Not many community investment professionals have the elimination of a global disease on their ‘to-do’ list, but then GlaxoSmithKline is not your average company.
First thing to note is just how big GSK is. In fact, ‘big’ does it a disservice. GSK is massive. With more than 100,000 employees and a presence in nearly 200 countries, it is the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world (a fraction behind Pfizer), and every minute, more than 1,100 prescriptions are written for one of GSK’s drugs. Its financials are as close to reading poetry as many City analysts get: total annual sales figures of £20.5bn, and a trading profit knocking in at £6.05bn. Second off, like those that scoop the lottery jackpot, the public isn’t quite sure whether it should love or hate GSK. For sufferers of diabetes, depression, or smokers desperate to kick the habit, GSK is the best thing since hot chicken soup. Yet the anticorporate script is no less certain: rich drug company + vulnerable ill people = greedy corporate giant. The headlines from the popular press can almost be left to write themselves, and sometimes they can seem pretty damning.
Given this context, what shape should corporate community involvement (CCI) take? How does a huge pharmaceutical company marry its commercial imperatives with its social and ethical responsibilities? GSK doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but if there are answers to be found, then the company is making the resources available to find them. Last year it invested more than £72m in communities. It has over 30 dedicated staff in its CCI team in a department called Global Community Partnerships.
Kicking off with the day-to-day, then, GSK’s CCI programme falls into a number of main categories: major initiatives in public health, product donations for humanitarian purposes (which, measured at wholesale acquisition cost, as is the industry standard, ran in at $28m in 2001) and more traditional community activities, such as charity partnerships and staff volunteering.
GSK is involved in three major disease programmes. Chief among these is its work to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (see box). GSK has also been working since 1992 to bring about more effective HIV prevention, education, and care for communities living with or affected by HIV/AIDS, through its Positive Action programme (http://www.gsk.com/positiveaction). Malaria is the third disease on GSK’s hit-list. The company recently committed more than £1.5m to its new African Malaria Partnership, which builds on GSK’s previous efforts to improve malaria diagnosis and treatment (http://www.gsk.com/malaria).
Product donations are managed by the GCP team, but are paid for centrally rather than out of the community budget. The donations come from a mixture of excess inventory and planned production, and GSK only gives its products to experienced voluntary partners that work within World Health Organization and Partnership for Quality Medical Donations guidelines. GCP is also responsible for a range of regional community programmes and works to identify these with guidance from representative teams from Europe, North America, International and the UK (where GSK is listed).
The approach of ‘regional representation’ ensures that GSK’s programmes are targeted at real needs in areas where the company can make a tangible difference.
In the UK, for example, GSK attempts to make the link between the company’s twin themes of health and education wherever it can. Recently launched is a £1m programme sponsored by GSK to enable researchers from Imperial College London to teach in state secondary schools. As part of its drive to encourage young people’s interest and confidence in science, GSK is also investing £300,000 over three years in support of Science Across The World, an international educational programme encouraging communication and shared learning across different cultures.
As well as investing more than £4m in medical research programmes over the last decade, GSK also makes charitable donations to medical research charities, awarding around £100,000 to five such charities over the last year. On the same theme, GSK’s annual IMPACT Awards programme celebrates the work of small charities working in the healthcare sector, awarding the top ten each year with £25,000 towards core funding – to be spent as they wish.
Global Community Partnerships is led by Justine Frain. Justine reports to the senior vice-president of corporate communications and community partnerships who, in turn, is a member of GSK’s corporate executive team. The board boasts a CSR Committee, which is chaired by the company’s new chairman, Sir Christopher Hogg, and to which Justine reports regularly on the company’s community programmes. GSK also follows what is becoming an emerging pattern in CCI management in that it now has a dedicated communications manager, responsible for both internal and external communications.
GSK is still acutely aware of the philanthropic legacies of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, although significant moves have been made to tailor its ongoing CCI activities into the new company’s overarching mission: namely, ‘to enable people to do more, feel better and live longer’. As a consequence, GCP now focuses predominantly on healthcare and education. However, an emphasis on the arts and the environment in the UK, and a range of local activities around some of GSK’s largest sites in London, Philadelphia and North Carolina, hint at the ongoing heritage of the merged partners.
