Rachel Hutchisson, Director of Corporate Citizenship and Philanthropy, Blackbaud

CHARLESTON, SC
January 22, 2013

Blackbaud is a community of people who care, who seek to help nonprofits drive positive change in the world. Through its corporate citizenship, it strives to make a difference both through what it does as a company and how it serves as individual people, personally and professionally.

Its commitment:

• Deliver solutions that help do good   
• Govern our business ethically
• Be a caring employer   
• Steward the environment   
• Serve others through good business, volunteerism and philanthropy

Volunteerism is a huge part of Blackbaud’s culture. Every employee who serves in any way is automatically considered a part of our corporate volunteer corps. 

Team Blackbaud is an example of grassroots volunteerism. Individual people donate their time and effort to encourage other employees to get involved, experiencing first-hand the many rewards each of them receives from serving others.

We sat down to talk with Rachel Hutchisson, Blackbaud’s Director of Corporate Citizenship and Philanthropy.   

Watch the video or read the transcription below.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your role at Blackbaud?
 
Rachel Hutchisson:
I am Blackbaud’s Director of Corporate Citizenship and Philanthropy.  I am responsible for the programs and the efforts around how we do good in the world both as a company, and also how we encourage individual employees to serve. 

For Blackbaud, my title very intentionally includes both citizenship and philanthropy.  Many companies have foundations where the giving is done from a certain entity or a pool of money.  Foundations are often separate from the company.  In our case, because we work with nonprofits (we have 28,000 nonprofit customers around the world), the things that we do to help them are really a part of our DNA, part of what we do every day.  So being a good citizen, being a good donor, and serving – all these things are woven throughout what we do as a business.  We feel like we have a responsibility to give back, but we also have a passion to invest in the [non-profit] sector that is doing so much good in the world. 

LowcountryBizSC:
How do you determine how to allocate where to allocate your charitable efforts?

Rachel Hutchisson:
Some companies are top-down with their decisions regarding philanthropy.  The CEO might have a certain passion that dictates where the company gives.  In other cases, the brand is aligned with a certain kind of nonprofit.  For example, a company in the housing industry will often give to housing-related non-profits. 

For us, we do not have a system where the executives tell us where we should give.  We have a number of different programs and we also have a fund at the local Community Foundation, but through all of them, we put the employee at the center of the decision.  We have an employee committee that serves as grant makers for the fund that donates to local education grants for disadvantaged youth.  The employees are the ones making the decision about who gets the money. If one of those organizations went to our CEO and asked for money, he would point them in the direction of the employee committee. 

We also have grants that we make within the community in recognition of where employees volunteer.  So, any employee who volunteers can apply for an award or a passions grant.  The grant is them given to that non-profit in the employees’ honor. 

Those are two examples of how we are employee-centric.  Being a company like Blackbaud, we can’t just pick a cause.  That would be like picking your favorite child!

After our recent acquisition of Convio, the Austin, Texas based software company, we looked very intensely at our vision and mission for how we give back.  We decided that it was fundamentally two things.  First, we wanted to make a difference by giving back to the non-profit sector that we love and serve.  We wanted to invest in that sector as a whole.   Second, we also wanted to empower our employees and help them be leaders in the sector.   We have two different sets of programs that do that.  The employee ones are very much about honoring their service.  We have a nonprofit leadership circle where we educate people who either sit on boards, or want to sit on boards, about how to be a good board member.

In both cases, whether it’s the sector or the employee we seek to have a multiplier effect. We want to take the knowledge that we have and send it out into the sector either from a corporate perspective, or from the perspective of one of our employees. 

LowcountryBizSC:
What are you most proud of in terms of Blackbaud’s contribution to the local community?

Rachel Hutchisson:
That’s a hard question.  I often say that the easiest and least effective thing that we can do is write a check.  When I look across everything that we do, the thing that makes me most proud is all of the individual examples that I see of employees taking whatever their passion is and turning it into some kind of useful help for the sector.

LowcountryBizSC:
Should a company give away its core product as part of its giving?

Rachel Hutchisson:
It’s not for me to say whether companies should give away products or not. Tom’s Shoes is a great example of a new company where the whole model is based on – you buy a pair of shoes, and you give a pair of shoes away.   That’s a very cool model.  But companies have a reason for existence.  They are there to provide services, to meet a market demand, to be an employer, and to make money.  

We believe that Blackbaud should be a donor, a good citizen, an advocate – that is fundamental to our business.  Not every company makes that choice.   What is interesting for us is that because we only work with nonprofits, it’s a little fuzzier.  For a large tech company who has consumer and public or private sectors customers, they can give their product away to non-profits.  If we did that, we would not have a business.

We provide software and related services to nonprofit organizations.  As the philanthropy person, I do not give away software.  People often ask for free copies of things, but that is not what my role is.  This reality has forced us to be very intentional about how we want to make a difference.   We feel that the intellectual capital, the knowledge that we give into the sector is sometimes much more powerful than even the donations we make. 

There are a lot of people who work in a technology company who have knowledge that can be of enormous help to a non-profit.  Someone in HR can help an organization develop an employee policy manual.   Someone in finance can help an organization structure their general ledger or deal with receipting issues.  There is so much knowledge that it takes to run a business.  We can encourage employees to use their professional skills in a way that is not directly competitive with what we offer as a business. That’s what is called pro bono or skills-based volunteerism.  There’s a huge opportunity there.