Cisco Practicing the Difficult Art of Hands-On Philanthropy

June 8, 2009

By Charles Waltner

Jennifer Brandon says Cisco Systems has helped her non-profit, Community Voice Mail, achieve a lot of good things over the past few years. Thanks to their combined efforts, her organization now looks forward to doubling the number of people it helps by the end of 2011.

Brandon says the networking giant's money, technology, and know-how have been vital to increasing the non-profit's ability to offer free voice mail services to homeless people. But the success of the partnership, she adds, has hinged on a simple realization. "We both recognize that the path to grand things is not always perfect."

Indeed, the history between corporations and non-profits has been a winding road. Non-profits, distrusting of their for-profit peers, generally prefer their patrons keep their distance. When corporations have tried to get more involved, the results have been mixed.

"In the non-profit world, there's a lot of cynicism about corporations, and some of it is not necessarily unwarranted," Brandon says. "There's a lot of micromanaging that can go on."

But philanthropy experts say closer partnerships between non-profits and corporations are more important than ever for addressing increasingly pressing social issues. Global corporations now control much of the world's resources. Non-profits, though equipped with expertise and passion, sorely lack the power, people and cash.

The results of Cisco's efforts with organizations such as Community Voice Mail demonstrate what can be achieved when non-profits and corporations successfully join forces. It's not easy – both Cisco and its partners say – but from their experiences the two are finding a new path for making the most of their complimentary capabilities and shared interests.

Forging Better Partnerships

Community Voice Mail's partnership with Cisco started seven years ago, just as Cisco was first developing its current strategy for partnering with non-profits. At the time Community Voice Mail was reaching a pivotal point in its development. The organization had been successful during the 1990s, but an aging voice mail system was threatening its ability to continue its good work. "In practice, we didn't have a next-phase strategy," Brandon says. "We were on the verge of obsolescence."

The organization was a great fit for Cisco, which focuses on ways it can use its expertise with Internet-based technologies to help non-profits reach their social goals. Cisco not only provided the organization more than $2.5 million in funding, it also contributed the necessary networking hardware, customized software, and technical skills to centralize and update the non-profit's voice mail system. Brandon says Cisco personnel donated hundreds of hours in building the new technology and teaching her staff how to use it.

Cisco also provided office space for Community Voice Mail's national headquarters in Seattle. And as part of its efforts, it helped negotiate a contract with Level 3, a telecommunications company, to offer discounted communications services to connect the organization's voice mail network throughout the country.

Such involvement from Cisco helped Community Voice Mail lower its operational costs by 22 percent in one year while greatly increasing the number of homeless people it could assist. The agency now serves more than 40,000 people annually in 400 communities across the United States.

But to get to all these good results, Brandon says Cisco and Community Voice Mail spent a lot of time talking – or more importantly – listening. Guided by mutual respect, the two learned how to be better partners.

Though Brandon says Cisco is driven by a "glorious ambition" to help, it tempers its can-do business sensibilities with the understanding that it doesn't necessarily have all the answers. "They have an honest curiosity, and they truly want to learn," she says. "I'm not saying our relationship is perfect. It isn't. But they gave us time to work on our program, and they recognized that ownership had to be with us."

Peter Tavernise, a senior program manager for Cisco's philanthropy efforts, says though Cisco believes it has business and technology insights that can help non-profits, it recognizes that its partners have crucial expertise. To get the best results, it needs to work closely with them to understand the social challenges they are both trying to address. "It's definitely a situation of mutual learning," he says.

'Cranking Up' Social Benefits

Community Voice Mail is just one of many non-profit organizations that are benefiting from such close partnerships with Cisco. Several non-profits that started working with Cisco as fledgling organizations earlier this decade have grown into impressive operations with broad scope, blanketing continents and reaching across oceans.

Throughout the partnerships, Cisco hopes to serve as a consultant of sorts, offering its technology and business acumen to help its partners reach more people. "We're not looking to fundamentally change a partner or the way they operate," says Alex Belous, a manager in Cisco's philanthropy operations. "Instead, we focus on helping them crank up their efficiencies and raise their capacity to make a difference."

Besides donating money, the company, for example, often "loans" rising star employees for up to a year through its Leadership Fellows program. These employees provide Cisco's social investment partners first-hand help in improving their operational processes and use of technology. Also, Cisco will pull in experts from throughout the company to advise a non-profit partner on specific management or technology issues.

Rey Ramsey, chief executive for One Economy Corporation, a global non-profit that provides information and technology assistance to low-income people, says Cisco's help – particularly from its Leadership Fellows program – accelerated his organization's development by almost two years.

Though Cisco has been an active and somewhat exacting patron, Ramsey says it has been "very respectful. They weren't mothering or anything like that. But the great thing about our relationship with Cisco is the tangible results."

The concept of packaging its know-how with donations is not new to Cisco. This was the basic idea behind the company's now famous Networking Academy. Cisco established that program in 1997 when it realized schools and other organizations receiving Cisco gear donations lacked the training to manage such newfangled networks.

By partnering with governments, schools, and non-governmental organizations such as the United Nations, Cisco developed a networking skills training curriculum that is now used in 165 countries, reaching more than 750,000 students per year.

Finding a New Path

Bradley Googins, executive director of the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and co-author of the book, "Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship," says it is vital for corporate philanthropy to move beyond writing checks. "It's not about money but how corporations use their resources, especially employees, to help address social causes," Googins says, describing corporations as "the monasteries of the 21st century."

"They are the institutions housing the knowledge, the talent and the influence," he says. "They have the opportunity to provide crucial leadership for addressing social needs."

Googins says an increasing number of people want corporations to make greater social contributions. According to a recent report published by The McKinsey Quarterly, 84 percent of executives in companies from around the world believe that society now expects their businesses to take a much more active role in environmental, social, and political issues.

Certainly, corporations have the means to make an enormous difference for all kinds of social efforts. Cisco's roughly $35 billion in annual revenue, for example, is more than the gross domestic product of 60 percent of the world's national economies. And according to Fortune magazine, the 500 largest global corporations generated $24 trillion in revenue in 2007, netting $1.6 trillion in profits. Their total output is nearly equal to the annual gross domestic product of the United States and the European Union combined.

Dr. Fred Mednick, the founder and president of Teachers Without Borders, a Cisco non-profit partner that provides professional development to teachers worldwide, says several years ago he was discussing the concept of non-profits and corporations working more closely together. His colleagues blanched at the idea, saying such relationships didn't stand a chance.

But Mednick says his organization's work with Cisco is evidence that these efforts do hold promise. He says Cisco's "package" of assistance has been crucial to his organization's development. Cisco helped his group develop Web-based knowledge transfer tools and establish more efficient operations. Mednick describes the company's Leadership Fellows program as "a most wonderful thing."

Like other Cisco non-profit partners, Mednick says the partnership has worked because of the efforts Cisco has put into fundamental relationship skills, like listening, Mednick says. "No other company has been more open to listening to us about how to help than Cisco. We are always talking with them and they are always listening."

Mednick says his group's relationship with Cisco is a great example of a new kind of organization, the ".corg." "Many people believed the two worlds of corporations and non-profits could never meet," he says. "But if we do it right, a lot of people can be helped."

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer in Piedmont, Calif.