Building Towards
a Breakthrough

An ambitious goal requires a new approach

Set an audacious goal

In 2016, Cisco’s Employee Community Impact programs were performing well, relatively speaking. At 37% engagement, we were above average. Most companies report an average 25-30% rate of participation.

But we knew that we could do better. And not just incremental improvement; instead, the team chose to set an audacious goal of 80% participation within five years.

We diligently adopted best practices in the field, such as matching donations year-round, raising annual match amounts, and offering five days of volunteer time off per year—later raised to ten days. Our corporate-driven quarterly campaigns served as rallying points to drive impact, and we expanded our local engagement to nearly 100 communities and volunteer networks around the world.

These actions served as an excellent foundation, increasing our engagement to just above 50% in 2019.

We were on our way—but we needed to do more. We needed to do something fundamentally different.

Do something different

Beyond best practices such as global campaigns and championing employee communities, we envisioned a new field of possibilities.

We looked at the barriers our employees faced in acting and making giving back a habit and imagined how Cisco’s technology, expertise, and innovation could break them down—creating new levels of engagement.

Digital platforms, data, and a deep commitment to understanding how our employees really want to engage became new priorities.

Redesign the fundamental framework

We put the power of giving into our employees’ hands by creating a simple, inclusive impact framework.

We recognized the many unique ways our employees are giving back, from walking the Camino de Santiago trail to raising funds for cancer charities to championing sustainability. We aimed to meet employees where they were, encouraging them to capture all the varied ways they were driving impact.
We empowered employee choice, allowing our teams to more easily select their preferred causes, in addition to offering them curated impact recommendations. We also increased the number of nonprofits and NGOs eligible for matching gifts – expanding from 7,000 to 90,000 organizations!
We focused on user experience, using employee feedback and data insights to help us capture the right audience, on the right channels, with the right opportunities. Through targeted campaigns and our digital-first impact platform, we were able to capture previously unreported and ongoing impact actions.

By prioritizing flexibility and employee choice, we began to see a strong uptick in participation in Cisco’s Employee Community Impact initiatives.

Celebrate all positive actions

Below are snapshots of six actions employees can take to drive impact.

Volunteering

Employee volunteering in person, virtually, and in teams

Donating

Employee donations and fundraisers benefiting global and local charities

Digital Advocacy

Advocating to end extreme poverty via GlobalCitizen.org

Environmental Sustainability

Employee actions and pledges to promote environmental sustainability

Integrated Action Programs

Employee action to initiate a corporate charitable donation

Sharing
Successes

Self-reported employee impact stories

Digitize to engage at scale

From virtual volunteerism to Webex donation chatbots, we deployed digital features to make it easy to start-and easy to keep coming back.

We asked ourselves, “How do we make it easy and intuitive for employees to give back?”

We used insights from behavioral science to incorporate elements like incentives and loss language into our campaigns. We also adapted growth hacking, a strategy common in behavioral economics and digital marketing, into our blueprint. This strategy uses digitization and “nudges”—data-driven interventions—to help employees take action and create pathways to further action. This, in turn, helps them develop new habits of giving back.

We “gamified” to encourage engagement, bringing elements like point scoring and competition with others to our engagement campaigns to make interactions fun and easy.

The image shows an enlarged view of a Webex chatbot interface, displaying a digital campaign encouraging employees to redeem credits.

Communicate in unconventional ways

We started to communicate much more frequently, through unconventional channels, and discovered new levels of trust with our employees.

Beyond the traditional quarterly or annual campaigns, we leveraged the channel our employees already frequented—our Webex Collaboration platform—to communicate via chatbot.

We also focused on making participation quick and easy. Within our tech-driven "one-click" campaigns we featured suggestions for non-profits to receive the donation. Our suggested options were selected over 99% of the time, suggesting high trust for Employee Community Impact campaigns and initiatives.

Implementing these key strategies led to increased participation—especially by first time givers.

Be sure to consider

Accessibility – ensure that campaigns are inclusive of people with disabilities by focusing on meeting key web standards for screen readers and keyboard navigation.
Cultural relevance – design communications and campaigns that speak to people in ways that resonated with them.
For example, translating communications into regional languages for specific employee markets.
Data optimization – make sure the data gathered is optimized to help understand which campaign is working—which banners and graphics are the most engaging—and which combination of behavioral nudges like incentives and loss language are the most effective.

The image shows a mailer campaign designed using behavioral science principles, such as loss aversion messaging, to maximize employee engagement.

Lead with data

All our engagement was tracked digitally. Through these digital interfaces, we generated tons of data, which we aggregated within the Employee Community Impact Dashboard and made available to key functional stakeholders responsible for driving employee community impact. To further decentralize ownership, we built a digital widget and placed it front and center on our intranet.

Tracking a company-wide goal was now in the hands of every employee, and people leaders could track the progress and plan team-oriented giving back events.

This began to drive our culture.

What gets measured, gets tracked—and what gets tracked, gets achieved.

We achieved 80% for the first time in 2020—and have sustained it for the past five years. In FY24, we achieved 86% participation.

The image shows a Tableau data dashboard with insights and a digital intranet widget that enables data tracking.

Case study: Engage new hire employees

Offering incentives starting the first day of onboarding helps create highly engaged employees.

Day One: For each new employee, we deposit US$15 in credits in a personal account on our giving platform. On their first day at Cisco, we send an email inviting the new employee to redeem the credits within 30 days.

Week One: New employees attend onboarding programs, including a session showcasing Cisco Employee Community Impact initiatives and the inspiring work of our global nonprofit partners. The session is designed to drive awareness of the many ways they can engage and give back and encourage immediate action.

Nearly 25% of new employees redeem their $15 giving back credit within their first week.

Weeks Two–Four: We begin a regular cadence of “nudges”—both emails and Webex messages—to remind new employees to redeem their credits before they expire.

The industry average for redemption of new hire credits hovers around 30%.

Through the innovation in our digital approach, continuous experimentation to create higher engagement, and the integration of nudges within Webex, we achieved a credit redemption rate of over 50% in FY24.

50% of new employees were experiencing the joy of giving within their first 30 days at Cisco.

For those employees, the impact of taking action from the very start kept expanding.

62% took a second action to give back. The collective impact of those secondary actions was over $400k and over 15,000 hours of volunteering time.^*

*during FY22