Classy Takes the 1% Pledge and Joins the Integrated Philanthropy Community

Classy started as a simple fundraiser for the American Cancer Society because we wanted to dedicate our spare time to a cause that was close to our hearts. As we started hosting dozens of fundraising events across a variety of causes here in San Diego, we realized that there was an entire new wave of young people eager to do the same. We had tapped into something special – something that was a lot bigger than ourselves.

Years later, we’ve now built a company that helps organizations harness the same eagerness we saw in ourselves and in our peers. Our dedication to drive meaningful change in our San Diego community and beyond has only strengthened over the years. That’s why we took the pledge.

So what is Pledge 1%?

Pledge 1% is a commitment to dedicate a percentage of our time, equity, or product to philanthropy. In other words, dedicate some portion of our resources to directly help organizations solve social problems. Pledge 1% was founded by the Salesforce Foundation, Atlassian, Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Rally, and now has hundreds of companies in its integrated philanthropy community including Yelp, udemy and TechStars, just to name a few.

In many ways we’ve been doing this through Classy Awards and our team’s own desire to fundraise for our partner organizations over the years; however, today we want to go a step further. There are two parts of the Classy pledge:

• The first part of the pledge is to dedicate 1% of our team’s time back to the social impact organizations using the Classy platform. This means that every Classy staff member will be given additional paid time off for volunteering throughout the year. They will be able to use this paid-volunteering-time-off to get involved with any organization that they are passionate about on the Classy platform.
• The second part of our pledge is to dedicate 1% of our product back to every organization that uses our platform. To do this, we’ve made the bold decision to waive all Classy transaction fees across our platform on #GivingTuesday, one of the largest giving days of the year. That will put more funding back in the hands of over 1,500 social impact organizations worldwide (and growing fast).

Classy’s mission is to mobilize and empower the world for good. Taking the 1% Pledge and joining an integrated philanthropy community of 350+ companies furthers our commitment to this mission and every social impact organization we serve.

Editor’s Note: This post was published on September 9, 2015.