At this time of year, many of us take time out to look forward to the next 12 months and to consider how we are making a difference, both personally and professionally.  So I thought it would make a fitting topic for my first blogs of 2020.

In 2020, Hyphen8 will celebrate our 8th birthday – an anniversary that not only makes me extremely proud but is particularly special due to the importance of the number 8 for us.

The 8 in Hyphen8 represents our mission to give 8% of our time and our profits back to benefit non-profit organisations and communities.  My vision for the future (and one that is shared by our amazing team) is to establish a charitable foundation to award grants to initiatives that will have a meaningful impact on future generations.  We have already established a solid reputation in the UK grant-making sector for our specialism designing and delivering Salesforce solutions and our hope is to grow our contribution over time.

While we continue to grow towards this dream, our social mission remains a key focus at the forefront of everything we do.  We currently demonstrate this in 3 ways; pro bono time, free solutions accelerators and by applying 8% discounts.

1. Pro Bono time

Each member of our team can donate time each year to help organisations close to their heart or with a cause that resonates for personal reasons.  We often donate time to smaller organisations who may have limited budget for their Salesforce implementation.  It gives us a buzz to know that we are helping them to make the most of the Salesforce platform and improve their efficiency.  Here are just a few examples of those that have received a donation of free time recently:

• Newbury Riding Association – provide therapy through riding for children with disabilities
• DebateMate – powers social change through world-class communication training
• Group B Strep Support – work to educate parents, doctors and midwives to prevent Group B Strep infection in babies
• Keen London – manages a team of volunteers to deliver regular fun sport sessions for children with disabilities

2. Free solution accelerators

It makes us very proud that following its launch at the beginning of 2018, a growing number of grant-makers in the UK are using our free accelerator grantFlex as a basis for their Salesforce solution.   grantFlex is built on the Salesforce nonprofit success pack (npsp) and was designed to provide:

• A proven date model fine-tuned over years of experience designing solutions for many grant-making organisations
• FREE plug in application designed to fast-track implementations (without you having to pay an ongoing licence fee for functionality that is not relevant)
• Flexibility to adapt the solution to suit your way of working and add further bells and whistles, third party applications or integrations

In addition to the core functionality, our product innovation team has a range of additional accelerators to simplify assessment checklists, dynamic help guidance for users finance transaction batching and much more.  

3. 8% Discount

I like to think that each year we are in fact making more of a difference.  Every day we are helping non-profit organisations to improve their efficiency, reduce administration time and make significant savings in operational costs.  So we are already making an indirect contribution to the impact of all of their amazing causes.  In Part 2 of this blog series, I will share how the Salesforce solution we designed and implemented for National Lottery Community Fund is already making a real difference.  

We are glowing with pride that we now provide ongoing support for over 75 nonprofit organisations of all sizes through our evolve programme.  It is vital to us that we recognise our customers’ ongoing loyalty and trust in us as their partner.  So our most loyal customers (some of whom we have been working with for 8 years) benefit from a minimum 8% discount from our standard day rate.  

I look forward to sharing examples of how Hyphen8 is making a difference this year.