Twilio

Twilio supports digital inclusivity for women and girls from underrepresented groups through its financial contribution to the US-based non-profit Black Girls CODE working in partnership with the non-profit Advancing Women in Tech (AWIT). Further, the company commits to integrating accessible design principles in their products and provides products that accommodate users with disabilities. Twilio also discloses its community investments.

In December 2020, Twilio launched a programme designed to help students from non-traditional backgrounds learn coding. Twilio’s Impact Fund supports organisations that help adults from underrepresented communities become software developers. Additionally, through Twilio Programmable Voice, the company supports school connectivity by allowing teachers and students to communicate while completing assignments in real time.

Twilio demonstrates senior-level responsibility for cybersecurity and discloses how its cybersecurity is managed in a white paper. It also has an incident response team as well as information security management certification. The company publishes a semi-annual transparency report, which details the number of government requests it receives for user data and those it complies with by country.

The company supports open innovation through various open source projects. It also extends financial support to social enterprise start-ups through its partnership with several impact venture capital firms.

Twilio can improve its efforts on contributing to universal and affordable access to digital technologies. The company has an opportunity to disclose how it commits to integrating accessible design principles into its products, and how it makes the workplace accessible for its employees with disabilities. Although the company reports its community investments, it can also disclose how the economic value it generates is distributed among stakeholders.

Twilio provides funding to support adults to become developers. However, the company has room to improve its efforts on enabling other initiatives that support basic and technical digital skills development.

Twilio reports that its information security management is certified. However, it can go a step further and follow industry best practice by making the certificate publicly available. It can also disclose the number of data breaches it experiences. As a digital company, it should also make a high-level commitment to child online safety.

Twilio has the opportunity to demonstrate its support for sustainable innovation. While the company reports its total number of employees in research and development (R&D), it can additionally disclose the number of women employees involved in R&D. It can also disclose the ethical guidelines it follows for product development.

Twilio commits to respecting human rights, but it does not commit to respecting all the labour fundamentals outlined in the ILO core labour rights, including the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining. The company has a grievance mechanism accessible to both workers and external stakeholders to raise human rights concerns and complaints. Twilio has included human rights issues in its materiality assessment. However, it does not disclose a process to identify, assess and act on salient human rights risks associated with its own operations and with its business relationships. Moreover, the company describes the stakeholders it engages with in general. However, it does not specify whether it engages with stakeholders whose human rights could be affected by its activities.

Twilio publicly commits to respecting worker health and safety, but the company does not place this expectation on its business relationships. Furthermore, the company does not disclose a policy commitment stating that it does not require workers to work more than the regular and overtime hours. It is also not explicit that it requires its business relationships to do this. Moreover, the company does not disclose the percentage of its global workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements, and it provides no relevant evidence in relation to paying its workers a living wage. Twilio does not publicly commit to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. The company can also improve its disclosure on workforce diversity by reporting on more diversity indicators per employee category, such as age group.

Twilio has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption, and it includes anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in its business relationship contracts. Further, the company discloses a tax strategy for its UK operations only and does not disclose its income tax payments in individual tax jurisdictions. Twilio does not disclose its approach to lobbying and political engagement. Specifically, the company has no public statement indicating that it does not make political contributions, and it does not disclose its lobbying expenditures.