A Key to Getting Corporate Money: Find Employees to Champion Your Cause

Employee resource groups — voluntary workplace networks organized around identities (race, gender, sexual orientation) or interests (animal welfare, education) — can be great conduits between companies with philanthropic dollars to spend and nonprofits seeking support. Such groups are also sometimes more willing to give to an array of causes than official corporate grant makers. But how can charities tap into these groups?

The key is finding an “internal champion,” says Maggie Monroe, outreach and recruiting manager at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

That’s how AIDS/LifeCycle, a 545-mile bicycle ride organized by the foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, has been able to inspire several employee groups to raise money and participate in the weeklong annual event.

To make inroads at a company, “we really need somebody who has already done our ride to champion us” to coworkers, Ms. Monroe says. Once the seed is planted, “it’s a multiyear process to get more than one or two people on the ride from that company.”

AIDS/LifeCycle organizers encourage riders to promote the event to coworkers and employee resource groups. They suggest that riders consider colleagues part of their potential donor network and find out if their employer will match staff members’ donations.

They also ask riders to invite AIDS/LifeCycle organizers to give informational talks in the office.

“Whenever we’re invited, I can’t think of any time I’ve gone in to do a talk where it has not come from someone who has known us,” Ms. Monroe says.

Giving@Google

On the company side of the equation, corporate-philanthropy leaders also rely on internal champions for ideas about where to direct company giving. Jacquelline Fuller, head of Google.org, says the philanthropic arm of the tech giant takes its cues from the interests and activities of the Google’s employee resource groups.

The most active groups include the Black Googler Network and Women@Google. Ms. Fuller credits the former with inspiring Google.org to make an $11.5 million grant to 10 racial-justice organizations earlier this year. Because Googlers wanted to focus in part on criminal-justice reform and collecting better data about policing and prisons, some of the money will support data projects at the Center for Policing Equity, Measures for Justice, and the W. Haywood Burns Institute.

“Black Googlers, in particular, led a hoodie march in our offices, raising awareness of some of the issues coming up with police brutality and shootings,” Ms. Fuller says. The activism prompted her team to ask, “Is this an area where we might have a unique role to play?”

In addition, Google engineers and data analysts volunteered their time to create a digital tool to help the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., display its exhibits online.

The Women@Google group has focused in large part on providing more opportunities for girls to learn computer science and improving representation of women on television and in movies. The group helped secure a $1.2 million Google Global Impact Award for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which will use the money to develop new software to analyze gender portrayals.

The two organizations have worked together on multiple efforts since representatives from both met at a United Nations event about improving the status of women, says Madeline Di Nonno, chief executive of the Geena Davis Institute.

Thanks in part to the resource groups, Google’s corporate culture encourages employees to organize on behalf of charities, Ms. Fuller says. For example, in December, a group of workers responded to news of the worsening crisis in Aleppo, Syria, by raising $300,000 from their colleagues in just one day. Google employees also raised money for victims of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, Calif., and to support organizations fighting President Trump’s travel ban.