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Why it just might make sense that Salesforce.com is buying Salesforce.org
Yesterday, Salesforce .com announced its intent to buy its own educational/nonprofit arm, Salesforce.org, for $300 million. On its face, this feels like a confusing turn of events, but industry experts say it’s really about aligning educational and nonprofit verticals across the entire organization.
Salesforce has always made a lot of hay about being a responsible capitalist. It’s something it highlights at events and really extends with the 1-1-1 model it created, which gives one percent of profit, time and resources (product) to education and nonprofits. Its employees are given time off and are encouraged to work in the community. Salesforce.org has been the driver behind this, but something drove the company to bring Salesforce.org into the fold.
While it’s easy to be cynical about the possible motivations, it could be a simple business reason, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. As he pointed out, it didn’t make a lot of sense from a business perspective to be running two separate entities with separate executive teams, bookkeeping systems and sales teams. What’s more, he said there was some confusion over lack of alignment and messaging between the Salesforce.com education sales team and what was happening at Salesforce.org. Finally, he says because Salesforce.org couldn’t issue Salesforce.com stock options, it might not have been attracting the best talent.
“It allows them to get better people and talent, and it’s also eliminating redundancies with the education vertical. That was really the big driver behind this,” Wang told TechCrunch.
Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group agreed. “My guess is that they were struggling to align roadmaps between the offerings (.com and .org), and they see .org as more strategic now and want to make sure they’re in the fold,” he said.
Focusing on the charity arm
Brent Leary, principal and co-founder at CRM Essentials, says it’s also about keeping that charitable focus front and center, while pulling that revenue into the Salesforce.com revenue stream. “It seems like doing good is set to be really good for business, making it a potentially very good idea to be included as part of Salesforce’s top line revenue numbers, Leary said.
For many, this was simply about keeping up with Microsoft and Google in the nonprofit space, and being part of Salesforce.com makes more sense in terms of competing. “I believe Salesforce’s move to bring Salesforce.org in house was a well-timed strategic move to have greater influence on the company’s endeavors into the Not for Profit (NFP) space. In the wake of Microsoft’s announcements of significantly revamping and adding resources to its Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, Salesforce would be well-served to also show greater commitment on their end to helping NFPs acquire greater access to technologies that enable them to carry out their mission,” Daniel Newman, founder and principal analyst at Futurum Research, said.
Good or bad idea?
But not everyone sees this move in a positive light. Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst and founder at Moor Insights and Strategies, says it could end up being a public relations nightmare for Salesforce if the general public doesn’t understand the move. Salesforce could exacerbate that perception if it ends up raising prices for nonprofits and education.
“Salesforce and Benioff’s move with Salesforce.org is a big risk and could blow up in its face. The degree of negative reaction will be dependent on how large the price hikes are and how much earnings get diluted. We won’t know that until more details are released,” Moorhead said.
The deal is still in progress, and will take some months to close, but if it’s simply an administrative move designed to create greater efficiencies, it could make sense. The real question that remains is how this will affect educational and nonprofit institutions as the company combines Salesforce.org and Salesforce.com.
Salesforce did not wish to comment for this story.
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Instagram’s fundraiser stickers could lure credit card numbers
Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that commerce is a huge part of the 2019 road map for Facebook’s family of apps. But before people can easily buy things from Instagram etc., Facebook needs their credit card info on file. That’s a potentially lucrative side effect of Instagram’s plan to launch a Fundraiser sticker in 2019. Facebook’s own Donate buttons have raised $1 billion, and bringing them to Instagram’s 1 billion users could do a lot of good while furthering Facebook’s commerce strategy.
New code and imagery dug out of Instagram’s Android app reveals how the Fundraiser stickers will allow you to search for nonprofits and add a Donate button for them to your Instagram Story. After you’ve donated to something once, Instagram could offer instant checkout on stuff you want to buy using the same payment details.
