DO Impact: Reflecting on progress and the path ahead | DigitalOcean

It’s been a whirlwind three months since we announced the launch of DO Impact—our global social impact program to empower changemakers through our three pillars of product, philanthropy, and planet—and we’ve been busy! Though the road to meaningful, sustained impact is a long one, we’re eager to share some early wins as we continue to lay the groundwork for DO Impact. One of our goals is to bring this community along for the journey, so we’re excited to share the first of many progress updates and a look ahead to the rest of this year (and beyond). 

Celebration, recognition, and growth

Shortly after the initial announcement, we celebrated the start of DO Impact and our first anniversary as a publicly-traded company with an event at the New York Stock Exchange. For the first time in a while, we had an opportunity to gather in person, so many of our colleagues were able to reunite, and others met for the very first time.

In the same month, DigitalOcean was honored at the 2022 DevRel Awards—Hollie’s Hub for Good (HH4G) took home Best DevRel Initiative and Greatest Contribution to Society. The awards recognized HH4G for creating meaningful impact beyond the developer community and standing out amongst peers in the category.

Since then, our DO Impact team has grown: Christy Schmidt joined the team to help us create and scale our social impact programming, and Jen Petraglia is on board, helping us leverage our technology to support and expand the technical capacity of more nonprofits. Partnering with teams across DigitalOcean—from marketing, sales, and people, to operations, engineering, and product—we’re working together to develop ambitious goals for DO Impact.

Impact updates across our pillars

Product

We have more than 2,000 organizations enrolled in Hollie’s Hub for Good, and that number continues to grow rapidly. We love hearing from our Hollie’s Hub organizations that are advancing equity and building a better world, all with the help of DigitalOcean’s range of cloud computing products. Some of the newest Hollie’s Hub for Good projects include:

• Idealist.org, which has the largest repository of social impact job listings and provides tools for its users such as a volunteering database and a salary calculator to address pay inequality within the nonprofit sector.
• Development Hackers: a community of software developers, no-code makers and DIY enthusiasts getting together to build a more sustainable future. Development Hackers provides a place where technology is leveraged to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The team at Development Hackers uses their DigitalOcean credits to build and support their website.

We’re also investing in research and expanding our efforts to get our products and tutorials into the hands of even more nonprofit organizations. We know our technology is one area where we can achieve massive impact—something that has been built into DigitalOcean’s mission and values since its founding. From supporting nonprofits to host websites and content to providing the infrastructure to create impact-driving web applications, our technology reduces complexity so nonprofits can focus less on developing IT infrastructure and more on their missions.   

Philanthropy

As we shared in April, we kicked off our Pledge 1% commitment with a $500,000 cash donation across 30 global Hollie’s Hub for Good projects, and we’ve already heard from some of the recipients on the impact these grants will have.

TSI, an org that works to make STEM education available in all communities, shared that the donation will help them create new tools for the students in their tech program, and combined with the Hollie’s Hub for Good credits, they’re now enabled to “build without limits.” Unstructured Studio, a Canada-based non-profit organization that supports children from underserved communities with creative learning experiences, plans to use the funding to expand the reach of their platform to thousands of learners and educators in the coming year.

We’re also making strides to develop our employee giving and volunteering programs. This year, our five ERGs (employee resource groups), will donate a total of $100,000 to nonprofits and causes of their choice. Our Rainbow Dolphins ERG is kicking things off with a $10,000 donation to several LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations to help celebrate Pride month.

Looking ahead, we’re prioritizing giving back, community engagement, and skills-based volunteering initiatives across our global employee base. In 2021, one-third of DigitalOcean employees donated through our matching program or logged volunteer hours. Just halfway through 2022, we’ve exceeded that number, and we’re working to provide even more future opportunities for our employees to get involved.

Planet

Finally, we’re in the process of diving deep to better understand DigitalOcean’s carbon footprint and to identify key environmental, social, and governance (ESG) focus areas in the coming years. To do that, we’re working with several external consulting partners to 1) determine our carbon baseline, which will help inform our long-term strategy to build sustainability into our plans for growth, and 2) complete our ESG materiality assessment to prioritize the issues most relevant to our business—as we know this is the best way to integrate social impact into our business model and have the greatest overall impact. 

2022 and beyond

We’re just getting started! And we’re excited to bring you along with us. Follow us here and on social (#DOImpact) to hear more about the progress we’re making as we support DigitalOcean’s mission to empower builders to change the world, and to give back while we do it.