by Marc Benioff
Our single biggest opportunity for impact, however, is when we have most of our Ohana gathered together. Dreamforce isn’t just our biggest customer event, it’s our biggest giving-back event of the year. We’ve collected a million books to donate to schools here and around the world, such as newly constructed schools in Nepal. We joined with Rise Against Hunger (then known as Stop Hunger Now) to package a million meals for communities suffering from limited food resources and poverty. An annual Dreamforce concert raises money for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals ($70 million and counting).
Over the last twenty years, Salesforce has given about $300 million in grants and our employees have volunteered more than 4 million hours in communities around the world. But here’s my favorite stat of all: A whopping 88 percent of our employees give back. And as we continue to grow, so will those numbers.
It’s not just the recipients of our time and donations who have benefited from these efforts. Giving back has been linked to improved productivity, employee satisfaction, and talent recruitment, according to research from Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Our own data shows that giving back is the second-highest reason why new hires join Salesforce, and it ranks in the top three reasons why employees stay. Sure, we have gorgeous office buildings outfitted with meditation rooms and barista bars, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that we compensate our employees fairly and equally. But the forty thousand people at Salesforce are motivated by more than all that. They care about doing something for others. They want to help local communities. They want to help our children get the best education possible. They want to help bridge the technology divide and prepare the workforce for the shock waves of the future.
Teaching Possibility
In its early days, the Salesforce Foundation was primarily a vehicle for making grants to nonprofits, based on the equity we set aside ahead of the IPO. We gave thousands of nonprofits, NGOs, and educational institutions up to ten free subscriptions to Salesforce technology and provided assistance in using our software to connect with their students, donors, staff, and other stakeholders. As the demand continued to grow and organizations came back for more subscriptions, we made a decision that has amplified our giving exponentially.
We realized we were in a unique position as the philanthropic arm of a company that develops and sells customer relationship management. Every nonprofit (of which there are more than 1.5 million in the United States alone), NGO, and educational institution has “customers”—whether they’re donors, students, alumni/ae, staff, partners, or clients. And these organizations need a tool for managing those customer relationships (across sales, customer service, marketing and commerce), just like any other business. By offering them additional subscriptions at a steep discount, we removed a significant barrier—price—to the efficiencies that such a tool could offer. At the same time, even at a discounted price, these subscriptions began bringing in revenue that we could put back into our communities.
These material breakthroughs in the nonprofit world also taught us an important lesson. At the end of the day, Salesforce, like any other technology company, is in the business of helping our customers access, organize, and make sense of information. This is, of course, a function essential to organizations, for-profit and nonprofit alike. But developing the ability to tap the power of information, we realized, is also critical for those who will be running and leading those companies and organizations in the future.
Even back when our nascent company had zero products and just a handful of employees, I knew that if we wanted Salesforce to become a trailblazing company, we would need world-class talent. Which meant we needed to invest in those places where future trailblazers could acquire the education and skills they would need to succeed in the digital, information-economy workforce: our schools and youth institutions.
So one of our earliest projects, which we undertook in partnership with General Powell’s PowerUP program, was putting computers in after-school centers, including one at the Embarcadero YMCA across the street from our office. We secured space in the Y’s windowless basement, where our employees painted the walls with blue skies and white clouds (like parts of Salesforce’s offices). Then we installed rows of computers loaded up with the latest technology in place of a bunch of antiquated, useless ones. When the kids came in after school, they were greeted not only with functioning technology, but with “live” help to teach them how to use it—our employee volunteers.
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In 2012, we were giving grants and volunteering for all kinds of organizations, including youth organizations, public schools, charities, homeless shelters, and more. On one hand, it felt great to be supporting so many causes we cared about. But on the other, I worried we weren’t delivering meaningful impact with this scattered approach. My close friend Ron Conway, a legendary Silicon Valley VC, philanthropist, and Salesforce.org board member, was close to then San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and suggested that we meet to discuss what the city needed most. At my favorite breakfast spot, Ella’s, I asked Mayor Lee (who passed away in 2017) what he wanted his legacy to be. He said one word: “Education.” After a long pause, he continued: “Especially in middle school, that’s where a kid’s fate is largely determined….And I would like to give our kids the opportunity, when they graduate, to see themselves working at tech companies like yours.”
A few years later, Mayor Lee began working with one of those very kids, Ebony Frelix Beckwith. Ebony, who is now our chief philanthropy officer, grew up in an underserved section of San Francisco (actually a few blocks from Visitacion Valley), and would daydream about someday working in the gleaming towers downtown when she tagged along with her single mother to her secretarial job. After graduating with a degree in computer science, she worked in operations at financial firms and then joined Salesforce as chief of staff in technical business operations. There was no question in my mind that she was the right person to bring a more data-driven approach to the business of giving back at Salesforce.org.
