'Free' and Cause-Related Marketing: Part II

Tuesday’s post was about the increasing use of ‘free’ as a business model. No less a company than Google is built on ‘free.’ So are Craigslist and Facebook and Flickr.

And free is coming on like a lion.

AOL used to be primarily a subscription-based service. But every year their subscriber base shrinks. Nowadays, as a free portal, AOL.com is the fourth most-visited Web property. The mighty Wall Street Journal’s online version had a subscription model. But Rupert Murdoch, who recently purchased the Journal, announced that it will soon be largely free. It will no doubt grow as a result.

As Chris Anderson writes in his cover story, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” in the March 2008 Wired magazine:

“People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.”

“The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's
why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo
gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.”

Fair enough for the for-profit folks. But as I asked in Tuesday’s post, “is free sustainable or even possible for organizations that are already not-for-profit?”

Many of you thought for a moment and answered, “Well, yeah. In fundraising nonprofits use ‘free’ all the time. And it works great.”

I’ve got a drawer full of proof at home.

• In my desk at home I have a drawer full of free-to-me address labels from perhaps a half-dozen nonprofits. I’ve gotten pens, bumper stickers, key fobs, notepads, and more. Nonprofits send out those giveaways because experience clearly demonstrates that an envelope with something free in it generates more than does an empty envelope.
• In the United States the public radio and television are both supported by periodic public appeals that draw heavily on premiums. Donations in a certain range come with valuable items like books, tapes, meals, lodging stays, events with celebrities, and more. The telethon producing charities do much the same, especially at the local level.
• Paper icons, usually priced at $1 in North America, sometimes come with price-saving coupons. And so the purchase price might bring $5 or more dollars in coupon savings. Some charities do much the same with calendars.
• A few months back I went to a free performance from best-selling author and humorist Andy Andrews that was sponsored by a nonprofit as a 'friend-raiser.' (He was dynamite, BTW. The best 90 minutes I've spent in the last year). In April Andrews will return to a larger venue for another friend-raiser, also free.

In fact, notwithstanding business cases like Gillette (where since the company’s founding in 1903 Gillette razor handles typically cost a pittance, but the blades are a pretty penny) nonprofits have been using the concept of free longer and with greater success than most for-profits. ‘Free’ is baked deeper into the DNA of nonprofits than it is in any flavor-of- the-month tech company.

Nonprofits understand better than most companies that ‘free’ doesn’t mean ‘no expense.’ Nonprofits know that in their fundraising they while they can and should give stuff things away to boost their fundraising. (Reread the material under the heading ‘Taxonomy of Free’ in Anderson's Wired article for a refresher on how to pay for and think about ‘free.’)

And finally, nonprofits understand that among the many things they can give away free the most important may be the feeling that their supporters are doing something good.

'Free' and Cause-Related Marketing: Part I

Of a sudden one of the hottest marketing concepts around is ‘free.’ But is free sustainable or even possible for organizations that are already not-for-profit?

I’ll tackle that question in Thursday’s post.

But first, what is ‘free’?

On a recent show, Oprah told her viewers that Suze Orman’s book Women and Money could be downloaded for free from Oprah’s site for 33 hours. During that time 1.1 million copies were downloaded in English and another 19,000 in Spanish.

The graphic above… from TitleZ via the blog longtail.com… shows that sales of the book on Amazon improved dramatically after the giveaway.

That example comes from author Chris Anderson, who says that Free is being driven by the declining costs of digital processing, storage and bandwidth. Anderson, who is the editor of Wired magazine and the author of influential book “The Long Tail,” has another book coming out soon on the business value of giving it away for free.

What other examples are there?

• Google, which gives away software, electronic storage space, email accounts, this blog and countless other items, is nonetheless one of the most profitable companies in technology.


• And who hasn’t by now used the also profitable and mostly free craigslist.com?

You see the approach used everywhere nowadays. Here’s some examples from the Amsterdam-based outfit Trendwatching.com.

• There’s free printed magazines and newspapers. And lest you think this is only some large market ploy, there’s even one in my small market handed out on the train platforms on weekday afternoons called The Buzz.


• In Europe there’s Blyk, a free mobile telephone service for 16-24 yeaar olds powered by advertising. Even for the regular mobile services, handsets are often free when you subscribe to a plan.


• In Austria and Germany you can get a nearly free Smart car for the price of one euro a day. The car is plastered with advertising and you must agree to drive it about 20 miles a day.


• In France you can get free photo processing and home delivery from MesPhotosOffertes. The photos come with 4x15cm tear-off strip of ads.


• Last July music artist Prince gave away some 3 million copies of ‘Planet Earth,’ his latest release in London’s Sunday Mail. In August, he sold out 21 performances in Wembley Stadium, each one with 20,000 paying concert-goers.


