Over the last decade and a half, the cloud computing giant Salesforce has rewritten the rulebook for how corporate philanthropy is supposed to work. That includes formalizing a commitment to give at least 1% of its time, product, and equity to charity no matter how well the company may be doing. Then it formalized a process for others to follow suit in replicating that commitment: The company’s early effort became the basis for Pledge 1%, an advisory program that launched two years ago, which helps others do the same in at least one of those three areas. Pledge 1% has been adopted by well over a thousand companies, including unicorns like Atlassian, Box, Pure Storage, and Twilio.
