3 reasons why PagerDuty’s Impact Program is Admirable
I was lucky enough to score some time with Nisha Kadaba, a social impact leader at PagerDuty (a for-profit business), to learn more about PagerDuty.org’s powerful approach to delivering impact.
PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform that empowers the right action, when seconds matter. The platform helps organizations of all sizes proactively manage their digital operations so teams can spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.They work with mega corporations like Vodafone, food delivery startups like Glovo, and nonprofits like Polaris (which operates the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline). You can imagine how important an escalation software can be for a company like Polaris.
Other than providing a service that is genuinely value-add for society, here are 3 reasons why I like what PagerDuty (and more specifically its social impact arm, PagerDuty.org) is doing:
They Leverage their Core Capabilities to do Good: Although PagerDuty is no longer a startup, they are still at their nascent stages of being a public corporation — only having IPOd about three years ago. In 2017, PagerDuty took the 1% Pledge to include investing 1% each of company equity, product, and employee working time to accelerate change in our local and global communities. PagerDuty.org was created in 2018, and mobilizes the company’s core assets — people and product — to drive scalable impact (scalable meaning, their impact grows as the company grows). They serve nearly 300 nonprofits and B Corps and offer special discounted pricing to both. A company like Coca-Cola drives a majority of their impact through grant-making (and a lot of it), but this method of giving back is really only available to the world’s largest, most profitable enterprises. Leveraging a company’s core capabilities and assets to do good is a better way of getting more companies to practice giving back at an earlier stage.
They Are Masters at Engaging Their Employees: “Dutonians”, as PagerDuty employees are lovingly called (which I obviously adore), are encouraged to adopt a social impact mindset and be global “agents of change”. In fact, 92% of Dutonians volunteered or donated to a cause in 2021. That is CRAZY HIGH engagement. In addition to that, Dutonians donated $80k of pro-bono expertise to their clients in addition to mobilizing over $100k of personal donations.
They measure their impact and report out on it: This is one of my favorite benefits of for-profits engaging in impact: they are generally really good at data, and they apply that skillset to tracking and measuring their impact. PagerDuty.org created their first Impact report in 2021 and it’s beautiful. Hello, numbers:
My take: PagerDuty embodies the full-spectrum approach that for-profit businesses can take through combining the power of its funding, people, and product to make a greater impact for its nonprofit customers and partners.