Advancing Strategy: How to Lead Change in Corporate Societal Engagement

Implementing a strategy may be even harder than developing it. This learning brief is intended for corporate foundation and CSR leaders who have completed an initial strategy refresh process and who seek effecitve practices and tools to advance this strategy. In our experience advising more than 100 multinational companie, effective leaders facilitate structured, data-informed decisions and enable important organizational improvements to achieve their strategic objectives. Specifically, advancing strategy in corporate societal engagement typically requires leading change in two major areas of the overall portfolio: designing a signative initiative and transforming local giving

Why Engage the Public Sector and How?

This article, co-authored by Maximilian Martin, Global Head, UBS Philanthropy Services, and Greg Hills explores different ways in which foundations can interact with governments in order to achieve social impact. By the nature of the scale and authority of government institutions, changes in the formulation or execution of public policy can contribute to widespread social benefit and systemic change. Many people feel that foundations are well-positioned to influence these changes in public policy, and this article investigates different approaches that foundations can take in order to achieve this change

Boosting the Immunization Workforce: Lessons from the Merck Vaccine Network - Africa

This report shares lessons learned from The Merck Company Foundation's decade of experience building immunization capacity in Africa. The Merck Vaccine Network -- Africa, a philanthropic initiative to train immunization managers in Kenya, Mali, Uganda, and Zambia, suggests seven key lessons that can help other funders, governments, and NGOs designing or implementing similar vaccine delivery training programs improve the effectiveness and sustainability of their work.Merck's experience designing and supporting the initiative can offer valuable lessons for other actors in the immunization and broader global health fields who are engaged in or planning similar work. Specifically, we identify seven forward-looking lessons that can increase the effectiveness and sustainability of programs to build the capacity of the vaccine workforce in developing countries:Conduct a rigorous needs assessment to anchor efforts in local needs and priorities;Perform ongoing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to enable programs to adapt, improve, and generate evidence of impact to attract new partners and funding;Create a sustainability plan at the outset to ensure that program impact is maintained beyond the conclusion of initial funding;Embed programs into local health systems to ensure that investments leverage existing infrastructure, relationships, and resources, and that impact can be sustained beyond the life of the program;Employ locally-adapted curricula and appropriate teaching techniques to maximize transfer and retention of relevant knowledge;Incorporate supportive supervision into programs to ensure that transferred knowledge is maintained and acted upon;Facilitate and support regular convening and communication, enabling continuous learning for improvement.In addition to describing the approach taken by MVN-A and the results achieved in the four focus countries, this paper provides additional detail on each lesson, supported by case studies from the MVNA experience

Anti-Corruption as Strategic CSR: A Call to Action for Corporations

Corruption is not a peripheral social concern that corporations can ignore or passively address -- it is a bottom-line issue that directly affects companies' ability to compete. Widespread in emerging markets, corruption is becoming an increasingly important issue for business to address. Furthermore, it inflicts enduring harm on disadvantaged populations by diverting resources for critical services like education, clean water and health care into the pockets of dishonest public officials. This white paper presents a critical assessment of corporate anti-corruption efforts in the developing world and offers a guide for corporations to move beyond traditional ethics and compliance activities to strategic anti-corruption efforts. Sponsored by The Merck Company Foundation and developed in collaboration with the Ethics Resource Center, the paper reveals opportunities for corporations to engage in more comprehensive and effective anti-corruption reform as a business imperative

Shared Value in Emerging Markets: How Multinational Corporations Are Redefining Business Strategies to Reach Poor or Vulnerable Populations

This report illuminates the enormous opportunities in emerging markets for companies to drive competitive advantage and sustainable impact at scale. It identifies how over 30 companies across multiple sectors and geographies design and measure business strategies that also improve the lives of underserved individuals

