Donate instead of gifts

As we are a fully distributed team, our values are what tie us together. Sometimes cool things happen that allow us to connect with other’s values too. We recently had an inspirational connection with PagerTree that allowed us to follow our mission of contributing and supporting actions that can positively impact the world. This resulted in a donation to an organisation whose engineering projects empower communities to meet their basic human needs and equip leaders to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.

The story?

Pager Tree offered to send us all Christmas gifts of T-shirts. However, we are a remote team living and working from different addresses all over the world. We decided this would be awkward for Pager Tree and not necessarily in keeping with our values so we kindly refused. We felt no need to generate extra waste and a bigger carbon footprint and proposed instead to make a small donation to a cause of their choice on our behalf. Positively surprised, Pager Tree asked if we would like to support Engineers Without Borders (EWB). We accepted. In that way we directly took part in helping EWB towards fulfilling their mission and vision of  “a sustainable world where engineering enables long term positive social and global development for the benefit of people and the environment everywhere.” as said on their website. It is a truly amazing feeling to know we took part in this.

Who are PagerTree?

Our alerts matter. They might be automated from monitoring systems or critical messages from clients. We used to have a cobbled together system for alerts using email filters and email-to-sms. Recently, however, we wanted to extend this to include schedules and escalating alerts between on-call members of the team. After some research we decided to try PagerTree. Their site describes PagerTree as “Intelligent alert routing for the modern team” and we have been very pleased so far! It does everything we need: a simple UI for setting up schedules and escalation rules, all the integrations we need and options to allow each person to choose how to receive alerts. Plus their support were really helpful getting us set up.