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The largest of the IBM-Employee partnership programs is our Matching Grants Program. This program enables employees and retirees to increase the value of their donations to higher education institutions, hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, and cultural and environmental organizations with a matching gift from IBM.
The recipient organization can choose to receive their gift in the form of either cash or IBM equipment. If they choose to receive equipment, IBM will match an active employee contribution at two or three times the cash match depending on the type of organization. If the eligible institution chooses cash, the match is one-for-one. For retirees, the match for equipment is 1 or 1 1/2:1 depending on the type of organization and cash is 1/2:1.
The IBM Matching Grants Program has been enhanced for the first time to offer participating universities a selected set of solutions and services, in addition to the hardware and software products available previously. This aligns the program more closely with IBM’s strategic initiatives as a global provider of services and technology solutions.
Eligible educational institutions in the United States can use their 2005 equipment credits for the new offerings beginning in March 2006, and those that do so will receive an additional 10 percent incentive on their credit balances. The combined hardware and software offerings include Power Architecture servers with supporting software, as well as solutions for open computing, digital medical imaging and digital media content creation. Also newly available are services for site security assessments and emergency equipment acquisition, as well as onsite and virtual technical services workshops to support these new solutions. Participating universities will receive more detail on the new offerings by mail in February.
The IBM K-12 Matching Grants program is a special program that enables employees and retirees to contribute selected IBM equipment and software to eligible K-12 schools of their choice by contributing only 20 percent of the retail value, and IBM matches the rest. This program is unique among corporate Matching Grants programs both in its focus on K-12 education and in its grounding in technology.
Hundreds of educational institutions and thousands of nonprofit organizations have benefited from contributions by IBM and our employees through our Matching Grants programs. Recipients of IBM Matching Grants are a varied group that includes the Nature Conservancy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, the Metropolitan Opera, the University of North Carolina and Yale University. Reflecting our strengthened emphasis on providing our grantees with the best we have to offer — namely our technology and technical expertise — the Matching Grants program has provided an increasing portion of its contributions in IBM equipment in recent years.
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