CSR Strategy Roadmap

FSG's new CSR Strategy Roadmap distills two decades of experience advising companies on CSR strategies into one step-by-step document. Designed for CSR and corporate foundation executives, the Roadmap offers practical tools and case examples designed to help companies transform their CSR strategies.CSR and corporate foundation executives are facing a shifting landscape of internal and external priorities. To meet these priorities, CSR teams are transforming their portfolios from broad generosity to catalyzing focused, business-aligned, and outcomes-oriented efforts. This transformation requires structured strategy approaches as well as incorporating a heightened understanding of the root causes of inequities and injustices in our communities. The Roadmap aims to guide executives through the process of developing a strategy to proactively address these shifting priorities

Volunteering for Impact: Best Practices in International Corporate Volunteering

Although multinational corporations invest significant resources in international corporate volunteering (ICV), a disproportionate emphasis is often placed on the quantity of activity rather than potential impact. Multinational corporations are slowly moving from traditional measures, like counting volunteers and hours of service, to adopting more strategic measures built around increasing business or social impacts. Companies are evolving ICV programs to strategic partnerships that focus on high-value skills transfer, capacity building and scalability, and driving outcomes beyond conventional philanthropic tools. FSG Social Impact Advisors released Volunteering for Impact, a compilation of best practices in international corporate volunteering (ICV). Sponsored by Pfizer Inc and The Brookings Institution, the study examines ICV within two principal models: local service, in which employees based in countries outside headquarters volunteer in their local communities; and cross-border service, in which employees travel abroad to volunteer. After numerous interviews and the analysis of ICV programs at 14 multinational corporations, FSG detailed current programs and made recommendations to guide corporate philanthropy executives and ICV program managers as they build high impact volunteering programs

Best in Class: How Top Corporations Can Help Transform Public Education

This FSG white paper, released in May 2007 and sponsored by Ernst and Young LLP, provides a critical assessment of opportunities for corporations to help transform the U.S. public education system through innovative corporate philanthropy. Based on six months of research and dozens of interviews with corporate philanthropy leaders, education nonprofit executives and educators, the paper maps the myriad of opportunities available for corporations to engage in education reform and details a range of lessons learned. In addition, it includes a call to action for corporations to raise their own expectations of corporate philanthropy in education to adopt systemic thinking, replicate and scale effective initiatives, and take collective action. By any measure, the U.S. education system faces daunting challenges. Among developed countries, the U.S. ranks 20th out of 28 in math scores, and a shockingly high number of students don't finish high school. However, the situation is far from hopeless. In fact, some leading corporations have decades of experience helping to turn around the most intractable problems in education. They have recognized that to remain competitive in today's global economy, schools must produce graduates who are prepared for the 21st century workforce

The New Role of Business in Global Education: How Companies Can Create Shared Value by Improving Education While Driving Shareholder Returns

This paper articulates the case for a renewed role for business in global education through the lens of shared value. It is intended to help business leaders and their partners seize opportunities to create economic value while addressing unmet needs in education at scale. The concepts we describe apply across industries and to developed and emerging economies alike, although their implementation will naturally differ based on contex

Ligo: An Open Source Application for the Management and Execution of Administrative Data Linkage

Introduction Ligo is an open source application that provides a framework for managing and executing administrative data linking projects. Ligo provides an easy-to-use web interface that lets analysts select among data linking methods including deterministic, probabilistic and machine learning approaches and use these in a documented, repeatable, tested, step-by-step process. Objectives and Approach The linking application has two primary functions: identifying common entities in datasets [de-duplication] and identifying common entities between datasets [linking]. The application is being built from the ground up in a partnership between the Province of British Columbia’s Data Innovation (DI) Program and Population Data BC, and with input from data scientists. The simple web interface allows analysts to streamline the processing of multiple datasets in a straight-forward and reproducible manner. Results Built in Python and implemented as a desktop-capable and cloud-deployable containerized application, Ligo includes many of the latest data-linking comparison algorithms with a plugin architecture that supports the simple addition of new formulae. Currently, deterministic approaches to linking have been implemented and probabilistic methods are in alpha testing. A fully functional alpha, including deterministic and probabilistic methods is expected to be ready in September, with a machine learning extension expected soon after. Conclusion/Implications Ligo has been designed with enterprise users in mind. The application is intended to make the processes of data de-duplication and linking simple, fast and reproducible. By making the application open source, we encourage feedback and collaboration from across the population research and data science community