This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

 

What happens when 500+ professionals spend one hour collaborating to creatively support one nonprofit’s success? In May of 2019, New Relic did just that.

 

New Relic is the industry’s largest and most comprehensive cloud-based observability platform built to help customers create more perfect software. The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. As a new member of Pledge 1%, New Relic has committed to leveraging our platform and talented employees to create partnerships and programs to enable nonprofits in their digital journeys. This means not only continuing to provide free licenses of our platform, and discounts to the nonprofit sector, but digging in and understanding nonprofit challenges so that we can better enable and support them.

 

 

This spring, our product organization gathered for our yearly offsite, a technical conference and opportunity to engage with one another out of the office. We were thrilled to leverage this gathering to support our NewRelic.org social responsibility program – enabling employees to give back time and talents to a nonprofit partner who was using our product through our free and discounted licenses program.

 

 

At the event, we were joined by Jared Chung, Executive Director of CareerVillage.org, a community where students get free personalized career advice from real-life professionals, and also.a recipient of New Relic.org’s product donation program. We invited Jared and CareerVillage.org to engage in an (never before attempted at this scale) exercise to leverage our technical talents, professional advice and passion to help this charity. 500+ employees participated in a session in which nearly 400 gave career advice on their digital platform while the other 100 participated in pro bono round activities. These activities included assessment of current usage of New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring capability, design thinking activities around the organization’s toughest challenges, live content moderation and UX bug review and ticketing. When we all worked together to bring advice and technical assistance to this nonprofit customer, we not only had a huge impact on their organization, but we created their “biggest day ever,” which is exactly what our product was designed to support.

 

 

For CareerVillage.org, knowing that 500+ people would be using their platform at once amounted to their biggest digital moment; it was no less important to their mission and success than when retail customers need to keep their websites running during Cyber Monday. It required them to bring on additional servers, and spend days testing to ensure that their site would be able to take the volume of users we were about to throw at them. This is part of what we at New Relic are inspired and excited to support for the nonprofit sector.

 

 

 “New Relic was a major driver of the biggest day in CareerVillage.org history. Thursday May 9th, 2019 saw the most career advice provided to students since the site launched: over 1200 pieces of advice in 24 hours,” Jared Chung shared.

 

 

Keeping a charity’s website up and running on Giving Tuesday, (when $400M of donations were made online in the US alone last year), or ensuring that 500 professionals can use the CareerVillage.org platform at once – these are the biggest moments for nonprofits, and these are the moments that New Relic is uniquely positioned to support.

 

 For more information about the NewRelic.org program – and how we’ve operationalized our 1% pledge of time and product – head to www.newrelic.org