Philanthropy as a Business- Google's Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility is becoming exceedingly popular and important for companies. It is an easy way to get in the media's good light, and many companies are tapping into this opportunity. Personally, I find it a lot easier to get a press release published if there is a "good-deed" attached. One company that I am marveled by in all aspects is Google. From various class projects my knowledge of Googles history and company structure has grown drastically. Before I begin on explaining the gist of their Social Responsibility, a brief history may be in order. For a typical Social Responsibility paper, the length of my history below wouldn't be so long but I find Google's history to be very interesting.

History:

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page and Brin met at Stanford University as Computer Science grad students. According to the google timeline Brin showed Page around on his college Visit. In 1996 the two created a search engine called BackRub. After a year the campus server's bandwidth was not cable of handing the search engine. 1997 was when the name Google was born from "googol" the mathematical term meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros. After securing 100,000 dollars in funding, Google sets up shop in Susan Wojcicki's garage. Craig Silverstein was their first hired employee. By December 1998 Google was recognized as a search engine of choice in the top 100 Websites. From there, Google exploded with almost every year marking a new product or feature being created.

Google's mantra is "don't do evil" and they try to apply that to every aspect of their business. Their Philosophy includes ten things :

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well
3. Fast is better than slow
4. Democracy on the Web works
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. You can make money without doing evil
7. There's always more information out there
8. The need for information crosses all borders
9. You can be serious without a suit
10. Great just isn't good enough

Perhaps Social Responsibility doesn't have to always be a separate entity of a company. I think Google does a great job of incorporating it into its daily business practices.

Google.org:

In 2005 Google created the Google Foundation which was managed by google.org. It took 10% of the 3 million shares of google to fund the foundation. Larry Brilliant headed up the google.org project but has since then become the Chief Philanthropy Evangelist. Megan Smith now manages google.org along with her other duties as V.P. of new business development. Google.org focuses on:

• Helping develop cheap clean energy
• Finding and fighting disease out breaks before they sweep the globe
• Inform and Empower

Google not only contributed money to google.org but it also contributed man power. Its original goal in 2004 was to donate 1 % of equity and profits in some form and also to donate employee time. One thing that Google does in it's Social Responsibility venture that is different is that they also invest in for profit companies that advocate for policies that follow Googles. This has raised eyebrows on whether this can be considered truly philanthropic. Google believes in approaching philanthropy like a business and tapping into the resources and strengths that Google has, its employees, products and technologies. One of these for-profit ventures is clean energy, this is considered philanthropic because it will benefit the greater good.

Dr. Larry Brilliant said, "... our greatest impact has come when we've attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google's strength in technology and information."

The five initiatives that Google will focus on in the next five to ten years are:

• Predict and Prevent - to predict eco and social crisis like infection disease outbreaks like the flu by spreading the information of the outbreak quickly and effectively
• Inform and Empower - improve public services of communication in undeserved areas
• SME’s - investing in small and medium sized enterprises
• RE - help combat greenhouse gas damage by developing renewable electrical energy
• RechargeIT - reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, stabilize the electrical grid by supporting companies that feature things such as hybrids

According to this article, thus far Google.org and Google Foundation have committed more than 75 million dollars in grants and investments.

Some interesting things to look at that Google has done are here:

• http://www.google.org/projects.html
  http://www.project10tothe100.com/