It seems there’s no free lunch in the world of corporate philanthropy these days. Donations are now often made with a flinty eye to the potential return on investment.
And the ROI doesn’t come in the form of a happier world, a reduction in suffering or an improvement in karma. Instead, it’s the heightened profile that comes when the thing that donation helps to create — an arena, the wing of a library, or an annual festival — ends up bearing your company’s name.
Gazetteer had plenty of time to mull this over recently while sitting with two sick kids in the waiting room at Vancouver’s children’s hospital, which bears a big plaque prominently featuring the Save-On Foods logo.
In a recent blog post, he wonders how big a donation is required for that kind of plaque, and comes up with a rough guess of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. (I suspect he’s in the right ballpark; the company’s annual contribution to children’s hospitals in BC and Alberta comes to about half a million dollars.)
“Which sounds like a lot, and it is,” he writes. “Until you start comparing.”
Comparing things like the cost of the bricks and mortar of the hospital itself, and the equipment, and the doctors, and the nurses, and the support staff, and the medicine, and even, grudgingly, the administrators.
Those, of course, cost millions and millions of dollars.
And Save-On-Foods didn’t pay for any of that.
We did.
All of us.
And for that we didn’t get no stinking plaques…. or free publicity…. or tax breaks.
Which is fine with me, as long as those Administrators and the Political Puppetmasters who appoint them remember that we, the people, are not ‘clients’ of the hospital.
We are the owners of the thing.
And they better not forget it.
But maybe he’s looking at this the wrong way. How about an involuntary corporate naming project? Statistics Canada could start publishing the Benson & Hedges Mortality Report; cities across Canada could issue DaimlerChrysler/Imperial Oil smog alerts. Type 2 diabetes could be rebranded as Pepsicosis.
These are companies that give and give and give to our communities. They deserve recognition. Full recognition.
