Social Impact Investments
Purpose. Partnership. Impact.
Together, Cisco Social Impact Investments and the Cisco Foundation aim to catalyze a vibrant ecosystem of changemakers working to positively impact people and communities around the world.
Our vision
A world of equitable, resilient, and empowered communities where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential and thrive
Our mission
We partner with organizations to create and scale innovative, digital solutions that promote a healthy planet and advance the well-being and self-reliance of underserved communities globally.
We accomplish this by harnessing the breadth of Cisco’s offerings of strategic guidance, catalytic funding, technology donations, and support from Cisco’s employee community.
How we invest in our global partners
Cisco's Social Impact Investment strategy is unique. We are intentional about investing in potential. We focus on getting in early - providing critical seed funding to promising nonprofits. As a technology company with a long history of innovation, we aim to fill a critical gap in funding by:
- Assuming the greater risks of investing in high-potential, unproven ideas and solutions. We provide funding for ideation, innovation, and experimentation to create tech-enabled, tech-delivered solutions.
- Providing ongoing support to help our partners test and validate those solutions. And then to replicate those solutions to multiple geographies, scale reach to more people, and drive deep impact
- Selecting client-centric, proximate partners who work hand-in-hand with the communities they support
All underpinned by donations of our technology, capacity building support, and more. We put this investment model to work in executing against Cisco’s 1 billion lives positively impacted goal - which we surpassed, a full year ahead of schedule.
Investment model
We provide patient and catalytic capital to high potential organizations, investing in tech-enabled solutions for impact at scale.
Stage 1: Create and Design
Stage 2: Deploy and Test
Stage 3: Replicate and Scale
Stage 4: Achieve Viability and Exit
Diversified investment portfolio: Entry point for initial investment is early-stage ideation, but our investment portfolio is distributed across all stages of investment to balance risk.
Priority social impact sectors
We invest along a continuum of global and local needs, prioritizing four social impact sectors:
- Crisis Response/Critical Human Needs: Mobilizing to provide essentials to communities in need and those in crisis, including food, housing, secure connectivity, and disaster relief
- Education: Supporting students, teachers, and schools by increasing engagement, building skills, promoting subject mastery, and expanding their capacity to thrive
- Economic empowerment: Transforming communities through skill development, long-term career opportunities, entrepreneurship, and access to financial products and services
- Climate regeneration: Building an inclusive, regenerative, and resilient climate future through education, regenerative agriculture, conservation/protection, and clean energy solutions (through Cisco Foundation climate commitment)
Who we fund
We fund high potential organizations that have the capacity to deliver solutions addressing key societal and environmental challenges, and where we can add significant value.
Our selection criteria include:
- Social impact sectors: Fit within one or more of our priority social impact sectors: crisis/critical human needs, education, economic empowerment, and climate regeneration.
- Technology: We direct funding toward solutions that apply technology to deliver programs and services, and/or support organizational insights and operations - to connect the unconnected and close the digital and data divide.
- Replication: We look for solutions that can be replicated beyond the initial geography in which they are developed and implemented.
- Scale: We aim to support solutions that have potential for scale.
- Impact: We fund organizations that have a commitment to tracking progress, validating impact, and reporting transparently.
- Market demonstration and ecosystem impact: We look to support solutions that demonstrate market potential and/or will have result in ecosystems level impact.
- Organizational capacity and proximity: We look for organizations with strong management capacity, inclusive teams, and that are proximate to the communities they are supporting.
- Viability: We aim to support organizations and solutions that can be financially viable, and to ensure sustained impact beyond our lifecycle of engagement.
Our offerings
Catalytic funding: Our unique investment model is designed to fill a critical gap in funding for high-potential organizations – identifying those with early-stage, tech-enabled solutions that we believe have the potential to scale exponentially and deliver extraordinary impact across our four priority social impact sectors.
We provide early-stage, seed-level funding to high potential organizations to design, create, test, and scale technology enabled and delivered solutions that can result in deep impact.
Grants and impact investments
- Global Impact Grants (GIG): Funding to non-profits leveraging technology to deliver programs and opportunities that can be replicated and scaled at a country, regional, and/or global level. Learn how to apply.
- Regional Solution Grants (RSG): Funding to non-profits leveraging technology to deliver programs and opportunities within a specific community or country. (By invitation only)
- Habitat for Humanity grants: providing support to build homes for families in need around the world. (By invitation only)
- Impact investments for climate solutions: funding investments in early-stage climate companies, from Pre-Seed to Series A, in support of our $100M climate commitment. Explore climate investments.
To learn more about our grantee partnerships, meet our current partners and then explore blogs on their impactful work.
Cisco’s Technology Grant Program (TGP)
We also offer strategic and technical advisory services from Cisco’s global employee community. These pro-bono consulting services support our partners across a range of areas, from solution design and testing, to security, governance, strategy, organization structure, marketing, and more. Advisory services are provided via both 1:1 consulting and by teams.
Employee volunteerism
Employees may also volunteer their time for individual and group volunteering as needed.
Our impact
Measuring progress and validating impact are core to what we do – to measure success, inform our own work, and support our partners.
We work collaboratively with our partners to jointly establish key performance indicators and associated targets; support data collection, analysis, and validation; and provide advisory services and other support to enhance impact evaluation capabilities.
Together, we track various levels of impact including individual impact, community/ecosystem impact, and organization impact including:
- Social impact on individuals, communities, and ecosystems for each of our priority social impact sectors.
- Replication of solutions beyond initial geography
- Scale of reach and engagement
- Financial viability and additional funding secured
In 2016, Cisco set an ambitious goal to positively impact 1 billion people around the world through our Networking Academy initiative and Global Impact Grant program. In December 2023, we were thrilled to share that we exceeded our goal – more than a year earlier. Learn more about how we impacted one billion lives.
Nonprofit partner impact updates
Power an inclusive future for all
We pursue our purpose by closing the digital divide, empowering the future of work, fighting for equality and social justice, and building a regenerative planet.