When Emilio Azcárraga Jean became Chairman and CEO of Grupo Televisa in 1997, after his father, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, passed away at the age of 66, investors saw a grim future for the storied Mexican television company. Though Grupo Televisa was still the largest media empire in the Spanish-speaking world, the company was saddled with debt and high operating costs, and many observers doubted that Azcárraga Jean, then just 29 years old, could turn the ailing company around.
He proved the skeptics wrong. Within two years, Azcárraga had reshaped the company, trimming the workforce, restructuring the company’s debt, and renegotiating contracts with everyone from Univision, the biggest Spanish-language network in the United States and a principal licensee of Televisa content, to star actors on Televisa’s programs. Today, Televisa’s stock is up more than 350% over the last ten years. Azcárraga -- having solidified Televisa’s position as Mexico’s biggest broadcaster and expanded the company’s holdings into publishing, Internet, and pay-television -- is widely viewed as one of the most powerful media moguls in the world.
Azcárraga set out to change Televisa’s approach to philanthropy as well, cutting expenditures and shifting the company’s focus. In 1998, Azcárraga ruffled feathers in Mexico’s arts community by reducing Televisa’s support the Cultural Center for Contemporary Art. Though the Cultural Center had been founded by Azcárraga’s father, the junior Azcárraga decided that Televisa could no longer afford the $12 million annual stipend the company provided.
In retrospect, the decision to withdrawal Televisa’s support for the Cultural Center was also a sign that Azcárraga intended to pursue a pragmatic, results-oriented approach to philanthropy. Once Televisa was back on firm financial ground, Azcárraga approached his colleague Claudio X. González, the Chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico, who is also a director of Grupo Televisa, to help create
The Multiplier Effect of the Media and Philanthropy
Azcárraga and González set out to build a corporate foundation that used Televisa’s position as a corporate leader, business partner, and content provider to create change, leverage more resources, and shape public attitudes about the Fundación Televisa’s core issues -- education, health and nutrition, housing and the environment. “The way we try to affect change is by taking advantage of the power of the media in all its forms -- television, radio, magazines, and Internet,” Azcárraga said. As the most important media group in the Spanish-speaking world -- and one of Mexico’s most powerful corporations -- Televisa has built alliances with federal, state and municipal governments, while also using its media holdings to reach the public at large. “We create alliances that expand our resources and allow the impact of our work to have an even greater reach,” Azcárraga says.
In other words: leverage. Fundación Televisa’s annual budget is around $9 million. But González estimates that the foundation’s impact is exponentially greater, thanks largely to partnerships with other business groups, government entities, and civic organizations -- as well as the social-editorial content that emerges from the company’s TV, radio, and internet fronts. “All of that permits us to generate alliances and to make that money grow exponentially, and to reach that many more beneficiaries,” Gonzales continues. “We’re speaking about a 1-to-14 scale in that respect. Once you consider all the alliances we create through Fundación Televisa, for every peso we put up for social work, we get others to put up 14.”
Leveraging Resources Through Public/Private Partnerships
Education is a cornerstone for Fundación Televisa, and Becalos, the foundation’s scholarship program, is a good example of how Azcárraga has fused business relationships, public-sector partnerships, and mass media to multiply the foundation’s impact. Working through Televisa’s media holdings, the foundation created a series of public service announcements to highlight the challenges facing the Mexican education system. Half of primary-school students have difficulty reading, and two out of three are incapable of using mathematics properly. Meanwhile, only 60% of middle schools students advance to high school, an attrition rate due largely to financial difficulties. Just 20% of Mexican student have access to college.
Off the airwaves, Televisa formed a partnership with the Mexican Association of Bankers, the Mexican trade association whose members advertise broadly on Televisa. For four months each year, the banks give customers an opportunity to donate to the Becalos scholarship fund whenever they make an ATM transaction. “We put up the campaign, the banks put up the ATMs, and people participate very widely, knowing that education is a key priority for Mexico,” González explains. “The initial amount of money we put forward is not huge, but the accompanying campaign is very big.” González estimates that the campaign will raise more than $10 million from over 25 million Mexicans.
Working with the Ministry of Education and officials throughout the states, Becalos offers a range of scholarships. Low-income students receive scholarships to support high school and college studies. Public-sector teachers and principals receive partial scholarships for online professional development courses. Becalos also targets scholarships to some of Mexico’s most marginalized citizens -- street children, the children of migrant workers, and indigenous people. By the end of this year’s campaign, which will wind down in September, Becalos is projected to create 55,000 scholarships. Azcárraga cites Becalos as an example of how the foundation uses Televisa’s media to create alliances and uses those alliances to multiply resources in order to benefit more people.
Using Programming to Move Resources
Televisa’s use of public service announcements notwithstanding, the platform for the Becalos campaign is largely offline, through partners’ ATM networks. Elsewhere, Azcárraga has sought out opportunities where Televisa’s programming explicitly advances the foundation’s work. As Gonzales explains, “What we’ve tried to do over the years -- and we’ve had huge contributions from Emilio personally -- is to answer the question: If we have already settled on certain substantive issues to deal with, how do we bring them into our media?”
