Postmates: A Case Study on How to Leverage a Business’s Existing Capabilities as a Force for Good
Diz Petit has been a community activist since she was 16 years old — she always had a desire to do right. Most recently she co-founded LiquiDonate, a for-profit service that matches a retail company’s unsellable items with local nonprofits and schools who need them while saving the company money — Donations as a Service (DaaS), if you will. She’s doing good and doing well (really well) at the same time.
Prior to LiquiDonate, she was employee #15 at Postmates, and after earning a reputation as the person who “cared about stuff”, she was catapulted into the position of founding and leading Postmates’ impact arm — Civic Labs. She was given a small yet workable budget by the CEO, but realized she needed to leverage the existing resources in house to set up the program to scale (my favorite type, as you know). Below is how she helped to build a sustainable impact program within a growing, not yet profitable startup.
There were three pillars to Postmates’ original in-house impact program:
1) FOOD SECURITY
FoodFight! was a program that invited participating restaurants to request a pickup of excess food and have it delivered to a local shelter at the touch of a button, therefore helping to limit food waste and providing restaurants with a simple and convenient way to give back to their community. As Postmates was already picking up food at restaurants and delivering to a final destination, why not make that destination a nonprofit or homeless shelter when excess food is available? The result: more than 300,000 meals delivered over 2 years.
→Postmates leveraged their core delivery business and vast network of restaurants on their platform to facilitate these transactions (delivery was paid for by Postmates, food was donated), as well as their tech team to install a button on the merchant tablet that allowed this exchange to happen.
Bento, which was started in partnership with Salesforce and Not Impossible Labs (and which has now spun off into its own company and actually was ranked as one of Time’s best inventions of 2021) was a program that enabled those experiencing food insecurity (and didn’t own a smartphone) to text the word “HUNGRY” to a phone number and be connected with a pre-paid to-go meal from a nearby restaurant that they could go and pick up.
→Postmates leveraged their existing pick-up product to enable the use of SMS for non-smart phones — or matching the product with the population.
2) DISASTER RELIEF
Postmates partnered with nonprofits like the World Central Kitchen and the Red Cross to provide last mile delivery of necessary items post-disaster. Interestingly, Postmates customers and employees could fund the cost of needed items, and then Postmates would pay for the delivery of the items.
→ Postmates leveraged its network of customers and employees to garner monetary donations, as well as its core delivery business to facilitate the delivery of these items — not only did this do good for communities in need, it kept their drivers happy by giving them more delivery orders.
3) COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
This simply allowed employees to pledge 24 hours of (work) time to any cause important to them. Company benefits of getting employees involved in their local communities include increasing employee engagement and morale, allowing coworkers to learn about one another, and informing product changes simply by interacting with different groups of people. And — you can snag some photos, which is good for management buy-in, along with good brand recognition.
→ Postmates leveraged their existing employee base as a force for good.
→ Fun fact: The national average participation rate for employee volunteering is 33%, and Postmates had a 84% rate.
I’ll leave you with a hot tip from Diz: It is imperative to have executive buy-in to build an enduring impact program. It’s also equally important to show management the benefits of said impact program — from sharing photos from volunteering days to publishing internal impact reports with real data.