference in the world around us, locally and internationally.

Now doing this at the founding of the company back in 1999 probably didn’t seem like a big commitment, since there were no profits to donate. But that was then. Fast forward 19+ years and the totals Salesforce has donated are staggering:

  • $280 million of profits donated,
  • 3.2 million volunteer hours,
  • Over $1 billion in social impact with donated technology.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that less than twenty years ago, Salesforce was a startup. They were a very small fry offering something that most people had no idea what it was. In due time the company was able to donate the numbers above because of the numbers below:

  • Annual revenues expected to surpass $13 billion dollars in FYE ‘19,
  • Over thirty thousand employees,
  • A market capitalization of over $100 billion.

Read the full article about voice and philanthropy in small business by Brent Leary at Small Business Trends.