Put Your Expertise to Work for Nonprofits

[Alicia_Schmidt]

Your product or skills may be the most valuable thing you can give.

📍 Where you are

It’s time to think about what else your company might have to offer — your product, your services, or your professional expertise. For many startups, this is where the highest-value giving happens, because what you make may cost almost nothing to replicate but be enormously valuable to an under-resourced nonprofit.

A product pledge means giving nonprofits access to what your company makes — software, services, physical goods, content, or professional expertise. For startups especially, your product may cost very little to replicate but be enormously valuable to an under-resourced nonprofit.

Service company? Your time IS your product. Pro bono consulting, design, legal, engineering, or marketing hours all qualify as a product pledge.

Three Questions That Define Your Program

#	Question	What to Think About
01	What will you donate?	Focus on your core expertise. Don’t build something new — start with what you already make.
02	Who is eligible?	All nonprofits? Specific cause areas? Org sizes? Geographic focus? Define your eligible universe.
03	What is your capacity?	How much can you give without straining your team? Set a limit — you can always expand later.

🚀 THE STARTUP RULE

Validate before you build. Before finalizing your program, talk to actual nonprofits and ask if what you’re offering is genuinely useful. Many companies build programs for products nonprofits don’t actually need. One conversation saves months of wasted effort.

🤖 AI DRAFT PROMPT

Draft our product donation program blueprint

Describe your company and what you’re considering donating — get back a program blueprint and 2-sentence description ready to share with your executive sponsor.

Copy this prompt into your preferred AI assistant (like Claude or Gemini), then fill in the [brackets]:

Help us define a product donation program as part of our Pledge 1% commitment.

Our company: [name, what our product/service is, how it works, number of employees].
Our impact mission: [paste from Module 1.3].
What we are considering donating: [e.g., free software licenses / pro bono design hours / discounted subscriptions].

Please answer the three program definition questions based on best practices:
1. What specifically should we donate, and at what level of access?
2. Who should be eligible — what nonprofit criteria make most sense given our mission?
3. What is a realistic capacity limit for a company our size in year one?

Then write: (1) A one-paragraph program blueprint, (2) A 2-sentence program description for stakeholder and nonprofit conversations.

Base recommendations on what would create real value for nonprofits — not just what's easiest for us.

What Can Be Donated — By Company Type

Company Type	What to Donate	Example
SaaS / Software	Free or discounted licenses, seats, subscriptions	Salesforce, Asana, Twilio nonprofit tiers
Agencies & Services	Pro bono hours in your expertise — design, legal, marketing, engineering	Taproot / Catchafire placement or direct partnership
Physical goods / CPG	Product donations or buy-one-donate-one model	TOMS shoes, Flamingo razors, Harry’s
Content & Education	Webinars, training, ebooks, toolkits, templates	Share proprietary knowledge nonprofits lack
Infrastructure	Office space, cloud credits, event venues, internet access	Donate access to what you have that they lack

📣 COMMUNICATING YOUR PLEDGE

Your product pledge is a one-liner for your website and careers page: ‘We give free access to [product] to nonprofits working in [cause area].’ It signals to candidates and customers that your giving is tangible — not just a policy. Add it once your program blueprint is established.

3 Quick Actions

• Answer the three core questions: what, who, how much (use the AI prompt above) and write your program blueprint.
• Write your 2-sentence program description for stakeholder conversations.
• Get exec sponsor sign-off on scope and capacity.

Your program is defined. Now let’s choose the right model for how you donate it.

Next: Pick the Easiest Way to Donate Your Product →