Social Impact in the Workplace: How Okta Uses Apps for Good

This post is the first in a series about Apps for Good, a collection of pre-built integrations to help Okta customers power their corporate and employee giving and volunteering. If you’re interested in deploying applications like these in your company, tell your Okta administrator about Apps for Good or reach out to us at [email protected].

Infrastructure for social impact

Okta for Good, our company’s social impact initiative, launched in 2016 with a mission to strengthen the connections between people, technology, and communities. One of the insights that guides our efforts is that people increasingly want (and expect) opportunities to engage with the causes they care about at work. Luckily, an ecosystem of these Apps for Good is rising to meet that need. Today, we’re highlighting the impact that Okta employees have created with some of these applications to show how any Okta customer can leverage these pre-built integrations to power their own corporate social impact.

In the last four years, Okta for Good deployed several different applications to create unique and meaningful giving and volunteering opportunities with our employees. In 2017, we launched Benevity as our primary employee giving and volunteering portal. Benevity allows employees to donate to charitable causes (including via payroll deduction) and coordinate volunteer activities with their colleagues. It also provides our team with invaluable data on the cumulative impact of our employees around the world. Since Benevity supports provisioning, we use Okta Lifecycle Management to automatically create a Benevity account for every Okta employee when they join the company.

Skill-based volunteering at scale

In 2018, as our company grew and our social impact programs evolved, we partnered with inspiring nonprofits to run events and campaigns with our employees. For example, CareerVillage is a community where students can get free, personalized career advice from real-life professionals. Okta for Good hosted an “advice-a-thon” for employees who logged into CareerVillage through their Okta dashboards to answer career questions from young people all over the world. At the time, we made it an in-person event but it’s also a great virtual volunteer opportunity. Similarly, Kiva was the first online platform that allowed people to lend money directly to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We deployed Kiva accounts to all of our employees and pre-loaded them with $25. Employees could choose to loan additional funds of their own. 

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with platforms that provide more targeted opportunities for specific groups of employees and that enable virtual volunteering. For example, we recently deployed Ovio to every engineer at Okta. Ovio enables volunteers to contribute to open source nonprofit technology projects. Similarly, we’re excited to be the first company leveraging VolunteerMatch’s integration with Benevity which enables Okta employees to browse both local and virtual volunteer opportunities from within their existing Benevity accounts.

Staggering potential

We deploy all of these applications to our employees via their Okta dashboards because it’s seamless and secure. We also believe it contributes to significantly higher levels of engagement—last year, 88% of Okta employees participated in volunteering and giving. 

Today, Okta customers are providing more than 800,000 employees with access to one or more Apps for Good. That’s more than 800,000 volunteers, donors, engaged citizens, and community leaders. This network—and your company—has a staggering potential for impact. 

If you’re interested in deploying applications like these in your company, tell your Okta administrator about Apps for Good or reach out to us at [email protected].