IMPACT SOURCING PIONEER

Pioneering Impact Sourcing

In 2001, before the term “impact sourcing” was coined, Jeremy Hockenstein with a team of 10 people opened a small office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to provide digital services to its first client, Harvard University to digitize its student newspaper.

Motivated by a desire to make a difference in the lives of underserved communities in a country struggling to recover from a brutal government regime, Digital Data Divide (DDD) was born. Its mission was to support the education and computer skills training to youth help them secure meaningful jobs.

Hockenstein’s vision for the mission-driven social enterprise was conceived while he was backpacking in Cambodia where he witnessed the extreme poverty and the limited opportunities for young graduates. Then a business consultant for McKinsey, he saw the potential to train and connect these individuals with jobs in the U.S. He now serves as CEO of DDD.

“Impact sourcing wasn’t coined yet but that’s what we were doing,” recalls Sameer Raina, DDD’s Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer.

Today, DDD successfully delivers work to hundreds of international and local clients from four operations centers. DDD is currently the largest provider of socially responsible outsourcing, employing 1,500 people across Cambodia, Kenya and Laos. Since 2001, DDD’s program has increased lifetime earning for youth in three countries by a projected total of more than $300 million.

IMPACT SOURCING IN A PURCHASING ORGANIZATION

Multiplying Its Social Impact

One company can make a difference. When you take a good idea that has social benefit and extend it to suppliers in a supply chain global transformation becomes possible.

That’s what Microsoft has seen from implementing impact sourcing, a model that intentionally engages often excluded workers.  Microsoft is encouraging and rewarding its large multi-national suppliers for inclusive practices and yielding enormous business and social benefits: creating thousands of jobs and supporting impact sourcing projects in 14 countries in fiscal year 2017.

For its accomplishments and commitment to impact sourcing, Microsoft is the first GISA winner in the Purchasing Organization category, presented by IAOP and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Seeing Impact Sourcing’s Potential

Microsoft started its journey about five years ago when the company more fully learned about the then-new concept of impact sourcing through the Rockefeller Foundation. The company quickly embraced it as a model very much aligned with its corporate mission of helping individuals and businesses achieve more and began building on procurement practices it already had in place.

“Impact sourcing was a paradigm shift,” said Tim Hopper, Microsoft’s Responsible Sourcing Manager. “I was blown away by the idea of a business model intentionally hiring and doing it in a fundamentally empowering way.”

IMPACT SOURCING IN A LARGE ORGANIZATION

Making a Large Impact

People set Teleperformance apart. The provider of outsourced omnichannel customer experience management believes that giving individuals a great place to work and realize their full potential makes a difference in delivering exceptional results.

That is why its strategy has long included recruiting disabled and socioeconomically disadvantaged youth under age 26 in developing countries and providing them with training to develop the needed skills to match their clients’ needs and thrive in the company.

With this type of corporate culture, it should come as no surprise that when Teleperformance set a goal in 2014 to hire 1,000 Impact Sourcing workers a year worldwide over five years, it resoundingly exceeded those targets in just two years.

By 2016, Teleperformance surpassed its goal with over 25,000 Impact Sourcing hires in the developing countries of Egypt, India, Mexico, Morocco, Philippines and Tunisia. The company sees worldwide opportunities for Impact Sourcing.

For its work as an early adapter and champion who is making a sizable and meaningful difference, Teleperformance received the 2018 Global Impact Sourcing Award for Impact Sourcing in a Large Organization from IAOP with the Rockefeller Foundation.

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

Positively Influencing Impact Sourcing: Avasant

Back in the early 2010s there wasn’t a lexicon for impact sourcing or a definitive source to turn to learn about the potential opportunities that could be created by providing employment opportunities for vulnerable and disadvantaged workers through outsourcing.

That all changed in 2012 with the publication of a seminal paper, Incentives & Opportunities for Scaling the ‘Impact Sourcing’ Sector, written by Avasant and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Among the many findings in the report that analyzed impact sourcing opportunities in 24 countries was: “Impact Sourcing has the potential to change the socioeconomic landscape in developing regions of the world.”

Impact sourcing has indeed had a major impact on society and individuals around the world by providing meaningful employment opportunities that has a ripple effect on communities.

“We helped to define impact sourcing with the paper we wrote for the Rockefeller,” said Kevin S. Parikh, COP, Avasant’s Global CEO and Senior Partner. “Now there’s a whole ecosystem and impact sourcing service providers who specialize in hiring people in these geographies. We had an important mark on impact sourcing.”