Together with Rob Acker, Salesforce.org’s chief operating officer at the time—and now CEO—Ebony and Suzanne pored over the data to see where employees were volunteering and what would be sustainable in the longer term as we sought to prioritize our philanthropic efforts around public school education. Perhaps where we landed was no surprise: We would double down on computer science education, injecting STEM education into all the schools in the district.
A year later, in 2013, San Francisco schools superintendent Richard Carranza (who went on to become chancellor of the New York City Department of Education) paid me a visit. He wanted to know if we’d be willing to donate a few million dollars to install Wi-Fi in middle schools and buy some classroom laptops. “You guys need to think bigger! What does nirvana look like for the schools?” I asked him. “You just have to tell us what you want.”
Eventually, Salesforce pledged $100 million over a decade to the San Francisco Unified and Oakland school districts. But unlike conventional corporate gifts, ours comes with hands-on assistance from our employees, who have volunteered forty thousand hours (thus far) to mentoring students in the classrooms of these two school districts alone.
As a result, San Francisco became the very first school district in the United States to have a computer science curriculum for every grade. We have more Wi-Fi in more classrooms, more full-time teachers and coaches for math and technology, and smaller class sizes. And the results are measurable. A full 90 percent of San Francisco’s public school students are now proficient in computer science, and we’ve seen a 2,000 percent increase in girls and 6,600 percent increase in underrepresented groups taking computer science. In my mind, that progress, more than how much money or time we donate, is the real measure of success.
Encouraged by these results, we’re doing similar work with school districts where we have offices around the globe. In Indianapolis, for example, the location of
our second-biggest hub in the United States, we gave $500,000 to the public school district. With about 90 percent of our employees giving their time in the local schools and nonprofits, they spent sixty-five thousand hours volunteering in Indiana last year alone.
Sometimes, though, the impact of our volunteers on the lives of students and young people isn’t just about hours or grades or test scores. Rather, it lies simply in showing them what’s possible. That’s part of the reason why Stephanie Glenn, an early member of our New York hub who has risen from sales manager to vice president, has made volunteering a primary team-building activity. Stephanie and her sales team have taught financial literacy at a school in Queens, and they have brought on interns from Year Up, a workforce development program for young adults without college degrees. Many, like sales intern Britnee Alvarez, end up getting hired by Salesforce for a full-time job.
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” as the saying goes—and we want these kids to see a bright future for themselves, at a company like ours. That’s why, in 2018, when Patrick Stokes, an executive based in New York, adopted the Dual Language Middle School, where 86 percent of the students receive free lunch, he did more than set up a coding program. He and Jennifer Stredler, a Salesforce.org vice president, worked with principal Kristina Jelinek to bring 32 students described by the school as “on the cusp” (not the highest performers, but with more potential than they may be demonstrating) to Salesforce Tower in Manhattan.
Patrick and Jenn, and several other Salesforce employees, arranged what they called a “rotating career panel,” essentially connecting the middle school students with small groups of employees from various teams, enabling them to ask what we did, how we did it, and, in some cases, what we earned! Whether it was the impact of these inspirational chats or the free Salesforce swag, several left that day with a goal: “I want to work someplace like this after I go to college.”
And many of them have. This was the goal of creating Futureforce, a diverse set of programs that includes adopting local public schools to address K-12 STEM education, partnering with nonprofits and NGOs on vocational training, recruiting from universities and community colleges, and creating hundreds of apprenticeships for urban youth, more than half of whom we’ve hired.
Giving Back by Skilling Up
When we think about educating communities that lack resources, our minds tend to go straight to public school systems. But children and teenagers are no longer the only demographic in need of better access to educational resources. With the rise of AI and robotics, workplaces around the globe are facing a wholesale transformation. For our customers across many industries, routine tasks are increasingly being outsourced to machines. To survive in a world where automation is rendering so many jobs—and even entire careers—obsolete will require an education of a different kind. That’s why workforce development has also become a priority for Salesforce.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2018 The Future of Jobs report, more than 50 percent of all employees will require significant re-skilling by 2022. People working in sales and manufacturing, for example, will need to acquire more technical skills. Today, at least one in four workers across all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries is already reporting a mismatch with regards to the skills demanded by their current job. Despite the growing need for adult re-skilling and job training, such opportunities are not currently available or accessible for most people. Millions of people transitioned out of work by machines and algorithms would deal a giant blow to global and local economies—and if left alone, the fissures from that giant crack will only continue to elongate and widen.
