Beginning with Mary Gates, the mother of Microsoft’s co-founder and longtime leader in the United Way, a legacy of philanthropy has been passed down within in the company and continues evolving even today. Company founder Bill Gates now pursues philanthropy full-time through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft alumni have founded and supported more than 150 nonprofit organizations and social ventures working around the world, according to its alumni foundation, and the nonprofits Jolkona Foundation, Givology and CRY America are all run by current Microsoft employees. Microsoft matches employee donations and volunteer time up to $12,000 a year and last year employee giving and company matching funds totaled nearly $90 million.
All this and more contributed to the company’s ranking of fourteen on this year’s Corporate Responsibility list which evaluated performance on a range of issues such as environment, climate change, employee relations, human rights and philanthropy.
According to the company’s senior vice president for human resources, Lisa Brummel, making social entrepreneurship part of the company’s DNA is a vital recruiting tool and gives the company an advantage over competitors. “There are certain companies that give their employees 20 percent time to spend internally to make the company better, “ Brummel said, referring to Google. “And there are some companies that give their employees 20 percent time externally to make the world better.”
Rob Salkowitz, author of “Young World Rising” writes that a younger, globally connected workforce demands a new organizational model that blends social and commercial goals, and attracts talent with visionary leadership and social mission.
A company with this mission must carefully align the benefits it gives to society with its business goals in order to thrive and Microsoft’s model seems to successfully do just that. One example of this is a project called PhotoDNA, where Microsoft researchers combined with Dartmouth College computer science professor Harry Farid to create a system that identifies and filters out know images of child pornography from search engines.
Tim Cranton, associate general counsel who worked on the PhotoDNA project said, “Microsoft employees truly believe they can change the world with software, even sometimes in an arrogant way, but there is an abiding belief that we can change the world.”
