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As another financial year comes to a close¹, the accountants draw out a projection of our profits and a corpus is carved out to give back some of our earnings to the community. Each member of the team has a chance to suggest and campaign for organisations working on:

1. Issues that impact our work.
2. Issues that impact our industry.
3. Issues that impact our society.

The corpus is then split equally between one organisation each from the above three groups. We prefer finding new recipients each year and try to have a gap of at least three years before donating to a previous recipient.

This year we ended up donating to:

• PhotoSwipe, for enabling buttery smooth click-to-zoom ​“lightbox” experiences on photos and images.
• The Internet Archive, for continuing to preserve this invaluable community resource that is the world wide web.
• Tarun Bharat Sangh, for conserving water — that precious life-enabling resource which we often take for granted.

This is our fifth year² of giving back, and we continue talking about this publicly in the hope that it encourages others to do the same, like it once encouraged us.

It was probably sometime in the late 2000s that I first came across the idea of an organisation pledging to donate a percentage of their profits to charity. I cannot recall exactly where I first read about this practise but it was probably on one of the early web 2.0 gang members’ projects. The idea seemed so novel at the time, yet also felt right, and I made a mental note to do the same if I ever when I ran my own shop.

Fast forward a few years, I was co-running my own shop, booking some profits, making an odd donation or two, but not really following the principle that had inspired me back then.

That finally changed in 2020. A lot of things got upended in that First Year of Covid™, but new practises also emerged as a result. We deliberated, sought opinions from the team, and put in place a process to make annual donations to three types of causes. Our pool is split three ways between:

1. Issues that impact our work.
2. Issues that impact our industry.
3. Issues that impact our society.

This is the fourth time we’re following through and giving back a percentage of our profits. This year we donated to:

• Prettier, for keeping our code consistent and saving countless trivial formatting and style-guide reviews.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, for continuing to fight for digital rights.
• Wikipedia, for documenting so much of the universe, and showing the best of the power of the web.

Just like the first three times¹, we are talking about this publicly in the hope that it encourages others, like it once encouraged us. Please join our efforts by amplifying the contributions to these organisations and projects.