Microsoft's Impact Sourcing Initiative
Impact Sourcing aligns our procurement strategy with our company's mission statement, to help others achieve more. Impact sourcing is the practice of suppliers’ intentionally employing long-term unemployed, first-time employed, or informally employed individuals. As a result of this initiative, Microsoft's suppliers have created thousands of Impact Employment jobs.
Impact Sourcing remains is a highly aligned program with concrete positive impact on individuals lives.
To support the social enterprises we have active business engagements with most and as well as providing philanthropic support through Microsoft's grant program. To extend this model we 1) participated in a cross industry/function stakeholder group to develop Impact Employment metrics (https://iris.thegiin.org/impact-employment-metrics) and 2) participated in over a dozen business cases on Impact Sourcing (eg. https://gisc.bsr.org/files/BSR-GISC-Autism-Empowerment-Kit.pdf), and 3) by making commitments to engage in Impact Sourcing.
Our Impact Sourcing progress to date has been with hundreds of organizations. These include suppliers whom we have invited and engaged in many forums, associations, as well many internal groups at Microsoft. Microsoft promotes Impact Sourcing by
1) including criteria in our strategic procurements which awards points to suppliers who are completing Impact Sourcing. All other things equal, impact sourcing is a tie breaker for suppliers competing for business. We also include targeted language in some RFPs for business owners who want to include Impact Sourcing as part of their outsourcing engagement.
2) we have provided an Impact Sourcing Leadership award to the supplier who best performs Impact Sourcing in our supplier chain. See https://news.microsoft.com/2017/06/07/microsoft-recognizes-outstanding-contributions-by- suppliers-6/ for latest award.
3) Suppliers who complete Impact Sourcing at Microsoft must maintain and periodically submit a scorecard based on https://iris.thegiin.org/impact-employment-metrics. In 2017 Microsoft supported Impact Sourcing projects in 14 countries including the United States, Kenya, Uganda, and India for services such as back office work and facilities management.
Using Impact Employment metrics (https://iris.thegiin.org/impact-employment-metrics), our suppliers currently engage thousands of impact workers on behalf of Microsoft.
For a recent example, we recently worked with the GISC, our suppliers, and internal stakeholders to publish an Impact Sourcing Empowerment Kit (Autism) that purchasers can distribute to their suppliers to help empower a historically disadvantaged group (~80% unemployment globally). See http://gisc.bsr.org/files/BSR-GISC-Autism-Empowerment-Kit.pdf.
