Brad Feld highlights examples of startup philanthropy. Salesforce.com mixes donation and employee service with 1% of their employees time, 1% of their equity, and 1% of their profits to the Salesforce.com Foundation. Rally Software has a 1% fund for their local community.
This week, StillSecure announced that they are taking a similar step and donating 1% of revenue through 12/31/04 to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Like Ryan, Raj Bhargava - StillSecure's CEO - has a strong personal philanthropic philosophy. With this action, he's integrating this philosophy and awareness into his company with an immediacy that is impressive. StillSecure is still a young company so it doesn't have the infrastructure to create a foundation, but Raj and his team are laying the groundwork today for having StillSecure have a component of its business that is philanthropically aware and subsequently more tightly integrated into its community.
Too many entrepreneurs leave philanthropy for when they personally succeed. The benefits of a philanthropy program go beyond cause-related marketing, its a way of engaging communities and employee satisfaction. Donating revenue is a difficult step for an early stage company, and there are alternatives. Providing employees time for worthwhile pursuits (Socialtext employees contribute on their own initiative to non-profits, politics and open source) lays the groundwork for programmatic efforts to come. Providing discounts and a commitment to serve academic institutions and non-profits helps build a more robust network of customers. In-kind donations take this a step further, but needs to be done in a non-discriminative program.
The simple step any startup can take is to make social contribution part of the vision and mission of the company at a formative stage. If you plan on success, recognize that its partially due to supportive communities -- and have a plan for what to do with success at each stage.
