WINGS 2003 Survey on Corporate Philanthropy - Results

For some while WINGS has had on its agenda plans for helping the network in working with corporate grantmakers. We now have a small working group made up of

• Fran Eaton, Managing Director of Corporate Services at the Council on Foundations, USA
• Pavlina Kalousová, Executive Director, Czech Donors Forum
• Nancy Roberts, President and CEO, Connecticut Council for Philanthropy, USA
• Sevdalina Rukanova, International Programmes Coordinator, European Foundation Centre
• Rory Tolentino, Executive Director, Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium

The group is chaired by Pavlina.

A couple of months ago the group invited all WINGS network participants to complete a brief questionnaire to help review the needs and issues in the network in relation to supporting corporate philanthropy. We had a great response - 26% of the network. These included a good mix of regions and organisations, which helped give a flavour of the work going on and the aspirations our members have.

Of the 26 replies, 18 (69%) were from organisations which include corporate grantmakers in their membership (and just one of these has only corporate members). Most of the remainder, including a number of community foundation support organisations, have active links with companies and all are interested in strengthening their understanding and skills in relating to corporates.

Table 1 shows the range of services covered by respondents (Left hand column shows number of respondents)

We also asked respondents to tell us what would be useful to them - what WINGS should focus on in its work in this area. Table 2 shows the relative popularity of the major priorities.

The working group has taken the two highest of these as the core of its work in the next year:

1. Sharing good practice in developing services and offering support to corporate philanthropists
2. Providing tools and examples to promote company giving.

They plan to begin by inviting experienced organisations to take part in a peer learning event during 2004 on the first of these - good practice in supporting corporate philanthropy. Plans for this are under way and will be publicised soon to the network. All the learning from the event will be widely shared within the network and also used to develop material to assist with making the case for company giving for use in contexts where this form of philanthropy is as yet under-developed.