Back in 2013 when Facebook launched its Donate button, I suggested that it could add a “remove credit card after checkout” option to its fundraisers if it wanted to make it clear that the feature was purely altruistic. Facebook never did that. You still need to go into your payment settings or click through the See Receipt option after donating and then edit your account settings to remove your credit card. We’ll see if Instagram is any different. We’ve also asked whether Instagrammers will be able to raise money for personal causes, which would make it more of a competitor to GoFundMe — which has sadly become the social safety net for many facing healthcare crises.
Facebook mentioned at its Communities Summit earlier this month that it’d be building Instagram Fundraiser stickers, but the announcement was largely overshadowed by the company’s reveal of new Groups features. This week, TechCrunch tipster Ishan Agarwal found code in the Instagram Android app detailing how users will be able search for nonprofits or browse collections of Suggested charities and ones they follow. They can then overlay a Donate button sticker on their Instagram Story that their followers can click through to contribute.
We then asked reverse-engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong to take a look, and she was able to generate the screenshots seen above that show a green heart icon for the Fundraiser sticker plus the nonprofit search engine. A Facebook spokespeople tells me that “We are in early stages and working hard to bring this experience to our community . . . Instagram is all about bringing you closer to the people and things you love, and a big part of that is showing support for and bringing awareness to meaningful communities and causes. Later this year, people will be able to raise money and help support nonprofits that are important to them through a donation sticker in Instagram Stories. We’re excited to bring this experience to our community and will share more updates in the coming months.”
Zuckerberg said during the Q4 2018 earnings call last month that “In Instagram, one of the areas I’m most excited about this year is commerce and shopping . . . there’s also a very big opportunity in basically enabling the transactions and making it so that the buying experience is good.” Streamlining those transactions through saved payment details means more people will complete their purchase rather than abandoning their cart. Facebook CFO David Wehner noted on the call that “Continuing to build good advertising products for our e-commerce clients on the advertising side will be a more important contributor to revenue in the foreseeable future.” Even though Facebook isn’t charging a fee on transactions, powering higher commerce conversion rates convinces merchants to buy more ads on the platform.
With all the talk of envy spiraling, phone addiction, bullying and political propaganda, enabling donations is at least one way Instagram can prove it’s beneficial to the world. Snapchat lacks formal charity features, and Twitter appears to have ended its experiment allowing nonprofits to tweet donate buttons. Despite all the flack Facebook rightfully takes, the company has shown a strong track record with philanthropy that mirrors Zuckerberg’s own $47 billion commitment through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And if having some relatively benign secondary business benefit speeds companies toward assisting nonprofits, that’s a trade-off we should be willing to embrace.
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Android users can now donate to charities through the Google Play Store
The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon — Apple for years has collected donations for the American Red Cross in the wake of natural disasters like the California wildfires and hurricanes, for example.
Google’s implementation, however, isn’t a launch tied to a single event. And it’s rolling out support for several charities, not just the Red Cross.
Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and Indonesia will soon see the option to make a donation to a number of organizations, including also charity:water, Doctors Without Borders USA, Girls Who code, International Rescue Committee, Room to Red, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Program USA and World Wildlife Fund US, in addition to the American Red Cross.
To access the feature Android users can head to play.google.com/donate to read about the organizations or to make a donation using the payment card they have on file for the Play Store.
To be clear, this is about the Play Store itself collecting charitable donations, not allowing Android app developers to do so. Google Play is covering all the transaction and disbursement costs, so the organizations receive 100 percent of users’ donations.
The feature’s launch has been timed with the holiday season, which often inspires charitable giving. It’s also a sort of belated nod to Giving Week 2018, the movement that encourages people to volunteer, fundraise and donate to worthy causes. (Giving Week this year wrapped on December 5).
The donations feature may offer a different selection of nonprofits in the future, we understand, though Google is not announcing any planned additions at this time.
Google says the feature will begin to roll out to Android users in the supported markets over the next few days.
