Corporate Foundation Giving Is Up - But What About The Arts?
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:04am Gary Steuer
Recently Americans for the Arts released The Future of Private Sector Giving to the Arts in America, a report on the proceedings of the 2006 National Arts Policy Roundtable, produced in partnership with The Sundance Preserve. I encourage everyone who cares about the arts to carefully read this report. In addition to reporting on the recommendations of the Roundtable, it also provides a summary of the research that was done as part of the process. In a nutshell, private sector giving to the arts, as a percentage of all private sector giving, has declined from 8.4% to 5.2% since 1992. If we had maintained an 8.4% share of giving, the arts would now be receiving $8 billion more in philanthropy. This market share decline has been masked somewhat because giving as a whole has been growing steadily so that even with a declining share, the total dollar amount of arts giving has grown, from $9.96 billion in 1995 to nearly $14 billion in 2004. However, in 2005 even the dollar amount of giving to the arts declined by half a billion dollars, or 3.4%. So a review of all the data out there seems to paint a picture of some real challenges in private giving to the arts. Read the Roundtable report for an overview of the recommended solutions. (But more on that at another time!)
Now the Foundation Center has just issued a new study of giving by corporate foundations that shows an increase of about 6% for the second consecutive year. So what gives-is the picture rosy, or gloomy? Well, the answer is,both, or perhaps muddy. First, this new research covers only corporate foundations, not direct corporate giving, and there seem to be sharp differences between the respective patterns. Corporate foundations direct 11% of their giving to arts and culture, according to the new Foundation Center figures. This is much higher than the roughly 5% figure reported by the Conference Board and the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy which study mostly large corporations, a figure that combines corporate foundation giving with direct corporate giving. The Foundation Center statistics also don’t count the in-kind giving of pharmaceutical companies through special foundations, which was $3.2 billion in 2005, a 90% increase over 2004. Other corporate research does include these in-kind gifts of drugs. In other words, the total corporate giving pie is growing dramatically, but this growth is being at least partially driven by donations of drugs that arts groups don’t compete for (OK, on bad days with major grant proposal deadlines looming, maybe we wish we DID have some of those drugs). The growth of the pie makes it look like our market share is shrinking worse than it really is.
HOWEVER, the fact that the Foundation Center is finding a 6% growth in corporate foundation giving, and the arts are clearly not seeing corporate giving growth that is comparable, shows that the problem is still very real and must be addressed. To be continued in future blog entries, because there is much complexity and nuance in this issue.
