Philanthropy Counseling: the Latest Benefit for High-Tech Workers

By NICOLE LEWIS

When employees at Cisco Systems, a technology company in San Jose, Calif., want to

take a break, they have numerous services available right at corporate headquarters. They can visit their children at a daycare center, drop off their dry cleaning, take yoga classes, and even have their teeth cleaned. The latest service: a counselor to offer free advice on charitable giving.

Seven weeks ago, Catherine Gowen started work at Cisco, widely thought to be the first company to pay for a full-time professional to help employees with their personal giving. She is available to work with employees one-on-one to plot giving strategies and to link up like-minded employees to support the same projects.

“They are the customers here,” says Ms. Gowen, adding that anyone can walk in her door, whether he or she wishes to donate $100 or $100,000 or much more. While she now works only with employees at the San Jose office, eventually her services will be available to Cisco’s 38,000 employees worldwide.

At least two other companies are considering imitating Cisco’s approach, says Peter Hero, president of Community Foundation Silicon Valley and the person behind Cisco’s decision to provide philanthropy advice as an employee perk. Several other companies offer resources to help employees with their giving, but nothing as ambitious as an on-site counselor like Ms. Gowen.

Mr. Hero came up with the idea after he heard a financial report on Cisco’s performance, and realized that several hundred, if not a few thousand, of Cisco’s employees had probably become millionaires because of the growth in the value of the company’s stock over the past decade. A $10,000 investment in Cisco stock on February 16, 1990, the day the stock went public, would be worth $6.7-million today. Though the company won’t say how many of its employees are millionaires, observers suggest that roughly 2,000 workers are worth at least $1-million.

Mr. Hero could have waited for the newly wealthy to visit his foundation, which is just seven miles away from the Cisco headquarters, and seek advice on how to give away their money. But he knew it was far more likely that employees would get help if they could talk to somebody without ever having to leave the Cisco headquarters.

He persuaded top Cisco officials to pay for the foundation to hire Ms. Gowen, who works in Cisco’s offices four days a week. Ms. Gowen, officially an employee of the community foundation, works at Cisco as a full-time consultant. Although Ms. Gowen plans to show donors how Community Foundation Silicon Valley could serve their needs, she is under strict instructions not to promote gifts to the community foundation over donations to any other charity, and to provide as much advice as employees need for all their giving questions.

“Most of the people are young, they’ve only recently made their wealth, and to expect them to dump it into nonprofit organizations they know nothing about is just unrealistic,” says Mr. Hero. “I see our counselor as helping bridge that knowledge gap.”

A handful of Cisco employees have already visited Ms. Gowen with questions about setting up a family foundation, donating stock, and starting a scholarship program.

In addition to providing information, such as tax benefits for different types of charitable gifts, she helps match employees’ interests to nonprofit organizations.

“Employees don’t have time to do research on a cause they are interested in,” says Ms. Gowen. “I’ll do some of that leg work for them.”

John Radford, a senior director at Cisco, has already met with Ms. Gowen twice to solicit advice about grant guidelines for his new family foundation. Because his foundation has no administrative staff to conduct research on potential grantees, he needs help from Ms. Gowen finding organizations that focus on higher education, his foundation’s area of interest.

Her counseling is “certainly a benefit to me,” says Mr. Radford. “Over time as more employees get a perspective on giving, the more it will be viewed as a benefit to all employees.”

However, he recognizes that the dip in Cisco’s stock could mean that some employees will be less inclined to be charitable. The company’s earnings are up, but last week Cisco stock was trading at about $50 a share, off its high of $82 earlier in the year.

Ms. Gowen, who previously worked in the grant-making division at Hewlett Packard, plans to build an internal Web site to provide information about charities and answers to frequently asked questions about giving. She will also schedule regular speakers on topics such as managing family wealth and donor-advised funds, which allow donors to obtain a tax deduction on gifts to a community fund or similar charity, then recommend how to distribute the money.

While people in philanthropy are intrigued by Ms. Gowen’s new role, nobody expects to see giving counselors popping up in corporations nationwide, in large part because few companies have enough wealthy employees to justify the expense of a counselor. Still many are keeping an eye on Cisco to learn how best to educate workers about their personal giving.

Meanwhile, Cisco is hoping that the counselor’s presence will be a signal to employees, potential employees, customers, and many others that the corporation takes philanthropy seriously.

Cisco employees are not required to visit Ms. Gowen, but there is an unspoken expectation that those who are able to give substantially will seek advice.

John Chambers, Cisco’s president, and John Morgridge, chairman of the board, “want their employees to be generous and they want Cisco to be well-regarded in the community,” says Mr. Hero.

“But more important, they want the people who work there and have made money to have the opportunity and satisfaction of giving money back, giving time back, to not simply be accumulating wealth, but distributing it in their lifetimes.”