Twilio.org Celebrates Five Year Anniversary, Meets Goal of Powering a Billion Messages for Good Five Years Early

Twilio.org Celebrates Five Year Anniversary,
Meets Goal of Powering a Billion Messages for Good Five Years Early

Twilio.org’s Impact Fund Invests in Education Social Enterprise Kinvolved

Social Impact Arm Accelerates Growth and Sets New 10-Year Goal to Help Nearly 15% of the World’s Population Every Year

Provides Grants to Two Organizations to ‘Get out the Vote’ for the Upcoming Elections

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. Sept 18, 2018 — Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the leading cloud communications platform, today announced that the company’s social impact arm, Twilio.org, is celebrating its five-year anniversary and has met its goal of powering a billion messages for good five years early. It is setting a new 10-year goal to have social impact organizations around the world using the platform to help 1 billion people every year. The Twilio.org Impact Fund also announced an impact investment in Kinvolved, and that it has awarded grants to Democracy Works and DoSomething.org to focus on increasing voter participation this election season.

Twilio.org was created in 2013 to provide technical, financial and strategic support to help social impact organizations solve social and environmental problems. When it initially set its billion messages for good goal, it expected to achieve it in 10 years, but has powered these messages in half that time. By providing organizations with the same industry-leading technology that private sector disruptors use to connect to the world, Twilio.org helps these organizations make a lasting impact. “Twilio.org arms nonprofits and social enterprises with the communication tools needed to create a positive impact on people around the world,” said Erin Reilly, vice president of Social Impact and general manager of Twilio.org.

Twilio Impact Fund Investments

The Twilio.org Impact Fund makes investments in social enterprises that use innovative communications technologies to achieve their missions and demonstrate the potential to scale further with technology. Following Twilio.org’s recent investments in Cell-Ed and Edovo, Twilio.org has made a $100,000 investment in Kinvolved, an organization that uses technology to help aid in its mission of boosting student attendance through its KiNVO mobile app.

“Twilio has been a supportive Kinvolved partner since 2013, when we first began using its service to enable real-time communications about attendance from school to home,” said Miriam Altman, CEO and co-founder of Kinvolved. “The Twilio Impact Fund investment represents an alignment of our organization’s objectives and is a significant milestone in a relationship we are excited to expand in the years ahead.”

Get out the Vote

Every second, 15 people raise their voices to elected officials using Twilio. With Voices for Democracy, a nonpartisan civic engagement initiative, Twilio.org unites social impact organizations with software developers to build and scale tools that advance the discourse between citizens and elected officials. In the lead up to the United States midterm elections, Twilio has also awarded two organizations with grants to promote voter turnout, including:
Democracy Works (TurboVote), a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to the idea that voting should fit the way we live; and
DoSomething.org, the largest tech organization focused on activating young people to make positive change both online and offline through campaigns that make an impact.
In the coming weeks, each of these organizations will launch unique programs and campaigns to engage underrepresented voting groups and encourage individuals to vote.

A Billion More
Twilio.org’s billion messages for good milestone proves the power of communications to amplify the impact that organizations can make on people’s lives. Over the next decade, Twilio.org is aiming to reach even more people and help organizations make an impact in the world. Reilly states, “As we continue to expand the work of Twilio.org, we believe that through developer creativity and innovation, we’ll be able to help a billion people each year.”

About Twilio.org
Twilio.org works with nonprofits and social enterprises to fuel communications that give hope, power and freedom. By connecting social impact organizations, passionate software developers and the full power of the Twilio platform, Twilio.org ignites positive change on a local and global scale. To date, more than 2,000 charities and nonprofits have used Twilio to send more than a billion messages for good.

About Twilio
More than 2 million developers around the world have used Twilio to unlock the magic of communications to improve any human experience. Twilio has democratized communications channels like voice, text, chat, and video by virtualizing the world’s telecommunications infrastructure through APIs that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet robust enough to power the world’s most demanding applications. By making communications a part of every software developer's toolkit, Twilio is enabling innovators across every industry — from emerging leaders to the world’s largest organizations — to reinvent how companies engage with their customers.

Source: Twilio