Yelp Foundation selects 2014 nonprofit grant winners

The digital age has seen the rapid rise of many companies but one that stands out in their support of nonprofits in addition to being useful to almost anyone seeking user reviews of businesses online is Yelp. If you’ve ever been trying to research a local restaurant, bookshop, dentist or practically anything chances are you may have used Yelp at some point. In fact many people depend upon the crowd-sourced review website almost daily and it’s become the 31st most popular website in terms of overall traffic within the United States according to Alexa.com.

Founded in 2004, Yelp’s board introduced the Yelp Foundation to assist deserving nonprofits, support community literacy programs and promote small business growth. The Foundation was started in 2011 and shares one percent of company equity with the programs above. For 2014 Yelp plan to give $1 million to charity which will include grants of up to $100,000 to organizations.

This years supported organizations are as follows:

La Cocina (San Francisco, CA) | Oakland Leaf Foundation (Oakland, CA) | Electronic Privacy Information Center (Washington, D.C.) | Defy Ventures (New York, NY) | Literacy Partners (New York, NY) | Local First Arizona (Phoenix, AZ) | Literacy Volunteers of Maricopa County (Phoenix, AZ) | Accion (Phoenix, AZ) | Make Way for Books (Tucson, AZ) | Urban Think Foundation (Orlando, FL)

In addition I’m pleased to note that the company operates a robust employee matching program for charitable donations for up to $1,000 per year in matching contributions. The grant program referenced above sees a further extension from last year’s program which awarded some $400,000 in total. It’s also wonderful to see that as the value of Yelp increases so does the ability of the Yelp Foundation to make these remarkable grants each year.

I also wanted to share what I felt were the rather novel and exciting methods used by Yelp to select those organizations that ultimately are eligible for the grants that they award. The company make these decisions based upon voting by Yelp’s own employees for the nonprofits that should receive support. However even before the voting begins there’s a unique approach to who gets considered.

Any and all nonprofit organizations that are ‘in the running’ for grants are brought forward by Yelp’s ‘internal champions’ who may have a strong interest or affinity for a particular charity. These individuals then go on to make a presentation to the Yelp workplace about why Yelp might look to support the particular organization that they champion and in turn the employees vote. It’s very grass-roots, very inclusive and to my mind an exciting way to drive forward the idea of corporate social responsibility via very enriching employee engagement practices.

Here’s to Yelp continuing these programs for many years to come and others perhaps following some of these practices.

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