How non-profits use technology to scale impact

We’re launching a series of blog posts to demonstrate how Cisco enables nonprofits to maximize technology for greater scale and impact. We’ll be looking at our three portfolio areas – economic empowerment, education, and critical human needs – and some of the nonprofits we support to tell their stories.

Cisco’s Corporate Affairs team stewards many of the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, including grant support for nonprofits.  Cisco and the Cisco Foundation aren’t looking to support just any nonprofit; we discover nonprofits that have the best ideas that use technology to solve social problems. After that, we help make their solutions a reality by providing early stage grant funding, technology donations, and expertise.

Through these partnerships, we help create technology-based solutions for economic empowerment, education, critical human needs, and disaster relief to improve lives around the world. Here is more information about how we identify nonprofits that have the potential to scale:

When it comes to economic empowerment nonprofits, we identify technology-based programs that connect underserved people to relevant skills, meaningful employment with career progression, entrepreneurial opportunities, financial products and services, and other resources they need to thrive in the digital economy and become financially independent and economically self-sufficient.

For nonprofits that focus on education, we identify partners with innovative, technology-based programs that improve student performance and engagement. We have a particular focus on investments in STEM studies and delivering education to underserved communities. And through Cisco grants and donations of our technology, we help improve access to quality education worldwide.

We also work with nonprofits that address critical human needs. Many people lack access to basic human needs: food, adequate shelter and clean water. At Cisco, we identify nonprofits and social change agents worldwide that are passionate about relieving these problems. Another aspect of critical human needs is supporting scale-able technology solutions that help disaster-relief teams move faster and provide vital services to more people when disasters strike.

At Cisco, we are proud to partner with organizations that are using tech to improve the efficiency and efficacy of their operations, and drive impact at scale.

Read all the articles in the series here:

How a nonprofit partner in economic empowerment provides tech training to survivors of human trafficking

How a nonprofit partner in education uses tech to bring educational content to those without the internet

How one NGO helps farmers use mobile phones to invest in a better harvest

How a nonprofit partner supports social enterprises so individuals can gain relevant skills

How a game is inspiring the next generation of cybersecurity professionals

How a digital data collection tool is helping humanitarians