2020 SPC Report

Dayspring Technologies is an incorporated Social Purpose Corporation (SPC). SPCs are for-profit corporations registered in California that not only provide valuable services, but also recognize a broader range of stakeholders and promote a positive impact beyond profits.

The pandemic of 2020 forced rapid and unexpected change, but also provided new opportunities to live out our core values, including generosity, mercy, and care for our neighbors.

This year, Dayspring Technologies and Dayspring Studio rebranded as Dayspring Partners. What hasn’t changed is our emphasis on partnership—the humility, integrity, and mutuality that we hope pervade our relationships with one another on staff, with each client, prospective client, and vendor, and with each of our community neighbors. 

We continue to focus our efforts in three areas: the workplace, the marketplace, and our community.

The Workplace

Beginning March 9, following guidance from San Francisco County, we sent our staff home to work remotely for their own protection and to help the broader effort to reduce the vectors of transmission within our community. Staff were initially given an allowance of $400 per person to improve their home workspace, but when it became clear the pandemic would keep us at home longer, the allowance was raised to $1400 as a way to ensure our staff were comfortable and well equipped to continue our work.

We want to do meaningful work that does good in the world, and in the process, we want the way in which we interact with others to be characterized by the “good fruit” of our core values–humility, partnership, justice, generosity, integrity, and mercy. As part of our long-standing commitment to justice, in light of issues of injustice brought to the forefront in 2020, and in response to concerns raised by our staff, we began a deliberate workplace conversation about the ways in which we work together.

Through those conversations, we shared stories and heard each others’ concerns, and we have identified a few areas to focus on as we continue our efforts toward a workplace that works well for everybody. As one example, as a staff, we identified that the way in which we track our time was unduly stressful for some members of our staff who have varied roles, personalities, and approaches to work. While tracking our time is a necessary task for billing with integrity and  managing wisely, we now offer more staff-friendly options for submitting time sheets and plan to implement further adjustments in order to make this process more human.

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The approximate ratio of highest to lowest salary at Dayspring
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Percentage of 2020 staff work hours executed remote from our Bayview home

The Marketplace

At Dayspring, we try to positively impact the marketplace by serving our clients in ways that nurture, rather than exploit, the relationship. We consider each project an opportunity to care for our clients, each of whom is under pressure to deliver by the rules of a cold, unsympathetic economy.

For our clients directly affected by COVID-19, we offered our consulting services with deferred payment and in some cases provided free client enablement training sessions. We’re paying invoices from small business vendors immediately on receipt, and we’ve empowered our employees to spend money at small, local, brick-and-mortar retail businesses to get needed funds to our neighbors quickly.

Every day, we are grateful for the trust our clients and customers have placed in us and the stability of our relationships over the years. Every day, we are encouraged by our own staff’s posture with clients and their clients’ responses in return.

client projects completed
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Clients served

Our Community

As an SPC, Dayspring has the goal of donating 3% of staff time and 10% of profits to other organizations, with the lion’s share going to neighborhood businesses and nonprofits.

However, the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 pandemic warranted an extraordinary response. Beyond our usual donation from profits, we also committed to giving 5% of our revenue for 5 months. The net result was almost $90k distributed to community organizations.

In addition, over 20 staff together donated over 2800 hours in service to the Common Good, amounting to roughly 6% of 2020 staff hours.

In 2020, we continued to focus on giving the majority of our donated hours to a single recipient. Rise University Preparatory is a middle and high school that aims to bring quality education to our Bayview neighborhood. Some of our staff produced their annual report; others used their Salesforce CRM to help track and support fundraising efforts. And many of our staff tutor after school on company time, allowing us to use our marketplace skills to benefit students, all while sheltering in place! In addition to the donations of funds and time, Dayspring continued its extra commitment to fund an entire staff position at Rise through 2020 and the 2020/2021 academic year.

hours donated in services for the common good including Bayview neighborhood organizations
$ 0
Contributed toward pandemic relief
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New initiative funded to support Black Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups in the Bayview Hunters Point community

The Neighbor Fund is a community-vetted, character-based small business loan fund with a participatory loan committee–meaning borrowers also sit on the loan committee. Rather than checking credit scores, we check with people that we know in the community. This has the effect of building up relationships within the community. Most of our borrowers are folks who, for a variety of reasons, wouldn’t be able to borrow money from banks.

Instead of issuing new loans in 2020, The Neighbor Fund provided $11,250 in grants to help past and existing borrowers and neighborhood small businesses weather the pandemic.

Pandemic support grants given
0
Loan successfully repaid

For better or worse, money matters in our lives. When Dayspring launched its first mobile app in 2009, it did so with the idea of improving people’s lives by helping them align how they spend their money with their core values. Our solution was Goodbudget, a budgeting tool that helps you track your spending, whether you have your own individual budget or share one with a household. Based on customer feedback, we have witnessed that when people’s relationships with money improve, their overall lives can too.

In 2020, our product team focused on supporting budgeters in financial distress with features to support debt tracking and payoff and with GB 911: Crash Course, an online course for people who’ve hit a financial emergency. And while we offer a premium paid product to support the cost of building, improving, and supporting the app, we waived subscription fees for existing subscribers who’d been especially hard hit by the COVID-led recession and continued to offer our free product, allowing anyone with a mobile device to benefit from Goodbudget.

$ K
saved on average in the first three months, according to Goodbudget users

Let’s talk

Contact us to discuss what partnership can look like between Dayspring and you.

415.247.9421

Ext. 102 Brand Design, Web Design, Software Development