One answer was through soccer. By far the country’s biggest sport, soccer offers an avenue for educating and inspiring millions of Mexicans, and Televisa -- which owns three first division soccer clubs as well as Estadio Azteca, one of the world’s largest and grandest stadiums -- has plenty of leverage points. In 2001, Fundación Televisa and Televisa Deportes, along with the insurance company Grupo Nacional Provincial (led by the Baillères family, also member of the Global Philanthropists Circle), launched Goals for Mexico, which seeks to generate social awareness about the problems facing Mexico -- and to move resources to help address those problems. For every goal scored by any of the Mexican first division soccer teams, Fundación Televisa donates money in one of four areas: education (technology and promotion of reading), nutrition, health (organ transplant and hearing) and housing.
This lottery-style philanthropy has helped Fundación Televisa move resources and raise awareness on a broad scale. From 2001 to 2006, for instance, the Football Club America, which sponsors education and technology, scored 323 goals. And for each goal, a primary or middle school received a “media room” with computers and Internet connectivity. In total, 184,407 students benefitted. Thanks to the goals scored in 2007, 1,000 families in the states of Michoacán and Guanajuato received new houses. The 33 goals that the Nexaca team scored yielded 33 school libraries in the state of Aguascalientes. The 55 goals scored by Monterrey, Veracruz, Pachuca, and Jaguares helped 165 children get hearing aids. Since 2001, 644 Mexicans have received a cornea, kidney, or bone marrow transplant through Goals for Mexico.
Using Content to Educate and Provoke
While soccer offers a convenient platform for moving resources and piquing viewers’ interest in the causes Fundación Televisa cares about, sports broadcasting is a tough medium through which to offer an in-depth examination of issues. For that, the foundation turned to the type of program that made Televisa a household name throughout the Spanish-speaking world -- the telenovela (soap opera). Although Televisa had been producing soap operas with social content for over 30 years, González and Azcárraga felt that the issues they cared about required more consistent and nuanced treatment. And viewers needed practical ways to take action.
In 2001, the foundation launched Telenovelas con Causa (“Soap Operas with a Cause”), which weaves social problems throughout the plotlines, and intersperses public service announcements throughout the broadcast. Since then, Televisa has produced nearly 40 telenovelas dealing with issues as diverse as malnutrition, education, environmental degradation, and a myriad health issues.
A few years ago, for instance, La Madrastra, one of Televisa’s highest-rated shows, featured a plotline in which one of the main characters was diagnosed with breast cancer. In true soap opera fashion, the whole family becomes embroiled in the drama. Writers weave in conversations about diagnosis and treatment options. Just before commercial breaks, the show aired public service spots featuring the actors. “The goal of this is to help viewers understand the problem, and to turn their attention to what we can do about it.”
The foundation also tries to provide practical solutions. During the La Madrastra breast cancer series, the foundation donated a cutting-edge mammography machine to the Cancer Institute of Mexico, an $800,000 piece of equipment that is among the most advanced diagnostic devices in Latin America. “We were able to donate that, and that permits doctors to detect mammary cancer earlier than the apparatus they had before. And of course that permits us to save lives,” González says. “So we bring it full circle in the sense that we give information, then we give information on how to prevent or treat the disease and then we do something very concrete in order to help out women in the health system in Mexico.”
Expanding Philanthropy in Latin America
Having reshaped Televisa’s corporate philanthropy, Azcárraga is widely viewed throughout the Americas as a leader among next-generation philanthropists. This past March, Azcárraga served as chair of the PODER Philanthropy Forum, a gathering of business, government, and nonprofit-sector leaders from the United States and Latin America. Hosted in Miami by PODER Magazine (www.podermagazine.com), the leading publication for the business elite focusing on the U.S., Hispanic and Latin American policymaking and corporate strategy (and co-sponsored by Synergos), the forum featured sessions ranging from pop singer Ricky Martin talking about fame as a currency to create change, to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus discussing innovation in philanthropy.
The following month, Azcárraga participated in “New Partnerships for Development: Private/Public Collaboration and Philanthropy that Delivers,” a panel discussion that kicked off the 49th Inter-American Development Bank Annual Meeting. Praising the gathering as an opportunity to “improve and increase philanthropic projects and charitable giving throughout Latin America,” Azcárraga outlined his vision for philanthropy in the region. “It is my hope and expectation that the current focus on the issue of charitable giving in the region will touch the hearts and minds of our community and spur positive action and progress.”
“Mexican philanthropy is in an exciting place right now,” says Diana Campoamor, President of Hispanics in Philanthropy. “There’s a lot of capital, human and financial, and many exciting ideas out there.” The challenge, she continued, will be to balance the personal creativity that is the hallmark of many emerging philanthropists with the need to collaborate for high impact.
Emilio Azcárraga thinks donors are ready to do precisely that. “We are in the early stages of development, but philanthropy in the region is gathering momentum and dynamism,” he says. “The growth of democracy and citizenship in our counties is going in the right direction, and that means more participation. We’re seeing that very clearly in Mexico. People are starting to understand that our government will only be part of the solution, and that the private sector will be an important part of the solution as well. At Fundación Televisa, we take philanthropy very seriously, and we do it with great care. As a part of the media, we have a unique responsibility to help philanthropic and civic activity move in the right direction.”