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Donations & Sponsorship

Corporate giving as a reflection of corporate culture

For over a century Roche has devoted some of its resources to supporting science and a range of social causes and cultural activities. The desire to give back to our communities is an ingrained part of Roche’s corporate culture. As an innovative, research-based business, Roche seeks to support novel, sustainable projects with the potential to have a lasting impact.

Focused giving

Corporate giving at Roche is administered by Corporate Donations and Sponsorship. Seeing Roche as much a contributor of skills and competencies as a funder of projects, Roche primarily supports programmes that will benefit from an active long-term commitment on our part. Given the areas of expertise and corporate culture, Roche’s priorities are:

  • Support for science through research activities and science education
  • Humanitarian and social projects, mainly in developing countries
  • Community and environmental projects
  • Contemporary music and art

Outcomes are more important than costs

Roche’s focus is on making an impact, rather than gaining broad public recognition. This is one reason why detailed figures on corporate donations are not publicly disclosed. Roche believes the total financial amounts are neither a useful measure nor predictor of outcomes or impact, and it is difficult in any case to assign a monetary value to knowledge transfers and to product or other in-kind donations.

For the past several years Roche has collected data about the Group’s overall corporate giving, as part of our sustainability reporting process. The amounts donated and the impact the donations have produced have both increased steadily over this period – partly as a reflection of Roche’s strong business performance, but also as a result of the decision to focus on a small number of long-term projects, implemented in collaboration with trusted partners. Working this way allows us to make the best use of available resources.

Roche’s Corporate Sustainability Committee monitors the impacts of our donations. We gauge the success of our philanthropy strategy in the same way we gauge the success of our sustainability practices: using the Business Case for Sustainability model. This includes a Corporate Reporting Manual (CRM) for internal data collection, which provides guidelines for reporting donations made and helps us identify the most effective ways todescribe and measure our social contributions.

We have revised our philanthropic donations policy as a result of improved data collection and monitoring through the CRM, and we can now more closely assess the real impact programmes have, such as the number of patients treated, drugs supplied and people receiving education and training.

In 2011, 88% of all Roche donations were made to support humanitarian and social projects, 4% of donated funds were used to support basic science and education beyond business considerations, around 5% went to contemporary music and art including the Museum Tinguely in Basel, with 3% devoted to community and environmental initiatives.