Create a Corporate Giving Program
A good giving program can support your business and marketing strategies. Many companies give to their communities because it is simply the right thing to do. Most are in fact motivated to give by a variety of factors.
 CHARITABLE GIVING EQUALS WEST VIRGINIA TAX CREDITS
West Virginia offers special tax credits—much more powerful than deductions —through its West Virginia Charitable Gift Tax Credit: Neighborhood Investment Program. Find out more about this opportunity and a listing of charities qualified to award such credits. |
The bottom-line benefits of giving are far-ranging and include:
- Healthier, more livable, and economically stronger communities
- Competitive advantage in attracting and retaining employees
- Closer relationships with community leaders and officials
- Greater customer loyalty
- Increased positive name recognition and brand awareness
- Leadership development opportunities for employees
- Enhanced reputation and standing in the community
- Beneficial business-to-business relationships with nonprofits
- A reservoir of goodwill within the community that can serve a company in a time of crisis
- Improved internal communications and sense of common purpose
- Exposure of staff to new ideas, points of view, and important social movements
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Special thanks to content provided by Alabama
Giving, a program supported by New Ventures in Philanthropy. |
PROS AND CONS OF CREATING A CORPORATE FOUNDATION
A summary of information many executives provided in answer to the
following question posed by Jane Ellen of Rochester Grantmakers
Forum provides a good look at both the pros and cons of creating
a corporate foundation.
What are the pros and cons for having a corporation set up a foundation in addition to or rather than doing thoughtful corporate giving?
Pros: They can pay matching gifts out of the foundation
and won't have to follow up for acknowledgments from nonprofits
for IRS purposes. A company-sponsored foundation can in some cases
(depending on how it's set up) insulate management from criticism
about funding decisions. For IBM, which has both a foundation and
a corporate giving program, the foundation money was used exclusively
for IBM's support of public education reform initiatives. Corporate
giving programs throughout IBM's major sites allowed local management
to make the decision as to what was right for their communities
and their own public relations needs. So the corporate program gave
them much more flexibility and did not require the strict adherence
to a specific giving strategy.
Having both is ideal where there are several sites. A corporate
giving program is much more flexible, and can be changed at the
management's whim in terms of what to fund and to what extent.
Cons: There is no privacy and the corporation
is subject to the private foundation disclosure laws. Also there
is no ability to co-mingle marketing and philanthropy dollars giving
the corporation much less flexibility in its giving.
The rules and regulations on private foundations.
Corporate foundations are subject to pay out, public disclosure
and self-dealing rules and other rules that all private foundations
are bound by. The self-dealing especially can be problematic for
corporate foundations. If for example a corporate foundation buys
a table at a charity fund raising event it cannot send corporate
employees to sit at the table without technically violating the
self-dealing rules. These kinds of situations can be handled by
having the corporation buy the table, not the foundation.
The hassles associated with setting up and maintaining any kind
of private foundation: filing incorporation papers, keeping records,
filing 990PFs etc. There's no reason, however, why a company-sponsored
"foundation" can't take the form of a donor-advised fund at the
local community foundation (or other public charity).
The Polaroid Foundation, for example, is really a component fund
of the Boston Foundation. A corporate foundation must have its own bylaws, dedicated staff, regular grant cycles, giving guidelines and mission, and must also follow the 5% pay out rule required of private foundations. A corporate foundation's grant making is limited to 501(c)(3) organizations.
Thoughtful corporate giving, however, has greater flexibility it is gift giving, since it is a marketing or promotion type of expense.
Learn more:
Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy
140 East 45th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10017
(212) 622-1081
www.corphilanthropy.org
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