Aspiration...

A 2003 audit at Pfizer's site in Sandwich, Kent had revealed a lack of strategic direction and coordination in the company's various community investment activities.

Pfizer wanted to bring together these activities into a single programme with a unified strategy, aligned behind select business priorities.

...into Action

CCWorks audited Pfizer's community investment through internal reviews and external benchmarking, and identified several crucial strategic gaps. A new CCI strategy began to take shape that would be aligned behind three key areas: Health, community and education.

Despite its status as a major healthcare company, only 16% of Pfizer's grants were going to health-related causes. CCWorks helped Pfizer to design a new two-year grants strategy, a major part of which would be to increase that allocation threefold.

The second strategic element focused on Pfizer's local East Kent community – one of the UK's most deprived regions. A significant proportion of grants were also going outside the area, and a new target was set for 90% to benefit this immediate community in future.

Staff volunteering activity was then aligned behind the same community goals. We contacted all local organisations that had asked Pfizer for funding or assistance in the previous three years, and helped them create volunteering activities most suited to Pfizer employees' skillsets. In the process, we sourced 300 new local opportunities for volunteering.

Since it was important to keep day-to-day administration to a minimum, CCWorks helped develop an integrated work process that enabled staff to obtain approval from their manager, interact with the voluntary organisation and record their efforts with the minimum of in-house bureaucracy. An online database, created and continuously managed by CCWorks, was integrated into the Pfizer intranet and allowed employees to search local volunteering opportunities. As a bespoke software, we could tailor it to match volunteering activities to staff development plans and to track employees' involvement and post-volunteering feedback.

In 2005, we helped the organisation align all of its community investment activities behind the same strategic goals, under the banner "Healthy Communities." The award-winning project "Helping @ Hartsdown" – which involved corporate donations, gifts-in-kind, and 100 staff and contractor volunteers to renovate classrooms at a local school – exemplified how all of Pfizer's community investment activity had now become both integrated and aligned behind a common strategic purpose.

Outcome

The "Healthy Communities" programme won a prestigious "National Example of Excellence Award" from Business in the Community in 2006.

The targets to allocate grants in greater proportions to health-related projects and the local Kent community have now been met.

In only its first year, nearly one in 10 staff members actively took part in the "Reaching Out" volunteering programme – representing a total of 4,800 volunteering hours for the company.  Just one year later, a staff survey revealed that 20% felt they had improved their personal skills through their involvement with the programme, and 55% said it was "focused and effective".