How ‘The Chronicle’ Compiled Its Survey of Giving at Nation’s Biggest Companies

The Chronicle’s annual survey on corporate giving offers a glimpse of philanthropy at many of

the nation’s largest businesses. The survey is based on information provided by companies ranked according to their annual revenue in Fortune magazine’s annual Fortune 500.

The 150 largest companies in the Fortune 500 were asked to provide figures on their charitable giving in 2000, 2001, and 2002. Information was obtained from 99 of those companies. A company either filled out a Chronicle questionnaire or The Chronicle obtained a copy of a company foundation’s 2001 fiscal year Form 990-PF, the informational tax return that is filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

While federal law makes the foundation tax returns open to the public, businesses are not otherwise legally required to disclose details about their corporate giving. Because many companies do not provide this information to the public, it is difficult to get a complete picture of corporate giving at the nation’s top companies.

Refusal to Disclose

The 51 companies that refused to provide information offered a variety of reasons for not participating. Some companies, such as Kmart Corporation, in Troy, Mich., said that it is corporate policy not to disclose corporate-giving data. Kmart also said that because of its recent filing for protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code, it had suspended support of charitable activities. The Kmart Family Foundation has been inactive since February 2001.

AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a health-care wholesaler in Chesterbrook, Pa., said that it did not want to respond because its giving plans were not yet final. Amerisource was formed last August by the merger of two companies, only one of which had a corporate-giving program.

Other companies said that they did not have the time or resources to answer The Chronicle’s requests for data. Still other companies said they did not have a centralized giving program that could pull together information on charitable donations by the companies’ local business units.

The Chronicle survey asked companies to provide data on donations of cash and products from the entire business, including subsidiaries, and for all gifts to charities in the United States and other countries.

Unlike in past surveys, The Chronicle this year asked companies to provide information not only on products they make, but also on products they sell. Previously, retailers had not been permitted to include donations of goods they sold unless they also had manufactured those products.

Other Types of Giving

The survey may reflect only a portion of corporate charity practiced by the companies that participated. The survey does not take into account, for example, paid time off that some companies give their employees so that they may volunteer at charities, or money raised by the employees themselves. It also does not reflect donations of in-kind gifts other than products that companies manufacture or sell. For example, the Ford Motor Company, in Dearborn, Mich., donated patents worth $25.8-million to various universities.

Figures for cash giving reflect donations by corporations and corporate foundations. In the case of foundation cash giving, the survey data are for cash from grant-making corporate foundations only. Some companies may have foundations that give money, in the form of scholarships, for example, to employees and their families. That type of cash giving was excluded from the survey.

Also excluded was information on corporate support of charities through means other than tax-deductible gifts of cash or products. For example, J.P. Morgan Chase & Company, a bank in New York, offers special interest rates to community-development projects, and Citigroup, also in New York, donates financial services to nonprofit organizations.

Other companies may give money to nonprofit groups through the businesses’ marketing or research divisions, negotiating deals that may help the companies test new products or gain endorsements from charities. Those deals are not counted in the survey.

Effects of September 11

Readers should be cautious about evaluating year-to-year giving data of companies, partly because a surge in corporate donations in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks could make some companies’ 2000 and 2002 giving seem unusually low by comparison. Forty-seven companies said that because of September 11, they gave more during 2001 than they had planned.

Some companies may not have reported complete giving numbers because they could not track how much their affiliates gave. In other cases, companies may have been able to provide figures only for their corporate foundations, a problem that makes it difficult to compare one company to another.

A change in how companies report their giving budgets from one year to the next may also cause fluctuations in their data. Mergers and acquisitions can make year-to-year comparisons difficult because the new companies must reconcile data from two formerly independent giving programs.

While observers of corporate giving typically measure a company’s generosity by comparing the business’s charity budget to its profits, the formula is often not so simple. Some companies base their giving on an average of profits over several years.

Following are the companies that declined to provide any financial information about their philanthropy to The Chronicle: Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, Ill.)
Albertson’s Inc. (Boise, Idaho)
American International Group (New York)
AmerisourceBergen Corporation (Chesterbrook, Pa.)
Aquila Energy Corporation (Kansas City, Mo.)
AutoNation Inc. (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
Berkshire Hathaway (Omaha)
Best Buy (Minneapolis)
Cardinal Health Inc. (Dublin, Ohio)
ChevronTexaco Corporation (San Francisco)
Costco Wholesale Corporation (Issaquah, Wash.)
CVS Corporation (Woonsocket, R.I.)
Delphi Automotive Systems Corporation (Troy, Mich.)
Dow Chemical Company (Midland, Mich.)
E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company (Wilmington, Del.)
El Paso Corporation (Houston)
Enron Corporation (Houston)
Exelon Corporation (Chicago)
FedEx Corporation (Memphis)
Fleming Companies (Lewisville, Tex.)
Goldman Sachs Group (New York)
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (Akron, Ohio)
HCA Inc. (Nashville)
Honeywell International (Morristown, N.J.)
Ingram Micro Inc. (Santa Ana, Calif.)
Kmart Corporation (Troy, Mich.)
Lear Corporation (Southfield, Mich.)
Lehman Brothers Holdings (New York)
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company (Boston)
Loews Corporation (New York)
Marathon Oil Company (Houston)
McDonald’s Corporation (Oak Brook, Ill.)
Mirant Corporation (Atlanta)
Publix Super Markets Inc. (Lakeland, Fla.)
Qwest Communications International (Denver)
Rite Aid Corporation (Camp Hill, Pa.)
Solectron Corporation (Milpitas, Calif.)
Sun Microsystems (Palo Alto, Calif.)
Supervalu Inc. (Eden Prairie, Minn.)
Sysco Corporation (Houston)
Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund (New York)
Tech Data Corporation (Clearwater, Fla.)
TXU Corporation (Dallas)
UAL Corporation (Elk Grove Township, Ill.)
UnitedHealth Group Inc. (Minnetonka, Minn.)
U.S. Bancorp (Minneapolis)
Viacom (New York)
Visteon Corporation (Dearborn, Mich.)
Walgreen Company (Deerfield, Ill.)
Walt Disney Company (Burbank, Calif.)
Wyeth (Madison, N.J.)

The Chronicle’s survey was conducted under the direction of Martha Voelz, with help from Debra E. Blum and Marni D. Larose.