A look back at the first official year of DO Impact

With the wild wave of 2022 behind us, we’re taking the opportunity to look back at the impact DigitalOcean created and supported last year. Here’s a recap of progress and highlights from the first official year of DO Impact:

Launching DO Impact

In April, DigitalOcean launched DO Impact at the NYSE. The event was both a celebration and a commitment to developing our strategy and programming as a Pledge 1% member. We’re just getting started, but feel excited about the meaningful headway we’ve made since then.

Giving more than $1.1M in cash grants to 900+ organizations (and more)

Despite an economically challenging year, DigitalOcean remained committed to its philanthropy and Pledge 1% commitment. Between cash grants, ERG-driven donations, employee donation credits, and matching employee contributions, DigitalOcean gave over $1.1M to more than 900 organizations in 2022. This $1.1M was split across:

• Hollie’s Hub for Good grants to support almost 30 organizations using DigitalOcean and several other partners who enable nonprofits in the digital space
• deploy grants to support three communities where many of our employees are geographically based, including New York, Colorado, and Pakistan
• ERG grants to more than 20 organizations important to our five current employee resource groups supporting women, early career professionals, military and veterans, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the Black community
• Employee matching gifts and credit programs that gave employees the opportunity to have donations matched 100% by DigitalOcean (and in some cases, like Giving Tuesday, 200%)! DigitalOcean also offers donation credits to employees for anniversary milestones, peer-to-peer kudos, and various other awards.

Finally, this year, we surpassed 2,200 nonprofit organizations using DigitalOcean with the support of infrastructure credits via Hollie’s Hub for Good (HH4G).

Supporting employee giving and volunteering

In 2022, we hosted two extremely successful employee giving campaigns and launched our first skills-based volunteering pilots. These initiatives reinforced how fortunate we are to be the place of work for such generous and thoughtful employees. Below are a few highlights:

• Total employee donors jumped from 248 in 2021 to 753 in 2022, an increase of more than 300%
• As of September, we had a total of 80% participation in our employee giving campaigns
• Collectively, employees directed more than $228K to 400+ organizations
• We created various funds on our giving platform to allow employees to respond to humanitarian crises and environmental disasters throughout the year
• We launched our employee ambassador program and completed our first successful project with Ersilia, a tech nonprofit supporting universities, hospitals, and laboratories in low-resourced countries with data science tools
• We sponsored several employee volunteer events, including backpack packing, career card-writing, and a beach cleanup

Engaging new partners, telling new stories, and receiving new awards

We engaged with amazing partners like UNICEF and Fast Forward, helping catalyze and extend our reach to more tech-driven nonprofits worldwide. We held a workshop in Bolivia with Hollie’s Hub for Good recipient Unicodemy, where we helped young girls in La Paz learn how to use cloud technology. We also held our first panel session at our customer conference highlighting two incredible nonprofit partners, Code Berlin and Bonterra.

Hollie’s Hub for Good was recognized at the 2022 DevRel Awards, winning Best DevRel Initiative and Greatest Contribution to Society, and DigitalOcean was honored as the RaisedBy.Us Impact Partner of the year.

Finally, we joined our Pledge 1% community at Nasdaq to celebrate Giving Tuesday, and DO Impact was highlighted on the NASDAQ tower and the Pledge 1% blog.

What to watch for in 2023

Reflecting on 2022 has us feeling equally proud of our early accomplishments and motivated to take continued action in 2023. As we move full steam ahead into this new year, we’re excited to focus even more on several areas, including:

• Evolving our product donation strategy to get DigitalOcean into the hands of even more nonprofits
• Creating more skills-based volunteering opportunities for our team members
• Engaging our increasingly global employee base in continued giving initiatives
• Forging an environmentally sustainable path forward and sharing these stories with the world

There is so much more to come. Stay tuned for more impact updates in the coming months!