Strategic vision, inspiring leadership and down-to-earth problem solving—these are the traits of most wildly successful entrepreneurs. When such entrepreneurs turn to philanthropy, their philosophy is much the same: a visionary and strategic approach to solving problems and improving communities.

Entrepreneurs don’t just want to write a check to a cash-strapped charity. They give with an aim to achieve specific goals. Alms for the poor? Perhaps—but it’s more likely to be educational opportunities and job training for the poor.

A Cycle of Prosperity

Entrepreneur Alan Hall fully inhabits this model of giving. He achieved massive success with MarketStar, the marketing and sales company he founded in 1988. The company caters to technology companies in more than 70 countries and generates billions in sales each year.

When Hall began reaping financial rewards from his company, he wanted to do more than “give back.” First and foremost, he wanted to help others achieve his same level of success. And he wanted to bolster the Ogden community he calls home.

“It wasn’t about me making money for myself,” says Hall. “When you have a great surplus, that surplus should be used to bless the lives of people who have significant needs. That’s been my personal and business philosophy all of my life and even today, the money we make we don’t keep—we give it back to charitable organizations.”

Hall discovered the great need in the world when he served an LDS mission in Guatemala. And later, he and his wife, Jeanne, spent their first year of marriage serving in the Peace Corps in Brazil. There, the young couple experienced a life of poverty first hand; they also discovered the joy of service.

As a successful businessman, Hall wanted to share the secrets of his success with a new generation of entrepreneurs. He founded Grow Utah Ventures to give a hand up to early-stage businesses by providing business resources and mentoring, as well as funding through local venture capital groups.

“If I can help an entrepreneur grow a business so they can have something like a MarketStar in their life and employ thousands of people—that’s a great thing to happen in a community,” says Hall.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg for Hall’s community involvement. He is chairman of the Utah Technology Council, a board member for the Utah Symphony Opera, vice-chair of the Weber State University Board of Trustees and a trustee for the Intermountain Healthcare Foundation. He has also chaired several capital campaigns for educational and nonprofit organizations in the Weber area, most recently chairing the $9 million capital campaign for Ogden High School.

In 1999, he and his wife formed the Alan and Jeanne Hall Foundation to primarily improve the lives of low-income residents in Weber County. The foundation awards grants to organizations that address access to health care, quality education, employment and safe housing, among other priorities.

“We are residents here and we see there is a great need,” says Hall. “A lot of people in our community go without meals, struggle with health conditions and don’t have the benefit of education.”

His ultimate goal with giving is to improve and enrich lives, creating a cycle of prosperity that will benefit generations of Utahns.

As he mentors up-and-coming entrepreneurs, Hall tries to instill in them his same philosophy of giving. “At the end of the day, I want you to repeat what I’m doing—I want you to make money for the purpose of helping others,” Hall tells young entrepreneurs. “They understand that we want them to use their money wisely and not keep it to themselves.”

Smart Philanthropy

The Community Foundation of Utah wants to tap into this pool of ambitious and generous entrepreneurs. The foundation’s mission is “to harness Utah’s entrepreneurial spirit in service to the common good through smart philanthropy.”

“We have a real history of founding impactful businesses in the state,” says Fraser Nelson, executive director of the foundation. “If I could get all these smart people to engage their ‘giving minds’—their intellectual capital as well as their financial capital—we could really be a catalyst for innovation in the nonprofit sector.”

To that end, the foundation is experimenting with strategies to get business leaders thinking about complex social problems. The foundation initially held separate focus groups with business people and with nonprofit executives. Nelson discovered some resistance to getting involved in the nonprofit world.

“They said, ‘I don’t want to sit on a board of trustees; I don’t want to sit in meetings; I don’t want to attend a gala and wear a black tie,’” she recounts.

To bring these two worlds together, the foundation held a “speed mentoring” event and invited about 70 “phenomenally successful entrepreneurs” and a similar number of nonprofit executives.

The businesspeople sat at tables with signs stating their area of expertise, such as marketing, finance or social networking. They met with nonprofit executives for five minutes each, and the discussion was limited to these questions: What is the social problem? How are you organized to solve it? Where are you stuck?

According to Nelson, the nonprofits came away with numerous ideas. “Their heads were spinning. They got so many phenomenal ideas; people looked at their issues in completely new ways.”

And many of the entrepreneurs discovered a passion for nonprofit work—and a new appreciation for the complexity of social problems like homelessness or high-school dropout rates.

The foundation is planning to build on this experience with a “social innovation” competition that will have panels of entrepreneurs competing to solve complex but common problems that nonprofits deal with—for example, how to attract a younger generation of donors or supporters.

“It will be a way for the expertise we have in this community to be engaged in a new way for the social good,” says Nelson.

As entrepreneurs become engaged with nonprofits and the state’s critical issues, many of them find they are more willing to get involved on boards or through contributing their knowledge and skills.

“Half an hour of an entrepreneur’s time is worth so much more than a $100 check,” Nelson points out.