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Overwatch ‘Pink Mercy’ sale raises $12M for breast cancer research
It can be hard sometimes to grok the scale of the gaming community, but the occasional charity event not only demonstrates the hugeness of the industry but also its diversity and willingness to shell out for a good cause. Today Blizzard announced that an Overwatch charity campaign raised an impressive $12.7 million for breast cancer research in just two weeks.
Overwatch is an extremely popular team-based shooter game that has made an impression not just with its solid gameplay, but its striking and inclusive character design. This sensitivity to the ever-widening demographics of gaming led them to conceive of this charity campaign back in May.
Players could for a limited time purchase a special “skin,” or 3D model, for the character Mercy — she’s the most powerful healer in the lineup, so the choice makes sense, even though the statuesque blonde isn’t exactly their most interesting character work. (A Pink Genji would probably look cool, but it would probably just make more people play him — a regrettable outcome.)
Special skins are highly sought-after, and while many can be obtained through in-game loot boxes, they can also be purchased. In this case, the price was set at $15, rather high for a skin but clearly that didn’t deter players, who shelled out by the thousands for both it and related t-shirts.
I asked for a breakdown, but a little napkin math gives a basic idea of the volume. The press release announcing the $12.7 million number says “thousands” of t-shirts were sold at $30 apiece; usually if it’s 10,000 or more they say so, so we’ll just use 10K as our estimate. That makes $300K from shirts, so the remaining $12.4 million means somewhere north of 820,000 people paid for the Pink Mercy skin.
Think about that! In two weeks more than three quarters of a million people paid $15 each for a virtual item. Pretty great. It’s all going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, by the way. They got a big novelty check:
And this is by no means the only big gaming charity event. Games Done Quick regularly raises millions, and Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play got so big that it had to be spun off as its own thing. It just recently announced a round of grants funding pediatric hospital equipment and staff, by the way.
This event went well enough that we can probably expect more in the future for other causes — I’ve asked Blizzard for any details on that front and will update if I hear back.
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Dell Foundation pledges $36 million to Harvey relief effort
Michael and Susan Dell have doubled down on the tech industry’s commitment to bail out Texas as it recovers from Hurricane Harvey. The couple pledged a whopping $36 million to the effort through their foundation today. The money, which represents the largest single contribution to date for the disaster, comes in the form of an $18 million seed contribution, followed by a dollar… Read More
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Game developers show political solidarity with Humble Freedom Bundle
The Humble Bundle is a reliable source of good deals on games, usually organized around some theme or another. This week’s bundle, however, is not only one of the best gaming deals of all time, but all proceeds are going to support charities that work with immigrants and refugees. Read More
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Google.org donates $30 million to help nonprofits buy the tech they need
Google.org is donating $30 million to non-profits this holiday so that they can buy any tech and related services that they need including hardware, software, training and IT maintenance or repair services. Earlier this month, reports leaked that Google had donated money earmarked for employees’ Christmas gifts to charity instead this year. It’s true that the company made… Read More
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Spotfund makes micro-donations easier with social-first mobile app
Liking or sharing a charity online might help raise awareness, but what a lot of campaigns that go comprehensively viral really need is cold, hard cash. Launched this week, Spotfund has created a site and an iOS app that makes raising $1-$3 donations far easier than before. “Making an impact isn’t about the size of your wallet,” Spotfund’s CEO says. Read More
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Ben Lerer, Gary Vaynerchuk and Andy Dunn join the board of nonprofit RaisedBy.Us
RaisedBy.Us, an organization that facilitates charitable giving at startups, has added three entrepreneurs and investors to its board of directors — Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above), VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk and Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn. The nonprofit works with startups so their employees can donate a set amount of each paycheck to the charity of their choice. (The system… Read More
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Google To Donate Up To $1 Million Toward Education In Android Pay Charity Campaign
In an effort to kickstart its mobile payments solution, Android Pay, Google this morning announced a holiday campaign that will see the tech giant donating up to a million dollars toward special education projects in partnership with nonprofit DonorsChoose.org. This is the first time Google has ever worked with an NGO on a mobile payments campaign, the company notes. However, it’s not… Read More
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