Microsoft’s corporate giving initiatives blend innovation and participation

I’ve written before how I envisage a changing landscape where corporate giving continues to grow and more people as employees align their charitable activities to support nonprofits via their place of work. Many large companies have really raised the bar in recent years to encourage employee engagement in both participation to assist with nonprofit fundraising events and also in terms of donations by spreading the scope and scale of charities that they support. The 2010 results just published by Microsoft demonstrate this as fully as any that I’ve read in recent months. It’s a testament to what a corporation can achieve by internally promoting their giving campaign so wholeheartedly.

Corporate matching of all employee donations toward nonprofit and community organizations provides great incentive for employees of the computer giant, with all donations matched up to $12,000 per individual annually. In conjunction with this they also offer a team where if an employee volunteers his or her time those hours will be matched with a per hourly payment to the organisation in question. Microsoft states that the continued development of fresh ideas and approaches has helped to see their employee giving results continue to rise year after year. In 2010 Microsoft held more than 300 different fundraising events during the year including a five kilometer run with more than 1,700 employee participants, soccer clinics, and internal auction site and even album of employee music. Such diversity in their approach seems to be bringing dividends to the causes they support along with the sense of participation amongst the workforce.

Some of the totals from last year’s accomplishments are really quite staggering. Almost 35,000 people within Microsoft participated during the year and Microsoft employee giving raised $96 million, the highest total ever. Volunteering was also exceptional with more than 350,000 hours of time given by over 4,000 people which in turn generated more than $6 million in funds for those associated organizations, speaking of which some 16,000 different organizations were supported by the company’s giving campaign last year. The company is very proud of its association with Seattle Children’s Hospital and are the largest ongoing donors to the establishment, giving more than $800,000 last year. Much of this funding assists those who might otherwise be turned away due to a financial or insurance reasons.

The legacy in my opinion of being a large international corporation runs far deeper than profits and innovations in technology or services, but also includes being a good corporate citizen; both in a global sense where possible but also in directly impacting the local community where you are most prominent. To those measures it appears that Microsoft are doing an outstanding job.