San Francisco-based, Amplitude, Donated More Than 12,000 Pairs of Socks for St. Anthony’s Free Clothing Program

May 19, 2023

A Q&A with Amplitude’s Luke Slipe and Carolyn Feibleman, who share details about the Walk for Socks campaign, and how they hope to compete and inspire other companies to get involved in giving back

How did you first get involved with St. Anthony’s?   

Carolyn: Luke and I co-founded Amplitude’s Community Impact ERG (Employee Resource Group) a few years back. We were looking for impactful ways to engage Amplitude employees in the San Francisco community. Since the beginning, we’ve found St. Anthony’s to be a great organization to support and always easy to plug into. We started volunteering first in the Free Clothing Program, but over the years we also brought groups of employees to the Dining Room.

Tell us about the Walk for Socks campaign you created. How does it work?

Luke: Walk for Socks is a company-wide charitable campaign that raises thousands of socks for St. Anthony’s while also encouraging physical exercise and friendly competition among our team members. For every 5,000 steps that our employees take during the campaign, Amplitude donates one pair of socks to St. Anthony’s. We do it in January each year, given that at the start of the year, so many people have a bunch of fitness goals related to New Year’s resolutions.

The competitive element is folded into it in that our global company of 700 employees is divided up into four different teams, and the team that takes the most steps (and raises the most socks) wins prizes that our ERG sources from our healthcare provider.

Carolyn: We really get excited about the cause! People rile up their teams and get people excited and enthusiastic about it.

Luke: We also do our part to keep everyone excited. Every week at our company all-hands meeting, we give an update on the campaign and literally bring out the boxes of socks so everyone can see the progress and the impact they are making. One week it’ll be, “We’ve raised 3,000 pairs of socks as a company.”  Next week, it’s “Wow, now, we’ve raised 9,000 pairs of socks.”

We had so many boxes; nearly a truck’s worth of boxes just stacked up in our audience room, which I think made the impact feel tangible and helped motivate people to keep going.

Carolyn and I have done a lot of community impact events at Amplitude, and this one is an order of magnitude better from a participation standpoint across the company.

So how many socks did you end up donating by the end of the campaign this year?

Luke: We raised 12,000 pairs of socks for St. Anthony’s, which is awesome! This is our fourth year doing it, and the number of socks has definitely grown a lot over the years. We ended up with close to 60% global participation across our company, which means that 400 people participated. It was the equivalent of 60 million steps logged.

Carolyn: I joined the company roughly four years ago. At the time our company was, I think, just under 200 employees. We’re now at over 750 employees. To be able to maintain the same level of participation across the organization, despite more than tripling in size has been so cool to see.

Where would you like to take this campaign in the future?

Luke: We would really like to inspire other companies to get involved with this campaign. We think it would be so fun to have some inter-company competition, where Amplitude competes against another company to record the most steps. And it would be a great way to get more donations to St. Anthony’s and help more people in need in San Francisco. So, for any company out there that wants to take us on and get involved next year – please get in touch!

Amplitude is a San Francisco-based company that provides product intelligence solutions to help businesses optimize their digital products and customer experiences.

Interested in coordinating a clothing drive for St. Anthony’s Free Clothing Program, visit the program’s webpage HERE. The Free Clothing Program is also accepting donations of clean, new and gently-used clothing and offers volunteer opportunities as well. For more information and to book a date and time, visit the volunteer webpage HERE.