Survey of Corporate Giving: How It Was Conducted

The Chronicle’s corporate-giving survey is based on financial information

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provided by many of the nation’s top companies as ranked according to their annual revenue by Fortune magazine.

The 150 largest of the companies that make up the Fortune 500 were asked to provide figures on their charitable giving for 1997, 1998, and 1999. Of those, 91 either filled out a Chronicle questionnaire or submitted financial information, such as annual reports or informational tax returns from the charitable foundations they support.

Because companies are not required by law to provide information on how much they give, it is hard to paint a complete portrait of corporate giving among the nation’s top businesses. Companies that are generous may be more likely to report their figures than those that are not.

The 59 companies that refused to provide information on their giving offered numerous reasons for declining to participate. Some said they were unable to because they did not have a centrally administered giving program.

Others said company policy prohibits disclosing information about their charity. Several companies said that they no longer respond to surveys because they receive so many requests for data.

In addition, some companies that had recently been involved in mergers said that the giving figures requested by The Chronicle no longer were relevant or were impossible to retrieve.

Companies that participated in the Chronicle survey were asked to include donations from the entire business, including subsidiaries, and for all gifts to domestic and foreign charities alike. Several noted, however, that they were unable to provide data from subsidiaries — particularly those based overseas — or for foreign donations.

The companies were also asked to report separately their cash and non-cash gifts. The non-cash gifts were to include donations of company products only, and were to be valued according to their fair market price, not their production cost. In some cases, companies may have included the value of other in-kind gifts, such as used office equipment or the cost of printing materials for a charity, in their non-cash-giving totals.

Even simply comparing a single company’s giving from year to year can be misleading. In some cases, a company’s philanthropy may appear to fluctuate when, in fact, an increase may be due to a company’s failure to spend its entire budget one year, so that dollars were carried forward to the following year. In other cases, a company’s giving may decrease because it made a big, multiple-year grant that it reports in its giving budget one year and not the next.

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 a percentage of income subject to federal taxes, which is not necessarily the same as their pre-tax profits. Others had wild fluctuations in profitability from year-to-year — sometimes due to business conditions and sometimes caused by the costs associated with mergers — while trying to keep charitable donations stable.

Caution should also be taken when comparing the giving records of different companies. Some do not keep track of the giving of all their divisions through their corporate headquarters, for instance, or do not collect information about product donations. Some companies reported only the money donated by their foundations and not gifts that came directly from the company.

In addition, companies support charities through a variety of means other than tax-deductible gifts of cash and products. Some companies may offer low-interest loans, for example, or give employees paid leave to volunteer. Moreover, companies may give money to non-profit groups from the company’s marketing or research divisions through deals that may help the company test a new product or gain the endorsement of a charity. These deals are not counted in a company’s charity budget.

The following are the companies that declined to provide any financial information about their philanthropy to The Chronicle:

The Chronicle’

s survey of corporate giving was conducted under the direction of Harvy Lipman, with assistance from Debra E. Blum and Kristen R. Batch.