Indeed, much of Justine’s work in devising a strategy for GSK’s community investment (a task which she took on in early 2001 during the merger of the two industry heavy-weights) has depended on pulling together the various strands of the two companies’ existing CCI activities and providing overall cogency. As the merged company attempts to forge a new identity for itself, CCI has emerged as a key touchstone of what constitutes the ‘spirit’ of GSK. The act of articulating the company’s commitment to the developing world in June 2001, in a report entitled Facing the Challenge, was seen as a key contribution on the road to defining this ‘spirit’. In May of this year, GSK took a further step towards communicating a cohesive approach to CCI in its first CSR review, under the title, Performance with Integrity. Here it defines the central objective of the company’s strategy: ‘to improve the quality of life of under-served people in the developing and developed world’. The distinction between the developing and developed world is a deliberate acknowledgement by GSK that its responsibilities incorporate health issues that lie well beyond its core markets. It also provides the regional teams with the flexibility to adapt the twin foci of education and healthcare to the respective needs of the communities in which they are involved. Therefore, in North America, GSK has decided to concentrate on access to health for vulnerable groups, while in Europe children’s health is the overriding theme.
What is common to all the programmes is the notion of partnership. Justine is at pains to explain why this is. The provision of suitable drugs, she argues, can only ever go so far to solving the problems of poor health, which finds its roots in a complex mix of socio-economic factors that fall to all sectors to resolve – public, private and voluntary. Hence GSK’s community programmes always involve a partner or, more often than not, multiple partners.
The principal challenge facing the GCP team is to provide a common thread between all the programmes – international, regional and local – while also giving the individual operating companies the flexibility to meet the multiplicity of different needs.
Returning to the opening point about GSK’s size, much of Justine’s job will continue to be dedicated to finding out just what the company is doing around the world in terms of CCI activities and trying to pull them together. Volunteering is a case in point. Both Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham had strong reputations for employee involvement. But, just as with the community partnerships, Justine’s objective is to provide a framework within which this culture of volunteering can be sustained and stimulated. As a result, GSK will be rolling out some international guidelines which aim to set a baseline for employee involvement around the world.
Tying together everything that GSK is involved in, Justine admits, will also require better measurement techniques. Developing systems to identify the outcomes and impacts of GSK programmes in line with the LBG (London Benchmarking Group) model, big as well as small, will help iron out those projects that GSK “does because it’s always done it like that” (the stumbling block of many a strategic CCI programme!). In addition, providing demonstrable results that link back to GSK’s overall corporate mission will help build an internal consensus around the purpose and aim of CCI – as well (again, a habitual consideration) as justifying the CCI budget to the operating divisions!
However, the hardest task facing Justine and her team will be overcoming the ambiguity of public opinion towards GSK and the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. Justine is frank. Some will never be persuaded that making profits from vaccines and drug treatments can ever be justified. But for the remainder, the key will be better communication of the benefits that pharmaceuticals bring, she argues – both through its products directly and through its voluntary community investments.
A quick search around GSK’s website reveals this attempt to engage on the questions being asked of the industry and mirrors efforts in internal communications to raise awareness of the public’s pressing concerns. And the emphasis here is on outputs – rightly so. After all, how can a company better prove its commitment than demonstrating the difference it is making? One would like to think that when the results of GSK’s campaign to eliminate one of the world’s most disfiguring and disabling diseases begin to roll in, then the anti-corporate script will be up for a re-write.
Justine Frain Vice President, Global Community Partnerships, Justine is responsible for the strategic development and management of GSK’s social investment programmes. She has worked in several areas of the business since joining Wellcome in 1988; first with the European strategic group and corporate information services, then the New Product Development group, then back to a corporate role as deputy group public relations manager. In August 1995, she was appointed head of communications strategy for Glaxo Wellcome. In this role she was responsible for corporate communications strategies on business developments, for the product communications and then also internal communications functions. She worked on the Integration Team for the GSK merger before taking up her current role.
Dr Frain has a first class honours degree in zoology from London University, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D also from London University.