Vivint Gives Back: Vivint Smart Home
Founded in 1999, Vivint provides smart home products and services for the broad consumer market. Vivint has installed more than 28 million devices in homes throughout North America and its cloud-based smart home platform processes more than one billion events per day.
Vivint’s nonprofit foundation, Vivint Gives Back, focuses on helping families with children who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other intellectual and developmental disabilities after recognizing the profound impact of smart home technology for these families.
Of children with ASD, roughly half attempt to elope from a safe environment—a rate nearly four times higher than an unaffected sibling. According to research from the Interactive Autism Network, wandering was ranked among the most stressful ASD behaviors by parents of elopers.
A smart home system helps monitor these children’s activities and safety. With cameras, door and window sensors and other smart devices, a Vivint smart home system helps the parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities secure their homes and find greater peace of mind.
Vivint’s efforts stretch far beyond just building a program to provide low-cost smart home systems to families with children who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. To date, Vivint has raised more than $17 million and donated more than 170,000 volunteer hours to help these families.
In 2018, Vivint partnered with the NBA’s Utah Jazz to build a special sensory room at the Vivint Smart Home Arena, home of the Jazz, for children with ASD and other intellectual and developmental disabilities. Designed and built by Vivint with the help of more than 220 employee volunteers, the $60,000 sensory room is one of the most advanced in any NBA arena and provides a safe haven for children with conditions related to neurodiversity during NBA games and other loud arena events.
It features a variety of games and tools to help provide a sense of calm or stimulation, depending on individual needs, including state-of-the-art multisensory stations, play therapy stations and activity panels. It also includes technology stations featuring Apple iPads and provides relaxing spaces for children and their families, including quiet cubbies that allow for alone time. In total, Vivint and its employees have helped build nearly 75 sensory rooms worldwide. Hundreds of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities have used the sensory room since it opened in April 2018. Many of these children would have been unable to attend arena events, such as NBA games, other sporting events and concerts if the sensory room did not exist.
Vivint and its employees contributed more than $325,000 to the National Autism Association (NAA), the Spectrum Academy and other organizations in support of helping children with ASD, and nearly $100,000 to the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics (FAST) to help improve the lives of children living with the genetic disorder, which causes developmental disabilities and nerve-related symptoms.
In honor of Autism Awareness Month in April 2018, Vivint gave away four complete smart home systems plus five years of 24/7 service and monitoring—valued at $22,000—to families with children affected by ASD. Vivint also subsidized much of the cost to install and service more than 580 additional smart home systems throughout the year for families with children who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. The Vivint Gives Back discount program helped families save an average of approximately $450 on a smart home system and monitoring in 2018.
Vivint employees have embraced Vivint Gives Back and its mission—in 2018 alone, employees volunteered more than 18,000 service hours and raised more than $1.3 million. In the company’s 2018 employee engagement survey, employees ranked “we give back” as the Vivint corporate value they were most satisfied with. The program played a vital role in Forbes naming Vivint one of “America’s Best Employers” in 2015 and 2018, and in Utah Business magazine naming Vivint one of Utah’s “Best Companies to Work For” in 2019.