In December 2014, the Atlassian Foundation helped co-found the Pledge 1% Movement. This is a global initiative aimed at creating a “new normal,” where companies of all sizes pledge to make giving back — at least 1% of annual profits, 1% of employee time and 1% of company equity — part of their DNA.
Perhaps your company is one of the more than 12,000 companies from 100+ countries taking part in the movement. Perhaps your organization has spearheaded a different approach to
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Atlassian is a software company. We like data. And because we use a technology platform (from corporate purpose software provider,
Look at more than one measure: Previously, we used to look at a single measure to determine whether or not our people were “engaged” with our social impact initiatives: volunteer participation. What percentage of our people were signing up to volunteer in a fiscal year? But we found that this was limiting in a couple of key ways. First, increasing volunteering participation rates every year is not scalable. By the time you reach 80 or 90% participation, you’re pretty limited in how much more you can grow. Second, measuring participation only didn’t account for situations that could significantly alter the engagement landscape… like, for instance, a global pandemic.
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So, we decided to analyze engagement more holistically, through a couple of different metrics. Instead of just looking at participation rates, we looked at total volunteer hours and giving rates. This gave us a better picture of not just if people engaged, but how deeply they engaged. If they were impeded from engaging in one area — say in-person volunteering — we could also see if this caused an uptick in engagement elsewhere (through donations, for example.) By looking at more than one measure, we were able to get a better, more complete understanding of engagement overall, and design programs that more effectively addressed areas where there were gaps. For example, the data showed us that it might be more impactful to direct some of our engagement efforts on boosting volunteering hours rather than just participation. We didn’t want volunteering to stop after people participated in one activity, so we started thinking about ways to re-engage them after that first contact.
Leadership buy-in really matters: At Atlassian, having the freedom to do good for society while at work is just one way we uphold our company’s values through our culture, and manager support and buy-in is an important way to set an example and encourage people to engage in social impact activities. Specifically, we found that when teams embedded social impact goals into their KPIs or targets, it had a positive impact on engagement. By including social engagement in KPIs, activities like giving and volunteering are not just a “nice to have”, but instead actual measures of success for those teams. We also used data to target teams with low volunteering so that we could tailor activities that suited them. This data-driven, team-oriented approach resulted in a significant increase in engagement that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to identify and achieve.
Social impact engagement correlates to better organizational outcomes: Finally, our data showed us that engagement in Goodness didn’t just have positive effects outside of the organization, (i.e., in terms of contributions to the community), but internally as well. A survey conducted by Atlassian’s Senior Quantitative Researcher, Dr. Mahreen Khan, found the precedence of commitment to social impact engagement within teams was related to an increase in effective organizational commitment overall.
In other words, teams that were most engaged with social impact also reported feeling
Understanding the drivers behind engagement with social impact programs is key to making them successful. In pivoting to a more data-driven approach, the Atlassian Foundation was able to better prepare and plan programs in advance, and also identify gaps and quickly change directions in instances where the data showed that something wasn’t working. This was especially important in a year marked by disruption for many businesses. If you are looking for ways to drive deeper engagement with Goodness programs in your own organization, consider looking at your data for answers. What you uncover might help you refine your programs so that more of your people are eager to join in, resulting in benefits for your business, your community and our world.
