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

This post is part of a blog 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].

In 2014, Box launched its social impact arm, Box.org, to help nonprofits around the world innovate and fulfill their missions by providing technology, skills, and capital. Since then, more than 9,000 nonprofit organizations have received over $10M in support from Box.org in the form of discounted products, capacity-building grants, and pro bono volunteering. With Box.org’s support, nonprofits are moving closer to achieving their goals while becoming truly digital organizations.

Box.org’s early years focused on product donations and employee volunteering. As the company expanded its global footprint, Box.org needed to scale. To do so, they looked for an easy-to-use volunteering and giving tool that could empower Box employees (“Boxers”) around the world to invest their time, skills, and money in causes that mattered to them. Ultimately, the Box.org team selected Bright Funds—a cloud-based platform for workplace giving, volunteerism, and grant management. 

“Since we deployed Bright Funds, Boxers have committed over $500K in employee donations and logged 20,000 hours of volunteering,” said Christina Louie Dyer, Box.org’s Global Programs Lead. “This level of impact would not have been possible without the Bright Funds platform.”

Box deploys all new applications to employees seamlessly and securely with Okta Single Sign-On (SSO), and Bright Funds was no exception. Box’s IT team leveraged Bright Funds’ existing Okta integration, which includes support for both SSO and provisioning via Okta Lifecycle Management. 

As a result, a Bright Funds account is automatically created for every new Boxer who joins the company, and they can quickly and securely access it from their Okta dashboard. The account is then automatically deprovisioned if the employee leaves.

Implementing a cloud-based social impact platform fundamentally changed the way Box.org engages with its communities. With the help of Bright Funds, Boxers are easily able to organize volunteer activities for their colleagues, bringing them closer to each other and their communities. Box.org also uses Bright Funds to reward Boxers for referring new hires by providing them with credit they can donate to a nonprofit of their choice. Finally, Bright Funds provides the Box.org team with the data they need to report on employee giving and volunteering trends to stakeholders throughout the company. Box’s employee engagement rate now exceeds 70%—far above the industry average.

According to Rachel Nersesian, Vice President of Client Success at Bright Funds, “Box.org is a model of a meaningful giving-back program. It has been incredible to see Box.org scale from its earliest days of growth to a robust program with impressive impact.”

Apps for Good is a collection of pre-built integrations to help Okta customers securely scale corporate giving and volunteering. Visit okta.com/apps-for-good to find the apps that are right for your organization.