Supporting Digital Capacity for Nonprofits 

This year has been difficult for all sectors and we recognize that this has disproportionately affected nonprofits, especially with COVID-19 arriving during a normally heavy fundraising and events season. While many sectors were able to shift to remote work easily, nonprofits were faced with not only moving their internal operations and events virtual, but also providing their essential programs and services digitally or taking extra precautions to continue to operate in person. We've seen incredible ingenuity in the ways that organizations have shifted their programs to virtual formats, found ways to deliver their content digitally, and responded with resilience and grit to best support those they serve.

Over six years ago, Box.org was started with the belief that Box had a responsibility with our product, resources and assets to invest in the communities that we worked and lived in. We didn't realize how true that would be as we continued to grow and saw how our product could support the amazing work that nonprofits do. More than 9,000 nonprofits are using Box for their work, including the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, PATH and Special Olympics of Northern California & Nevada. Box helps manage donor information, share important information, manage the content for grants, and provide secure collaboration.

With this pandemic, we have spent time connecting with nonprofits and getting feedback about what Box can be doing to better serve during this challenging time. Our teams at Box have been digesting this feedback and addressing it as best as possible.

Here are just some of the key updates:

Enhanced staff collaboration

We have been hard at work delivering new new capabilities over the past several months that will enhance the Box experience for nonprofits, including:

• An all new Box experience on the web that delivers a simpler and faster way for your development team, program managers, field staff, and board members to securely work from anywhere
• The ability to add annotations to 100+ file types directly in Box Preview, making it easier for your teams to exchange comments and feedback directly on projects and documents
• Collections, a simple new way to organize files and folders around topics and work streams relevant to you, like grants, donor information and important assets
• Better integrations and support for Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, O365 and G Suite, which enables staff to easily and securely share content in Box while working in a variety of applications.
• Improved accessibility options at a.box.com to support the user experience for anyone who requires an accessible version of the Box application.

Strengthen your security and compliance posture 

Security and compliance are top of mind for everyone. Sharing research, insights, and client and donor information in a secure and compliant way is vital to your organization as well as ours. We developed Box Shield as a way to prevent data leaks with frictionless content controls to identify anomalous user behavior which allows for prevention of malicious content. It also automates classifications based on information types like PII. With our recent bundling of our products into cost-efficient Suites, core security and compliance capabilities are now easily paired with Governance and Relay.

Supporting nonprofits of all sizes

We know that technology is vital to program delivery and mission delivery. For some organizations, 10 donated licenses will be enough for you and your staff and you will always be able to access those through TechSoup. For larger organizations, we always start at 50% off our products to make them as accessible as possible. To learn more, reach out to your Box account team or to Box.org.

Our commitment to the nonprofit community

The future of work for all sectors has entered a "new normal". In the past few months, organizations have had to fundamentally shift the way they work and this will have rippling impacts moving forward. While we had hoped to be in the recovery phase, we recognize that we are still in an extended response phase. We're inspired by the innovation we are seeing during this time. We've heard from our nonprofit customers how they shifted the programs in a matter of hours and days, shipped hardware out to address the digital divide, and have found innovative ways to continue to support staff and beneficiaries during this challenging time. When COVID-19 hit, we invested in organizations that were addressing the immediate needs of the communities where we worked and lived, through food services and providing access to digital devices. We also invested in our community more broadly through Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the City and County of San Francisco’s Give2SF Response and Recovery Fund. As racial injustices were highlighted during this time, we chose to support organizations fighting for equity through education and advocacy. We remain committed to mobilizing our resources to support our communities during challenging times and addressing racial and systemic inequities. 

Thank you to our nonprofit community for the incredible work that you do. We are grateful for the opportunity to help power your missions through our platform.

To learn more about Box for Nonprofit watch the video below featuring co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie.