The team needs uniforms. The fundraiser needs a table. The building needs a roof and somebody has suggested the firm might help. The organization needs a board member and your name came up.
Each request is reasonable, each requester is somebody you know, and there are more of them every year because a firm that has said yes is a firm that gets asked.
Deciding each request individually is the error
Without a stated position, every request is assessed on the relationship in front of you, which produces three problems at once.
The pattern of giving reflects who asks rather than what matters, and over years it becomes visible and looks like favouritism because it functionally is.
Declining becomes personal, because with no policy to point at, a no is a judgment about the requester.
And the total is never examined. Firms are frequently surprised by what they gave last year, distributed across things nobody chose.
Decide the shape once a year
An afternoon of work that resolves most of this permanently.
Set an amount for the year. Decide what it is for — the categories that connect to what the firm actually depends on, which for most is youth, workforce, and the institutions that make the town liveable. Decide what is out. And decide who says yes, so that requests do not all arrive at the owner personally.
Then a decline has a reason that is not about the person: we set our giving in January and it is committed to schools and the fire district. That is a real answer, it is repeatable, and it does not require anybody to be judged.
Firms that adopt this generally find they give a similar total to better effect and stop dreading the question.
Concentration beats distribution
A firm giving small amounts to twenty things has purchased twenty acknowledgements and changed nothing.
The same total committed to one or two things over several years can actually move something, which is the coalition argument applied to a single firm’s resources.
Multi-year commitments are worth considerably more than their face value to the recipient, because they permit planning that annual grants do not. They are also harder for a firm to make, which is why they are rare and why making one distinguishes a firm from every other donor.
Time is scarcer than money
The request that is hardest to decline is for somebody’s presence rather than the firm’s money, and it is the one owners over-commit to.
Three boards is not three times one board. It is a person attending twelve evenings a quarter, reading nothing properly, and contributing little to any of them.
One seat held properly for six years is worth more to a community than four held distractedly for two, and it is the version that produces the institutional standing the compact entry describes.
Which makes the honest decline about capacity rather than interest: I am on the hospital district and I do that properly, so I am not able to take another.
Two requests that need care
From somebody who can affect the firm. A significant customer, a regulator, a public official. What is appropriate depends on who is asking and what is being asked, and where any question arises about influence, it belongs with counsel before an answer is given rather than after.
For contested causes. A firm supporting one side of something the community is divided over has made a choice about which half of its customers, employees, and neighbours it is aligned with.
Whether to do that is the owner’s decision and this Library takes no position on it. What is worth understanding is the trade: the standing that lets a firm convene people who disagree, described in the association entry, is spent by taking sides, and it is difficult to recover.
The most valuable things are not money
Worth naming, because firms asked for cash frequently hold something better.
Equipment and a crew for an afternoon. Somebody’s professional capability — accounting, drafting, project management — supplied to an organization that could never purchase it. Space. A phone call to somebody the organization cannot reach.
Each costs a firm less than the equivalent cash and is worth more to a small institution. And each is a form of participation rather than payment, which is read differently by the community and is what the compact actually consists of.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD