Social impact with data and analytics
Atlassian’s analytics team created a skilled volunteer program to support our Foundation and its mission
One key reason I am happy to work at Atlassian is our commitment to social good. It was also a motivating reason to apply. I find volunteering and philanthropy very rewarding: I fondly recall helping my volunteer-enthusiastic mother prepare craft kits for the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s annual Art of the Season fundraiser. Or more recently collecting trash off of California’s beaches.
Therefore, I became quite attracted to Atlassian when I learned of its 1% pledge. The story is that back in 2006, founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes wanted to give back to the community. So they made a simple pledge that 1% of Atlassian’s equity, product, profit, and employee time would be donated to charitable causes.
I find this story inspiring, but I find it more inspiring that Atlassian stuck to its promise. At the time of writing, the Atlassian Foundation has:
- Donated over $37 million dollars
- Volunteered 132 thousand hours of employee time
- Donated and provisioned over 126 thousand free and deeply discounted product licenses to eligible charitable organizations
Now you may be thinking “OK sure, companies make promises all the time. But do you actually see any of this in the company culture? Are you encouraged to volunteer?”
Social impact is in our DNA
The answer is absolutely yes. Social impact is a priority for our founders, company, and employees. Atlassian offers 5 annual volunteer days off and a donation-matching program (Atlassian matches employee donations up to $1000 annually). We constantly receive blogs and Slack messages about new volunteer opportunities or fundraisers spearheaded by Atlassian team members. I participated in the Engage4Good program — a skills-based volunteer program — in which I advised a non-profit’s technical team on agile methodologies and stakeholder relationships. It was a great experience.
The credit for most of these programs, such as Engage4Good, goes to the Atlassian Foundation team. They support our internal opportunities as well as external programs, such as education grants. It’s a small team of about 20 dedicated and passionate individuals who constantly improve how the Foundation supports social impact organizations.
Atlassian Foundation’s mission to catalyze social impact is Atlassian’s collective strategy to bring the best of Atlassian to create an outsized impact globally.
In the past couple of years, the Foundation team realized that analytics could help answer mission-critical questions. They had a lot of internal data about the programs. They knew what questions they wanted to answer with the data. But they didn’t have enough analytics experience or resources to unlock the insights.
Strengthening the Foundation’s mission with data
Fortunately, Atlassian had a rapidly growing team of data scientists looking for social impact work. Ali, an analytics marketing manager, approached the Foundation team with a proposal: how about starting an analytics foundation committee (AFC)?
The idea quickly received support, and the AFC proposal was drafted. It would be a joint partnership between the Foundation team and a cohort of data scientists. Data scientists commit 10–20 hours in a quarter to support a mission-aligned project. This proposed structure would make it easier for the Foundation team to find eager volunteers, and it created more social impact opportunities leveraging data skills. The Foundation team then prioritized projects, leaders announced the new committee, and the first cohort started in January 2021 with five projects and thirteen data scientists.
Better granting and skill-based projects starts with visualizations
Rachel Harrison and Edoardo Tonelli, data scientists on the Customer Analytics team, joined in the first cohort. When asked why they participated in the program, Rachel explains:
I’ve participated in engagements with NFPOs before but found it difficult to apply my technical skills and the fact getting access to external data can be difficult. Becoming involved with the AFC was then a natural fit that enabled me to combine giving back and enabled me to use my technical skills to actually make an impact.
- Rachel Harrison, Customer Analytics data scientist
Their project supported the Foundation’s global education grant-making program, which leverages the 1% equity pledge to grant, support, and accelerate non-profit and social enterprise innovators in the global education ecosystem. The program’s leaders needed to know: How can we grant and support partner organizations to achieve more impact?
Rachel and Edoardo crafted a beautiful Tableau dashboard to surface some key grant-making metrics. The visualizations made it much easier for the program leaders and others to understand the grant program. It eased the process of communicating the Foundation’s global education impact to the Board of Directors — as well as to other Atlassians and the general public. And it is being used to re-imagine the Foundation’s strategy and expand their global education work.
It is rewarding to know that through this work we’re enabling the team to more easily communicate and showcase the incredible work they have done and continue to do with our partners.
- Rachel Harrison, Customer Analytics data scientist
Another project focused on Atlassian’s skills-based volunteering program, Engage4Good. Twice a year, Atlassian calls for projects from social impact organizations that require specific skills. Not all projects are selected or completed, and the Foundation team wanted to improve the success rate. In order to do so, they needed to offer more engaging projects to Atlassians and also provide the skills needed by the non-profits.
The new dashboard built by the AFC team showed which skills are in high demand, which regions might need more project options, and which project types Atlassians are more likely to match with. This information enabled the Foundation to guide project proposals and acceptance criteria for higher chances of successful completion. For instance, one immediate takeaway was to create more Engage4Good opportunities in India as the Atlassian demand for projects is high.
Let’s keep supporting these data-for-good opportunities
The first cohort of data scientists on the Analytics Foundation Committee revealed new insights and metrics for the Foundation team. I am very excited (as are many of my teammates) about this new opportunity to directly contribute data skills in support of Atlassian’s social impact mission. The second cohort already has a set of projects underway. We look forward to their results and insights in the weeks to come!
Thanks to Taylor Light, Geoff Pidcock, Rachel Harrison, and Edoardo Tonelli for their help on this article
Interested in joining our team? Check out our careers page.
