Corporate impact functions are increasingly held to the same performance standards as any other line of business. Yet most still rely on an annual allocation from the enterprise, leaving their programs exposed to the health and will of the business. Through 2023, the HPE Foundation faced exactly that challenge. Its spending assumed a $10M annual corporate contribution and in years when the company couldn’t meet that commitment in full, the foundation covered the gap from its roughly $80M corpus, which put it on a path to depletion.
To help NationSwell members navigate these tensions and build more resilient impact functions, we interviewed Fred Tan, HPE’s Global Head of Social Impact. Fred and his team restructured the foundation’s financial and operational model to move it from reliance on annual corporate funding to self-sufficiency. Today, returns from the corpus cover annual operating costs and grantmaking, and any additional corporate contribution grows the base.
The following resource outlines the steps the team took to create efficiencies, generate returns, and build a durable impact function. The processes and decisions described are intended to help leaders frame their own approaches, but should be considered within each organization’s own financial, legal, and tax context.
The steps outlined are:
- Step 1: Set goals and targets
- Step 2: Audit grantmaking programs
- Step 3: Consolidate and reduce vendor spend
- Step 4: Redesign employee matching
- Step 5: Update the corpus investment policy
- Step 6: Pilot impact investing