Profit with a Purpose

The philosophy of the Community Foundation of Utah resonated deeply for Phil Hansen, CEO of CLEARLINK. The marketing company that focuses on technology-driven customer acquisitions, was the primary sponsor of the foundation’s speed mentoring event and sent its chief marketing officer to participate.

But Hansen had already experimented with ways to achieve impactful philanthropy through CLEARLINK. The company launched an internal campaign for employees, enabling them to get involved in the community and focus on their own wellness. The CLEARLINK Cares campaign quickly expanded to benefit the entire community.

“We’ve given to schools, individuals, local and international programs—kind of finding what we like to do,” says Hansen.

But the company had a hard time quantifying the payoff.

“As a marketing company, we do a lot of research. At the end of 2009, we looked at what we learned from some of these contributions—what went well, what didn’t—and we weren’t able to tell if we were making a difference with the time and money we were donating,” he says.

So Hansen and his executive team decided to re-focus their corporate giving back onto their own employees.

“A lot of our employees were struggling with the same health issues, the same family issues, the same financial issues as the recipients of our giving,” says Hansen. “So it made more sense to donate internally first.”

CLEARLINK’s new program is informally called “Purpose for Our Profit” and it allows employees to focus on three areas: personal well being, valuable relationships and unique experiences. Hansen sums it up as “feeling good about yourself and doing things you like with people you love.”

The company sends employees on vacations abroad, brings in experts to teach seminars on various topics and pays for health club memberships, among many other things.

“We literally created a double bottom line and our CFO is tracking these things so we can really see the benefit of what we’re doing,” explains Hansen.

The spirit of caring and giving has infiltrated the entire company, and employees have begun looking for ways to get involved in the community themselves. Some of them are still involved in the local organizations that CLEARLINK has contributed to, like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Utah Food Bank. Others have been brainstorming about ways to subsidize a local teacher’s pay for a year.

“When a lot’s been given to you, you give a lot,” Hansen says. And he can’t keep his own thoughts from creating a larger impact on the community. The company is a few months away from launching a new nonprofit that will support new entrepreneurs and startups.

“It’s about giving time and talent and resources to people [in ways their banks] would not normally fund them,” says Hansen. “It’s funding people and ideas and small businesses in a very unique way.”

Building a Solid Foundation

Nurturing the state’s business environment is a common theme for Utah’s entrepreneurial philanthropists. Gary Crocker, chairman of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, focuses on the scientific community that he says provides a foundation for wealth generation and job creation in Utah.

Crocker founded Research Medical in 1983, and the company became the largest manufacturer of open-heart surgery catheters. The company was sold in 1997 for $235 million.

But Crocker does not take full credit for his extraordinary success. “There is no such thing as a self-made man,” he says. “That company would not have been possible—no matter how clever I was—without the opportunity to live in a society that already had a critical mass of life science engineers and other experts. No entrepreneur functions in a vacuum.”

Crocker has been a co-founder or primary investor in several life-science companies. He also served as chair of ARUP Laboratories for five years. He has also been involved in the University of Utah’s (U of U) science programs for many years, serving as a trustee and as a member of both the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics Board of Trustees and University of Utah Research Foundation Board. His financial contributions to the University include funding the Crocker Science House and the Crocker Science Internship Scholarship. Most recently, Crocker announced a $10 million gift to the U of U College of Science to help renovate the historic building that currently houses the Utah Museum of Natural History. Once renovated, the building will house the College of Science, providing a state-of-the-art center for teaching and research.

“The State of Utah needs to protect the fragile competitive advantage we have in the College of Science,” says Crocker, who notes the college’s current facilities have become antiquated and run down.

Once housed in the Crocker Science Center, the College of Science will have up-to-date classrooms and labs. “It will also feature spin-out incubator space so technologies can have a bridge to commercialization built into the academic environment,” he says. Crocker chairs the College of Science external advisory board, and he is pleased that the college’s new facility will carry his name. “To be affiliated that closely with one of the top 10 undergraduate science programs in the country is a real honor and is a perfect fit for the life-science career that I’ve pursued,” he says. “Without the folks who are educated and prepared for the life-science industry in that kind of college, the companies that I’ve helped to found would not be possible.”

However, it’s not all about science and startups for Crocker. He is also using his sharp business sense to propel the mission of a local nonprofit that serves abandoned and abused youth.

“The Utah Youth Village provides a place of shelter, retraining and safety for children who have been abandoned by their families or who were so extremely abused and traumatized that state agencies can’t really deal with them,” says Crocker.

He has been involved with the Utah Youth Village for more than 15 years, much of that time as its chairman. “Most nonprofits are in this very difficult situation of always having to go hand-to-mouth for funding—always having to plead for more money,” he says. “That cycle doesn’t provide a solid foundation for growth or predictability.”

Crocker proposed the idea of providing the same “family teaching model” to the dysfunctional children of wealthy families for a substantial fee. The income generated by this for-profit enterprise would then support the nonprofit services provided by the Utah Youth Village.

“We created an internal funding mechanism, which is a very non-charitable culture thing to do,” he says.

And it’s just this intersection of entrepreneurialism and philanthropy that is helping to transform lives and reshape Utah’s future.