A Bonus that Doesn’t Fill your Pockets but your Heart

I walked to the office in the morning, thinking about what I’d say in my first interview with Showpad - when I suddenly saw commotion on the streets - the few overhead cables that had been dangling above the road the evening before, were now lying across the dirt-road, in the orange dust, rusty cars and smelly motorbikes swiftly crushing them… I couldn’t help but grin when I realized what this meant - no internet for the next couple of days. Haha… Yes, when I started applying for Showpad - I was living in a rural area in Benin, West Africa.

We’re exactly two years later now and I’ve been extremely happy working at this fast-paced start-up, where not a single day is like the previous, challenges are the standard, chaos is the norm, beer is available on tap and colleagues feel like family. I have to admit that growing from roughly 20 to 200 employees in 2 years is quite the adventure!

But, once you’ve got Africa in your heart it’s always somewhere in the back of your mind. With my first wage and limited number of holidays I didn’t have much possibilities to go back and volunteer, but now that I was finally making money, I kind of felt bad not giving anything back...

Till this one Friday morning when I was in the San Francisco office and we huddled together for Showpie - our weekly global meeting, where the SF office gets breakfast burritos and the EMEA offices open their first beers to start the weekend - It was employee success’ turn to present and they had one big topic on the agenda: referral bonuses.

It’s a pretty common company policy that employees get a bonus if they refer a friend, acquaintance or ex-colleague - however in most of the cases this bonus is an amount of money that might sound like a nice sum at first, but after taxes, isn’t at all what you expected. What our amazing employee success team did instead is give the Showpad team 2 options - If someone you referred signs his or her contract, you can:

1. Choose the standard sum of money
2. Or… If you choose a good cause to donate your money - Showpad will double the amount! 

My heart literally made a jump when hearing the last one. Making a quick calculation in my head… the government doesn’t tax donations to recognized NGOs + Showpad doubles the sum of money. This meant we could donate €4000 to a good cause of our choice. And believe me, having lived in Africa, you do realize how much money that is.

Around the time they made the announcement I heard that, Dries, one of my Vlerick classmates I had referred, made it through the selection process - wooop!

To be honest I had to give it some thought - In the past I volunteered for different NGOs in Ghana, Burundi and Benin and know a ton of organizations who give aid where it is needed most. But because this was such a big amount of money I wanted to be 100% sure that every penny would be spent helping people in need.

That’s why I chose HELP vzw - a Belgian organisation very close to my heart - consisting of a small group of doctors and surgeons who spend two weeks operating in Fianarantsoa, Madagascar. An incredibly beautiful but extremely poor country where people who suffer from disorders and diseases get cut off from society. Year after year the team flies their entire mobile hospital over to treat these people and give them a better life. So far they have successfully treated about 1500 people, entirely free.

The next mission of 28 people will leave on November 5th - and with Showpad’s help they are a little bit closer to closing the big gap of money they need to raise. So if you’re reading this blog - feel free to check out their blog or website, all tiny bits can help. (Yes - they can definitely use some help with their website as well :D )

I am super proud to work for a company that supports fantastic initiatives like this - and would love to thank our employee success team for giving us the opportunity to get a different type of bonus - a bonus that doesn’t fill your pockets but your heart.