I view this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the inevitable economic dislocation that will result from technological innovation. This means ensuring an adequate form of job security for those people who find that their careers are disrupted or replaced. It’s likely that more jobs will be created than lost in the coming decade, so investing in training and re-skilling is a critical step in enabling displaced workers to reenter the workforce.
We need to do nothing short of reimagining the social contract for the twenty-first century, and a challenge this big and complex cannot be left to politicians alone. Rather than sitting on the sidelines as automation accelerates, every business has a vested interest in finding ways to train and re-skill workers for the jobs of tomorrow.
In the United States alone there are nearly half a million open technology jobs, but our universities produced only sixty-three thousand computer science graduates last year. Meanwhile, our companies can be incredible universities for educating the workforce of the future. Which is why we invest in training employees, as well as interns and apprentices, to acquire new skills, in many cases through specialized instruction and hands-on experience that can’t be obtained at even the most prestigious universities.
We aren’t the only ones investing in workforce development programs. JPMorgan Chase is spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding community college and other nontraditional career development programs for women, veterans, and underrepresented minorities globally. “We must remove the stigma of a community college and career education, look for opportunities to upskill or reskill workers, and give those who have been left behind the chance to compete for well-paying careers today and tomorrow,” says JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Dow, IBM, and Siemens have established apprenticeship programs to help fill the skills gap in their industries. And CareerWise Colorado is working to create twenty thousand apprenticeships in the state for high-demand occupations across multiple business sectors over the next decade.
At Salesforce we also use our online learning platform, Trailhead, to help both our employees and our customers continuously develop the new skills required in today’s rapidly changing digital economy. With Vetforce, we offer free training to U.S. service members, veterans, and spouses to acquire the skills necessary to obtain tech jobs. I was personally inspired by TJ McElroy, who, after losing his sight in the Marine Corps, became a certified information-technology administrator through the Vetforce program. Today he instructs other disabled vets to prepare them for careers in technology.
Keith Block, our co-CEO, has taken on workforce development as his cause, much as I have with homelessness and oceans. When he worked to launch a massive digital transformation at State Farm, he and its CEO Michael Tipsord partnered to go beyond just getting the best implementation of our software. They wanted to ensure that the workers impacted by AI-powered technology advances, everyone from the agents to the claims processors, would get the training needed to continue thriving in their careers. Part of this re-skilling is being done through Trailhead.
Keith is also committed to spreading the message about workforce development far and wide. “Get in the game,” he told the one thousand partners, including IT consulting giants Accenture, PwC, and IBM, who assembled at one of our recent annual partner meetings. “This isn’t only about projects or revenue; it’s about truly making customers successful, and their employees.”
Our companies are a vast army of millions of people who could have a tremendous impact on re-skilling workers impacted by automation: mentoring them, working side by side with them, giving them the tools they need to continue to learn and grow. By coming together not just with other companies, but also with community colleges, universities, veterans’ groups, NGOs, K-12 schools, and governments, we can help close the skills gap, nurture prospective employees, and develop the future workforce that will support a strong and growing economy. It’s no longer enough to bring along the workforce of today. We also need to work hard to build the workforce of tomorrow.
I often ask my peers in Silicon Valley what would have happened if the top-tier venture capital firms required the companies they invested in to put one percent of their equity into a public charity serving the communities in which they do business. The answer is ob
vious: Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, and numerous other successful Silicon Valley companies would have created some of the largest public charities in the world, amassing billions of dollars that could fund programs to address the most difficult problems we face.
We need to find a way to give back on a massively large scale. The answer is business. Some companies, such as Google, have adopted a variation of our 1-1-1 model, and we’ve worked with other organizations to spread it around the world. We also provided the seed for Pledge1percent.org, which encourages and provides a framework for companies of all sizes and stages to donate 1 percent of their employee time, product, and profit or equity to any charity.
More than eighty-five hundred companies in a hundred countries so far—including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and Twilio—have joined Pledge 1%, generating over $1 billion in philanthropy through the 1-1-1 model. The companies understand that giving back versus looking forward isn’t an either-or option. It’s complementary to our investments in innovation, and the foundation of everything we stand for, because it means putting our faith in the promise of a better future.
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“This is about Americans getting off the sidelines and getting onto the playing field.”
These words of General Powell (who is today on the Salesforce board) have always stuck with me. Yet I’m also acutely aware that this playing field he spoke of is far from an even one, as access to education, information, and opportunity becomes more and more stratified across socioeconomic divides. And these fissures begin to widen long before people enter the workforce. To heal them, we need to start where they do—in our nation’s most underserved and underfunded schools. If I could put anything on a billboard it would be ADOPT A PUBLIC SCHOOL. Or at least, donate some time and resources to one.