Why We Invested In Deed
By: Victoria Cheng, Partner at PruVen Capital & Jared Katzen, Investor at PruVen Capital
We recently announced our investment in Deed’s $10M Series A. We wanted to share insight into why we are so extraordinarily excited to be partnered with this team to transform how employees can engage with their employers around philanthropy, volunteerism, and social change as part of our on-going investment in the Future of Work.
Corporate Social Responsibility is becoming critical to companies of all sizes
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has reached an inflection point. As recently as five years ago, only companies with 10,000 or more employees were implementing formal corporate impact programs, employee engagement tools and other non-traditional employee benefits like corporate gift matching and volunteer time-off. Today, companies of much smaller scale have started to consider these initiatives far earlier in their lifecycle. Employees and consumers alike are voicing the importance of seeing social responsibility from the companies they work for and the brands they buy from. Demonstrating dedication to supporting a mission and social impact is now a necessary component in the fight for talent. We’ve seen companies with as few as 100 employees implement CSR programs, which function to attract top tier talent, increase employee engagement, morale, productivity and retention, improve corporate image and enable individuals to provide meaningful contributions to their local communities.
Recent events have encouraged companies to re-evaluate their CSR programs
Deed is benefitting from recent events that have encouraged companies to both implement and re-evaluate CSR programs in the wake of COVID, BLM, #metoo, and hybrid/remote work.
Deed brings a modern approach suitable for the new workplace — Seamless integrations, mobile first UX, superior analytics/dashboard, and social experience to giving
Deed’s tech provides an intuitive/seamless user experience with easier integration with HCM providers like Workday than legacy offerings. Employees have evolved to using next generation communication platforms like Slack & Team, leveraging mobile phones as a key channel of engagement at work, and finding new ways to connect socially in a remote environment, yet CSR solutions have not adapted to this new world. Deed allows employees to more seamlessly interact with each other around impact in a more social way fostering stronger relationships and minimizes the friction of donating through their employers. For the HR/CSR leader, Deed offers a modern sophisticated reporting dashboard to enable companies to better understand their programs so they can be more effective in managing them.
Demonstrated higher employee engagement and impressive growing roster of enterprise clients
This better user experience leads to higher employee engagement on the platform, higher participation in donor and volunteering programs and fosters a stronger community amongst employees leading to higher employee satisfaction, especially in the world of hybrid/remote work. Higher employee engagement lead to increased donations and better retention making the ROI for the platform more compelling to enterprises. The percentage of all employees on Deed’s platform that donate is over double the market average.
Since its launch Deed’s client base includes an impressive list of forward thinking companies from marquee technology firms like Airbnb, Lemonade, Stripe and DoorDash along with iconic enterprise clients (10k+ employers) like Kyndryl & Adidas.
Seamless and fast integrations that drop onboarding time from months to weeks
Historically, HR/CSR teams spend 12–24 months on acquiring and implementing technology, taking away from other program related activities, in many cases halting all other strategies focused on growing the participation and impact of employee giving and volunteering. Deed is hyper-focused on delivering an automated/turnkey solution with faster implementation times and customers are voting with their feet, with a significant number of Deed’s current customers having moved off incumbent solutions and onto Deed.
PruVen Capital could not be more thrilled to be supporting the Deed, and we look forward to leveraging our deep domain expertise and our network to accelerate bringing Deed to more companies. Congratulations to Deevee, Steve and the entire Deed team, we can’t wait to work with you and see what the future has in store!
