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For 24 years, Insight’s mission has been to invest in growth. While the unifying thread across our portfolio is software, we partner with companies across many verticals. As our portfolio companies grow, their global impact increases: they shape industries and create economic opportunities for their employees, local cities and customers. In 2018, Insight and the broad portfolio community contributed in a variety of philanthropic activities with positive influence.
Below are highlights from a few portfolio companies and Insight IMPACT.
Impact in North America
Campaign Monitor
Since 2015, Campaign Monitor has led a “Giving Back” program that allows our employees to take up to 4 days per year to volunteer and give back to the community through the charities that matter most to them. "Giving Back" is a unifying and integral part of our culture at Campaign Monitor, with regular events taking place each month throughout our global locations. In 2018, the company has supported 31 charities globally, hosted 19 fundraising events and volunteered over 1,100 hours to causes that support food security, animal welfare, health research and the environment.
Conga
The Conga Cares program is a global initiative created to encourage and support our teams to be active contributors for positive change in their communities through volunteering and charitable donations. Here are two ways that our teams have recently impacted their communities:
- Our software engineering leadership team partners with an organization called SheTech, which focuses on bringing STEM awareness and education to young women, to show them what a career in software engineering could look like.
- Conga matches every employee’s charitable donation (up to $1,000) and Matt Schiltz, our CEO, personally matches 50% of each donation (up to $500). It launched in February 2018 and we’ve collectively donated over $72,000 to 76 different organizations!
At Conga, we deeply believe that our team members thrive when they give back to their community. Therefore, we include a volunteer activity in our new hire onboarding program. In addition to offering 24 hours of paid VTO (volunteer time off) as part of our benefit package, we have also made August our "Global Volunteer Month" where teams across the globe come together to better our communities.
FloQast
For the last three years, FloQast has supported a local Los Angeles charity called United Cerebral Palsy of Los Angeles (UCPLA) by helping to manage, sponsor and participate in their annual charity golf tournament, the Devon Stern/UCPLA Golf Tournament. UCPLA is the largest nonprofit direct care provider of services in Southern California for persons with cerebral palsy, autism, Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities. In addition to sponsoring and volunteering in the charity, the FloQast team also plays in the tournament and was proud to place 1st this year. FloQast is also excited to help co-found/launch the Los Angeles chapter of Holiday Heroes, a Chicago based charity that partners with local hospitals to offer a week of themed parties to children who are terminally ill.
Gainsight
Gainsight promotes social responsibility and community involvement through the Gainsight Gives program. The company participated in a number of philanthropic initiatives, but two examples were particularly unique.
- Gainsight partnered with Athena Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating gender diversity in the boardroom. Gainsight sponsored five women for the Athena Aspiring Director Program - waiving the $7,500 first year membership fee. The program includes all membership benefits such as 1-on-1 executive coaching, board package development and personal brand presence.
- Gainsight Gives launched the “Returning to the Workforce Project” where they offered free training and certification in Customer Success Management at a Pulse Academy workshop event (a value of over $300) to professionals looking to re-enter the workforce, including former caregivers and veterans. It can be difficult to transition back into the workforce—especially in the field of Customer Success, which is evolving so quickly. That's why Gainsight created a path for people to get the skills and knowledge base needed to get a head start in this fast-growing industry.
Spanning
At Spanning, the company is guided by their core values, HIFADO (Helpful, Innovative, Fun, Accountable, Driven and Open). Every year, they show their commitment to social responsibility by engaging with the tech community in many creative ways.
Here are three examples from 2018:
- Many of our engineers and product managers participate in local chapters of national organizations that seek to make technology more inclusive, such as Girl Develop It.
- For every unique survey from their Salesforce community completed, Spanning donated $10 to support PepUp Tech and its mission to increase the number of underrepresented people in tech.
- Spanning offers qualified nonprofits a 25% discount to help keep their data protected.
Turnitin
Turnitin has a long history of Corporate Social Responsibility through granting employees 2 paid days off a year for a nonprofit of their choice and up to $1000 in matching grants per year. There is also a deep partnership with community at their Oakland, CA headquarters. For the past 5 years Turnitin has sponsored 3 scholars through the East Bay College Fund which grants college scholarships to Bay Area students.
In 2018 Turnitin extended it’s reach and partnered with Gensys Works to give a local high school student an opportunity to intern in the corporate headquarters. Turnitin has also partnered with the Oakland EdFund and Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary for the 2018-2019 school year to support literacy and technology education in the community. The partnership between MLK and Turnitin continues to grow: during the first week of December, Turnitin had the largest group of employees in history head back to MLK for Computer Science Education Week, leading a coding project using Google Chromebooks and working with students in grades 4 and 5.
VTS
In mid-2017, VTS launched a Diversity & Inclusion working group staffed by employee volunteers and chaired by a VTS-paid diversity specialist. In 2018, the company rolled out a "Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Plan (SDIP)" developed by the working group with quarterly actions and goals.
Activities in the 2018 SDIP included modifying and rolling out new interview processes, training all employees on unconscious bias, developing recruitment strategies like partnerships with Out in Tech and Black Girls Code, and hosting quarterly brown bags and panels on diversity and inclusion topics. In Q4 of 2018, VTS hosted a panel with experts on "working while differently abled" was attended by nearly 3/4 of VTS employees.
Impact Around the World
Detectify (Sweden)
At Detectify there was one employee this year who went above and beyond to make a social impact. Their security advisor, Frans Rosén, participated in several hacking events. He participated in OneLogin Charity Bug Bounty Bash where they hackers collected $13,000 to ICMCP and Queercon. He also donated €1000 to Let's Encrypt, where managed to find a very critical security that affected a large part of the Internet.
HomeToGo (Germany)
On December 5, HomeToGo supported Berlin’s local volunteering group, Serve the City, by wrapping holiday gifts for children at a refugee shelter. Over twenty employees helped wrap 400 gifts in two hours.
Showpad (Belgium)
At Showpad, the company has built the ShowpadCares team to organize events all year at each of their office locations. The standout event this year was their "Een dag voor Gent" initiative, which translates to "A Day for Ghent." With this initiative, Showpad committed to giving employees one full paid workday to volunteer in their local community and partnered with the City of Ghent to build the digital platform eendagvoorgent.be/, which tracks how many companies are participating, how many days have been volunteered and how many charities have been helped.
As of today, 36 companies have participated in Een dag voor Gent, volunteering 832 total days to 30 different charitable organizations.
Insight Venture Partners
Insight IMPACT had a busy 2018.
Structured around one organized event per quarter, we focused most of our efforts on using our specific professional skill-sets to give back to the community. Working with non-profits like Streetwise Partners, SuitUp and BUILD, we were able to provide hands-on business skills and entrepreneurship workshops to under-resourced students and adults in New York City.
Overall, we logged over 130 hours of mentorship across our employees, and many individuals have continued to work with these organizations independent of firmwide events. We were also thrilled to have the opportunity to engage in other sorts of Impact work, from a Thanksgiving repack event to a "No Shave November" initiative that raised funds for Men’s Health charities.
As we look to 2019, Insight IMPACT will continue to work towards our mission of providing a centralized, collaborative, and fun way for Insight employees to demonstrate our commitment to giving back. With the launch of a new internal platform that enables employees to share volunteering opportunities with their coworkers, we think we are on track to raise engagement more than ever.
