Top 600 corporate donors give 0.43% of pre-tax profits to charity, says DSC
Howard Lake | 5 April 2011 | News
The top 600 companies that give to charity gave around £762 million in community support in 2009/10 (including £512 million in cash donations). This represents an average of 0.43% of their pre-tax profits, and this includes in-kind as well as cash donations.
The figures were derived from research carried out for the 8th edition of DSC’s The Guide to UK Company Giving. The DSC welcomed corporate support for charities but pointed out that in-kind donations, such as volunteering employee time and secondments, were not always needed by the charitable community, and could in some cases can impinge too heavily on the charity’s own resources in accepting them.
Denise Lillya, senior researcher for the Directory of Social Change and the author of the Guide gave advice to fundraisers: “The key when approaching companies is to produce more effective applications (whether for in kind or cash support); to tailor requests by taking into account the nature of a company’s business, its ethics, its community involvement policy (if available), and what a company wants or might reasonably be persuaded to give. This information should then be married with what the applicant charity actually requires, without imposing to any great degree on its own resources.”
The Guide to UK Company Giving 2011/2012 provides commentary on the current state of corporate community involvement in the UK, and relevant advice and information on securing funding or winning other support from the listing of nearly 600 companies in the UK that give ‘in kind’ or cash donations to voluntary organisations.
www.dsc.org.uk
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.