HPE’s 2022 Accelerating Impact Campaign – Supporting Tech Non-profits in Challenging Times

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Fred Tan is the Deputy Director of the HPE Foundation, leads HPE’s global social impact strategy, and has the honor of running the annual Accelerating Impact campaign. After wrapping up the 2022 Accelerating Impact campaign, he shared more about social impact at HPE. 

What is HPE’s Accelerating Impact campaign, and how is it unique? 

Accelerating Impact is HPE’s annual employee-driven campaign that funds a portfolio of specially curated and supported technology non-profits through the HPE Foundation. Each year, every HPE team member receives US$25 that they can donate to one of the many tech non-profits listed within the Accelerating Impact campaign. We know from team member feedback that our people want to be able to easily support non-profits that align to a purpose they personally connect with. So, we’ve designed our Accelerating Impact campaign to offer a broad selection of tech non-profits that tackle a wide range of issues. It’s something really unique not just within the tech industry, but within the field of corporate philanthropy as well.  

By democratizing how capital is allocated through the Accelerating Impact campaign, HPE gives our team members the ability to determine which causes and communities to direct HPE Foundation funding toward. This model allows us to build trust with our team members, the non-profits we serve, and the communities we operate in.   

We have also taken care to consider diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the design of our Accelerating Impact campaign, and we are proud to support an incredibly diverse group of nonprofits; 63% of the tech non-profits listed are women-led and 53% have a leader who identifies as part of an underrepresented group. 

How successful was this year’s HPE Accelerating Impact campaign? 

This year, over 32,000 team members helped direct a record US$1,283,825 toward our non-profit partners, making 2022 our most successful campaign ever. More than half of our global workforce participated in the campaign, a strong showcase of their engagement in HPE’s mission to be a force for good. These contributions will impact millions of lives around the world.   

Why is HPE Accelerating Impact personally important to you? 

Tech non-profits have bottlenecks that HPE has the power to help address. Non-profits are locked out of many funding methods, like venture capital, and often struggle to build their organization traditionally. These challenges are especially felt by the underrepresented founders that we support. HPE team members can direct funding to support the development of non-profits that are tackling important issues in their communities that might otherwise go unnoticed.  

For example, WattTime is one of our non-profit partners – they offer technology solutions that achieve emissions reductions without impacting cost, comfort, or function. Clean energy technologies have a high barrier to entry because fossil fuels already exist, so support from HPE team members is incredibly valuable for green tech. WattTime is also a cofounder of the global Climate TRACE coalition, which harnesses remote sensing and software intelligence to monitor human-caused greenhouse gas emissions in near real time, bringing transparency and accessibility to global emissions data. Climate Trace was recently profiled in The New York Times and ranked fifth on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2022.  

Why has it been important for HPE to partner with an accelerator for the Accelerating Impact campaign?  

We partner with the accelerator Fast Forward to invest in non-profit organizations that use technology to accelerate social impact because they have deep specialization and expertise in facilitating giving programs, and also provide training, support, and resources to help selected non-profits succeed by helping them to scale. It was important for the HPE Foundation to align ourselves with non-profit organization experts to advance our social impact mission. 

Our team members work with Fast Forward to mentor and volunteer with tech nonprofits year-round, and our HPE Accelerating Impact campaign takes our community engagement work to a deeper level. 

To find out more about the HPE approach, programs, and our progress on the environmental, social, and governance issues most significant to our business, check out HPE’s Living Progress Report.