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Guardian sustainable business ... Values-led business ... Rifles for a four-year-old: when corporate donations go bad

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Guardian sustainable business Values-led business Rifles for a four-year-old: when corporate donations go bad Corporate donations have never been more popular, but some companies still struggle to align philanthropy with social responsibility gun with engraving get well grayson on butt When corporate donations go wrong: a gun manufacturer produced guns with ‘Get Well Grayson’ engraved on the butt. Photograph: PRNewsFoto/Henry Repeating Arms Sponsored by: About this content Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt Monday 20 October 2014 11.49 EDT Last modified on Friday 24 October 2014 04.06 EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Shares 530 Comments 31

In early September, rifle manufacturer Henry Repeating Arms created 100 custom rifles featuring an engraved sunflower and the words “Get Well Grayson” in cursive script on the butt. The proceeds from the rifle were donated to Grayson Sutton, a four-year old from Sedan Kansas, battling primary pulmonary hypertension.

About a week later, alcoholic beverage company Diageo, which owns brands Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Tanqueray and Guinness, among many others, donated 34,560 bottles of water – “enough to fill a semi-truck”, as the company proudly proclaimed in a press release about the donation – to the residents of Tulare County, one of the areas hardest hit by California’s drought. A month earlier, an investigative piece in Mother Jones magazine had revealed that most bottled water in the United States comes from drought-ridden California, where Arrowhead and Crystal Geyser are soaking up groundwater, and Aquafina and Dasani are filtering and bottling municipal tap water.

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As October rolls around, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the US, the inevitable annual pinkwashing is in full swing. While people are still talking about the ill-conceived Kentucky Fried Chicken pink bucket from a few years ago, there are plenty of more recent examples of wrong-headed pink-ribbon campaigns.

To name just a few: Baker Hughes is producing and selling hot pink fracking drill bits, for which it donated $100,000 to breast cancer charity Susan G Komen. Alhambra water is selling pink-ribbon-labeled plastic polycarbonate water bottles that contain bisphenol-A (BPA), an endocrine-disrupting chemical that has been linked to various hormonal cancers, including breast cancer. In 2012, the Susan G Komen Foundation declined a donation from Pornhub.com which had raised one cent for every boob video viewed on the site, but this year the foundation will be receiving funds from sales of pink-bordered Nascar shirts that encourage people to “check their headlights”.

The NFL, as it deals with accusations of protecting perpetrators of domestic abuse, has rolled out its “Crucial Catch” campaign for breast cancer awareness month, a campaign that promotes early screening as a solution, an assertion that flies in the face of current research, which indicates that early screening and detection has little to no correlation to breast cancer survival rates.

That’s just three weeks worth of examples of corporate philanthropy gone wrong. It’s an increasingly common occurrence, both because more companies are giving more money than ever before and because it has become easier than ever to catch companies in a giving gaffe.

In some cases, companies have the best of intentions. Henry Repeating Arms, for example, genuinely wanted to help out a local kid, and the $40,000 it raised for the Sutton family is no doubt appreciated, despite the flawed logic of connecting guns with four-year-olds. In other cases, the discordant donations stem from a drive for sales or brand recognition run amok.

Companies that get corporate donations right tend to have crafted a clear strategy, aligned themselves with a particular nonprofit and committed to doing more than a one-off campaign or donation.

Why give?

“Companies make donations and build relationships with nonprofits for all sorts of reasons – branding, talent recruitment and retention – especially now because millennials really want to both buy from and work for companies that they feel reflect their values,” said Susan McPherson, who provides corporate social responsibility consulting to various companies and nonprofits. “Underlying all of it, though, is the rising demand for transparency from companies, which has been amplified by the rise of social media.”

Maria S Redin, strategy lead for social innovation consulting firm Good/Corps, which has worked with Pepsi, Google and Starbucks, as well as high-profile nonprofits, such as Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, said companies need to understand the “why” of a donation.

“There are many reasons: a company may want to align its brand with a cause that its consumer cares about; a company may want to donate to a cause that is important to its employees; or a company may donate to a cause because it believes it can create a better social and business ecosystem,” Redin said. “The key is to clearly understand why the donation is being made.”

According to Carol Cone, who coined the term “cause marketing” 30-odd years ago and now heads up the business and social purpose arm of global public relations agency Edelman, it’s equally important for companies to figure out the “how” of corporate donations.

“Thirty years ago, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago it was a question of ‘if’ a company was going to support social issues. Now it’s ‘how,’” she said. “Especially with millennials, there’s a huge expectation of companies and brands to show their values in how they act, and to do so in a deep way, not a slap-a-ribbon-on-it way.”

Getting it right

And yet, so many companies continue to get it wrong. Most often, these blunders come down to a lack of strategy or authenticity or, in some cases, both. The experts offered the following best practices as a guide to getting corporate philanthropy right.

1. It’s a business strategy, not a communications strategy. A donation made for the sake of a press release typically does more harm than good. To realize the value of a donation in terms of brand reputation amongst consumers, investors and potential hires, a company has to align its philanthropic strategy with its overall mission and values.

“Decades ago corporate giving was still novel and you could still get away with certain things,” Cone said. “These days, it’s not enough. If you’re going to support the American Heart Association, it’s not enough to make everything red in February. You need to have health policies in your company that support employees; you need to ensure the food in your cafeteria is heart-healthy; and you need to be doing things that help to change behavior in a meaningful way.”

2. Don’t hop on the latest trend. Just because it’s October doesn’t mean your company should throw its weight behind women’s health. “You have to find something that’s authentic to your brand,” McPherson says. “If you’re Patagonia, you’re not going to pick something that’s completely outside the realms of outdoor recreation and the environment.”

3. Sell employees on the idea first. If your people aren’t involved in or behind a corporate philanthropic effort, not only is it likely to flounder, but you’re also missing out on a key recruitment tool. “You have to involve your entire company, whether it’s an ongoing program or an annual survey, they need to have a part in it,” McPherson said.

4. Marshall all of your assets. While a check is always useful, many corporations could – and should – be providing more than just monetary support to the causes they champion. McPherson cited the example of a financial services firm that wanted to give free financial advice to nonprofits in addition to its donations. Redin pointed to Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation’s Sports Matter initiative. The foundation was interested in the issues of underfunded sports teams in the United States, so launched a crowdfunding program for such teams, called Sports Matter. Dick’s not only donated funds, but also leveraged its marketing team, producing both commercials and a feature-length documentary called “We Could Be Kings.”

“All these pieces together created an incredible program that allowed DSGF to reach goals beyond what a traditional donation would have allowed,” Redin said.

5. Talk about it once it’s successful. Companies need to have a way to measure the impact of their donations and a clear definition of success. According to McPherson, they would also do well to hold off on talking about philanthropic initiatives until they reach their goal.

“Metrics should be tailored to the goal and, in the most effective cases, encompass business success as well as social impact,” Redin said.

“Companies need to show the impact of what they’re doing, not try to make news out of the fact that they’ve launched a program,” McPherson said.

On the flip side, McPherson added that she often sees companies that are having a positive social impact and not talking about what they’re doing at all, which she described as a “missed opportunity”.

“If you do it right, you should be shouting it from the rooftops,” she said.

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