Partner Spotlight: How Zuora Links Workplace Giving and Volunteering to ESG with Deed

Reaching 70% employee engagement in social impact in their first days on the platform, the monetization leader put a smile on the faces of employees.

Introduction

Zuora helps today’s innovative companies build, run and grow modern businesses through a dynamic mix of usage-based models, subscription bundles and everything in between. Trusted by leaders like Caterpillar, General Motors, Zoom and Box, Zuora is spearheading a market revolution in user-centric service.  This has made the Zuora team hyper-attentive to the needs of the people they serve and the planet we all share. In 2023, Zuora partnered with enterprise social impact technology provider Deed to engage their workforce in this mission of service by volunteering and donating with causes that matter to them. According to Rachael Claudio, Zuora’s Senior Director of Social Impact and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), “Our purpose is to help people subscribe to modern ways of doing business – ways that are better for customers, better for companies and ultimately better for the planet.” What does that look like in practice? Here’s a look at how Zuora approaches social impact and ESG using Deed.

How Zuora uses Deed to connect workplace giving and volunteering to ESG 

Zuora structures its social and environmental impact activities around three main pillars: environmental sustainability, entrepreneurship and youth economic opportunity. With that broad purview, Claudio manages all of the company’s philanthropic programs, including employee volunteering and giving. She’s also spent the last two years working with Zuora’s head of investor relations to build the company’s ESG and sustainability programs at Zuora from the ground up. One major recent success for the company’s social impact came on Giving Tuesday. Zuora’s Giving Tuesday campaign featured 37 fundraisers created by “ZEOs”—what Zuora calls their employees—from around the world for causes that they’re passionate about and are close to their hearts. Every ZEO received a $25 credit to donate to one of the fundraisers or any organization of their choice. Zuora also offered 2:1 matching on all donations ZEOs made with their own funds. The campaign started when the sun rose in Australia on November 28 and lasted for 48 hours. Read more about their Giving Tuesday Campaign. 

What did participation look like? Claudio reports that “67 percent of ZEOs participated in our Giving Tuesday campaign, raising over $108,000 for 129 charitable organizations around the world.”

One ZEO is Matt McClain, Zuora’s Director of Global Services. McClain adds that: 

“With the support from Zuora and my fellow ZEOs, we raised over $4,200 on Giving Tuesday for the Kyle Pease Foundation to help people with disabilities through sports. The foundation focuses on helping disabled athletes enter endurance races, gain employment, and sponsors grants to improve their lifestyle. Having my employer and teammates support and promote an organization I care about means the world to me. 

Claudio says that Zuora was looking for a social impact technology provider that would be both fun for their employees to use and powerful and flexible enough to meet the increasingly complex challenges that rise from an authentic commitment to ESG. 

"Deed was so appealing to us because of how intuitive the platform is for our ZEOs. As a oneperson team, I needed to find a platform where employees could log-on and figure out how to make donations, request matches, and create volunteer opportunities or fundraisers. The transition for us has been super positive. The feedback I’m getting from employees is all about how much easier Deed is for them to use."

So with the right technology in place, what strategies is Zuora using to do good?

Key Deed features for Zuora 

User Experience  

The Deed platform is designed to be as smooth and enjoyable as possible. From building out personal profiles with nonprofit affiliations and top cause areas, to helpful features like pledging and “Nominate a Nonprofit,” Deed is meant to make doing good as fun as it is meaningful.   

Actions 

Unplugging electronics. Switching to fair-trade coffee. Using inclusive language in the workplace. With Actions, all sizes of good deeds, from small changes of habit to long-term commitments can now count toward environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals. 

Communities 

Deed offers community-building tools to help employees and employee resource groups (ERGs) alike to get onboarded and stay engaged. Our latest feature, Communities, offers our partners a single platform for all volunteering, fundraising, and social events management that’s as easy to use from the employee perspective as it is insightful for program leaders. 

Vast Library of Nonprofits and Opportunities 

Employees can browse over two million nonprofit organizations, offering countless opportunities  to share their time, money, and talent anywhere. Deed works with industry leaders like Goodera, VolunteerMatch, Idealist, Points of Light, Volunteer.gov, and more to curate tailored feeds and experiences for our partners as well. But we never sacrifice quality for quantity. Our library is backed by our robust payment infrastructure, marked by our premiere partnership PayPal Giving Fund and other trusted names. Together, with daily screening cycles, we deliver the highest payment success rate and the most rigorous vetting process in the industry.

Data and Reporting 

Deed offers CSR program leads a wide range of self-service capabilities, many of which can be tailored to meet unique business needs. These include intuitive reporting and real-time dashboards, all accessible through one system by using the same login information. 

What’s next for social impact at Zuora

Before upgrading the company’s social impact technology, Claudio says she never had to worry about going over budget for matching employee donations or “Dollars for Doers.” 

“Now I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to plan so we don't actually do so much that we're going to go over the budget so quickly!”

So what does that plan look like? For one thing, Zuora is considering condensing their annual month of service into one global day of service. “I’ll ask our volunteer ambassadors to plan events in their market,” Claudio says. This is a smart—and fun!—way of channeling the energy of a global workforce. And since social impact technology enables Zuora to offer workplace giving and volunteering opportunities year-round, there’s less pressure to dilute the focus by stretching the day out into a month.  

Earth Month (April) will also be big for Zuora. Claudio says the company plans to make use of Deed’s integration with the innovative nonprofit One Tree Planted to offer sustainability-focused Actions.

As for the rest of 2024 and beyond? “I think just being able to figure out how to really support the passions of our employees is a challenge where Deed will be helpful,” Claudio says. Claudio points to employee campaigns, fundraisers, and other employee capabilities as helping Zuora take a more bottom-up approach to social impact. 

Deed is an enterprise social impact platform that makes it fun and easy for millions of employees to share their time, money, and talent with causes they care about. We started as a viral volunteering app, and today our platform gives the world’s most inspiring brands—from Zuora to Airbnb and lululemon—one exceptionally-designed home for all of their purpose-driven activities. Corporate grantmaking, employee donations/matching, diversity & inclusion, and employee resource groups (ERGs) are only the beginning. Because over the past three to five years, everyone’s expectations for Fortune 500 corporate social responsibility have radically changed. But with our trusted integration partners like Workday and PayPal, hand-in-hand customer service, and a collaborative product team, Deed’s platform moves at the speed of work.

To learn more about how Deed can help drive engagement for your organization, visit www.joindeed.com