Creating Network Effects for Good: Introducing Apps for Good

When Okta was founded back in 2009, just getting to the cloud was a herculean effort for many organizations. We helped solve that with a catalogue of pre-integrated cloud applications that enabled our customers to securely connect to their applications — and we called it the Okta Application Network (OAN). Over time, more organizations moved to the cloud, our customers asked us to connect them to critical services like VPNs, firewalls, and endpoint management systems. Thus, the OAN transformed into the Okta Integration Network (OIN), which removes the friction of interconnecting identities and delivers network effects to customers and partners alike.

As the OIN evolved, so did Okta’s commitment to social impact, leading us to ask, “how can we use the OIN to deliver powerful network effects for communities around the world?” That’s exactly what we’re doing today: expanding the OIN with a new category of integrations called Apps for Good.

Apps for Good empowers our customers to seamlessly bring community engagement and social impact applications to their employees and partners, giving Okta’s millions of daily users opportunities to give back with their employers.

How does it work? Now, Okta admins can provision community service as simply and securely as they provision email accounts. With Apps for Good, companies can select the tools that fit their corporate giving culture and goals, deploy them directly to employees’ Okta dashboards, and start giving back immediately.

Employees can now engage with social impact applications like Benevity, Bright Funds, CareerVillage, Kiva, VolunteerMatch, and YourCause that enable volunteering and giving of all kinds. And we’ve also created a simple process for social impact applications to join Apps for Good through our Integration Accelerator Program, which provides enhanced assistance to quickly introduce integrations. Today, Box, Docusign, Eventbrite, Github, Groupon, Experian, and GoDaddy have deployed Apps for Good and collectively, Apps for Good will result in an expected 27,000 engagements with the social impact apps.

Giving back to the communities in which we live and work is core to our identity at Okta, and it’s part of our responsibility to enable the millions of people who use Okta to do the same.

If you’re the creator of an app for good, join us! If you’re an Okta admin and don’t see your social impact app of choice in our OIN catalog, and let’s start creating network effects for good together.