On Monday, we published the Microsoft 2014 Citizenship Report. Microsoft’s citizenship commitments, to serve our communities and fulfill our responsibilities to the public, are based on our core belief that these commitments and actions contribute long-term value to society and to our business. As a reflection of that belief, we publish the Microsoft Citizenship Report each year at the same time as our Annual Report.

During fiscal year 2014, Microsoft made strong progress across the broad range of our citizenship commitments, including, for the first time, surpassing $1 billion in total company annual giving.

Highlights from the Microsoft 2014 Citizenship Report include:

We advanced our three-year commitment to create opportunities for 300 million youth by 2015 under the Microsoft YouthSpark has created education, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for 227 million youth since launch, including 124 million in fiscal year 2014.

We expanded our work to help nonprofits do more good with technology by donating software and hardware to more than 86,000 nonprofits around the globe. This includes the donation of Office 365 Nonprofits to 11,500 nonprofits in 74 countries.

For the third year in a row, our employees and our company match program contributed more than $100 million to nonprofits worldwide.

We took new steps to meet our longstanding commitment to ensuring the privacy and security of our customers’ data, including expanding our use of encryption across our services, providing choice and transparency on data location, and strengthening legal protections for customers’ privacy.

We built on our industry-leading carbon neutrality program with expanded investments in renewable energy to power our cloud services by purchasing more than three billion kilowatt hours of green power, equal to 100 percent of our global electricity use.

As described more fully in the report, these and other citizenship initiatives and results underscore our commitment to operate our business in ways that meet the highest standards of corporate social responsibility. They also reflect the dedication of our employees, who every day strive to create technology to help others do more and achieve more in their lives.

We recognize that there is always more that we can do, and we welcome ongoing feedback from our many stakeholders around the world. Please let us know your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you.

Tags: citizenship, Lori Forte Harnick, YouthSpark