Company Announces ‘Docusign for Forests’, Outlines Donation to Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, and Steps up Pledge 1% Commitments

As part of its drive to remove paper from the process of doing business, DocuSign Inc. announced its ‘DocuSign for Forests’ initiative—a broad commitment to help protect the world’s forests that includes financial donations, broad scale support of non-profit organizations, and a commitment to donate 1% of expanded revenues earned from customers that pledge to improve their paper-use practices.

The initiative was unveiled at the ‘Fighting for Forests’ session during the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2019 in Davostoday alongside several sustainability luminaries—including Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and United Nations Messenger of Peace; Thomas Friedman, author and New York Times columnist; Paul Polman, outgoing Unilever CEO and co-founder of the Tropical Forests Alliance; and Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce.

As part of the DocuSign for Forests initiative, DocuSign will initially commit $1.5 Million this year to support organizations doing critical work to preserve the world’s forests—and it will continue to donate more over time.

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This includes an immediate grant of $1M to the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation—a non-profit organization announced today to ensure that Dr. Goodall’s tireless work to protect the environment can continue to benefit future generations. The commitment to the Foundation will come in equal parts from the DocuSign IMPACT Foundation and from company CEO Dan Springer in his personal capacity. The remaining $500,000 will then be earmarked for other forest-focused organizations.

DocuSign will also invite new and existing customers to improve their environmental and paper-use practices by taking a pledge at docusign.com/forests, and by moving more of their paper-based processes onto DocuSign. In return, the company will donate 1% of the expanded revenue from those customers to forest-protection causes. It will also add a calculator into its core eSignature product to showcase how people are reducing waste and positively impacting the environment.

“As a company whose core offering is inherently forest-friendly, we are helping to save hundreds of trees every day as our more than 450,000 customers around the world decrease their use of paper. As a result, we believe we can galvanize even more people to act to protect the world’s forests,” said Springer. “We want everyone to ask whether it’s necessary to print documentation, and if so to print as little as possible. We want them to recycle all their discarded paper. And we want them to continue embracing technology to digitize as many of their business processes as possible.”

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In terms of the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, for almost 60 years Dr. Goodall has pioneered our understanding of the animal kingdom and the environment at large—as well as the harm that humanity is inflicting on it, and solutions for protecting it as a result. The Foundation seeks to support innovative, scalable global solutions that serve to address the critical balance between preserving nature and meeting the needs of humankind.

“I have launched the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation in the hope that we can create an endowment that will enable the programs I have developed to continue, new ones to be initiated, and so that the fight for the good of the natural world will continue beyond my lifetime,” said Dr. Goodall. “DocuSign and Dan Springer are among the first supporters of the Foundation, and I am delighted to partner with them in our goal of protecting and restoring the planet’s resources.”

“DocuSign’s new initiative is an impactful commitment to environmental causes that reinforces the mission of Pledge 1%, while addressing one of the world’s most urgent and important challenges: climate change,” said Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce. “At Salesforce we believe that every business can be a platform for positive change and we co-founded Pledge 1% with the intention of evangelizing that message. We’re thrilled to see DocuSign implementing a bold commitment like this and hope others sign the pledge to make early-stage philanthropy the standard.”

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