• On it goes; free drinks in Japan from vending machines, free college textbooks in the United States, free travel guides in Europe, free Wi-Fi in a lot municipalities, free GPS units in New York. Etc.

Wait a minute, you say, there’s no free lunch. These things are supported by advertising, or concert-goers, or some such. Well, yes and no. Google is supported by advertising. But unless you live in one nine U.S. cities (out of 450 worldwide) where listings cost anywhere from $10 - $75, Craigslist is completely free to you. It’s not so different with Flickr.com. The average user could exhaust herself with the many free features of Flickr before she would have to pay for their premium service called Flickr Pro.

So how do these outfits survive? They have to meet payroll and pay for paper or Smart cars or photo finishing chemicals, right?

Chris Anderson helpfully provides “a taxonomy of free.” But there’s one item he doesn’t mention. Oftentimes these outfits run very leanly. Craigslist is said to have a staff of less than 25 people, with whom it achieves sales of something more than $15o million a year! (That's $6 million in sales per employee.)

Freemium

While there have long been giveaways offered as enticements… think of Mrs. Fields cookies, for instance… the ‘bait’ typically is only offered in tiny quantities. By contrast, in the digital age when the incremental cost of processing power and bandwidth and digital storage space approaches zero there’s a whole different kind of economics in place. So, in effect, something like 1 percent of craigslist users pay the
freight for the other 99 percent.

Advertising

Advertising allows content, services, software, free college textbooks and more
to be free to all.

Cross-Subsidies

What’s free is any product meant to persuade you to pay for something else.
Those free CDs in the newspaper from Prince were made possible by the 420,000
paying concert-goers a month later. For that matter, cross-subsides power
over-the-air television in the United States. Advertisers make possible all that
free news and entertainment.

Zero Marginal Cost

“This describes nothing so well as online music,” writes Anderson in his article
in Wired. “Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution,
the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where
the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a
business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every
other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give
away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing,
and other paid fare. But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is
not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun
to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most
musicians anyway."

Labor Exchange

When you vote on that exquisitely-rendered reply to some question on Yahoo
Answers, you’re creating value or improving the service for the next user.
That’s a labor exchange.

Gift Economy

Wikipedia is part of the gift economy, whereby smarty-pants type people,
motivated by something like altruism or pride, are creating the world’s most
extensive and free encyclopedia. Altruism also motivates freecycle.com, whereby
an object of value can be yours if you’re willing to just haul it away. Some
similar motivation is behind CouchingSurfing, which matches people willing to
put up a stranger for a night or two with people looking for a place to
stay.

In Thursday’s post; how to make free work for your nonprofit or client.

Big Blue’s Case for Corporate Social Responsibility

According to a recent survey, 68 percent of business leaders are using corporate social responsibility (CSR) to create new revenue streams and 54 percent believe that their CSR endeavors are giving their companies a competitive edge.

These and other findings come from a report issued Feb 12 by the IBM Institute for Business Value, a unit of Big Blue’s business consulting division. The Institute surveyed 250 business leaders worldwide and found that businesses are increasingly using the elements of corporate social responsibility to differentiate themselves from competitors, lower costs, and bolster their bottom line.

“CSR is no longer viewed as just a regulatory or discretionary cost,” the report’s authors, George Pohle and Jeff Hittner write in the introduction, “but an investment that brings financial returns.”

The survey suggests that momentum is gaining in CSR. The survey identified five areas where companies have ‘focused their CSR activities’ … regulatory compliance, strategic philanthropy, formal company values system, cost savings and creating new revenue streams… and asked respondents to rate their companies activities as either mature or recently started.

The areas of ranking highest in new activity were a statistical dead heat: creating new revenue streams with 49 percent, strategic philanthropy with 48 percent and cost savings with 47 percent. Formal company values finished with 44 percent while new activity in regulatory compliance finished last with 28 percent.

The survey also found that companies who say that their efforts are outpacing those of competitors are twice as likely to:

Collaborate

• Understand well their customer’s CSR expectations.
• Have increased information on sourcing, composition and impact of their goods, services and operations.
• Collaborate with consumers and partners.
• Engage employees in CSR from the janitor to the CEO.

Integrate

• Place critical importance on (and rate themselves highly) at supply chain management.
• Rate themselves highly at developing products and services that positively effect the environment.
• Place critical importance on (and rate themselves highly) at aligning their philanthropy and their business.

This is an useful report from a respected source. The weight of opinion on the business value of CSR continues to grow. I welcome it.

Like all surveys it helps us understand the Zeitgeist of our time. But like any opinion survey it doesn’t tell us how people actually behave in the real world or why.

A Charity’s Responsibilities to a Sponsor in Trouble

What responsibility, if any, does a charity have when a faithful sponsor faces bad press or worse?

The last charity I worked for as an employee…Operation Kids… was a startup children’s charity organized as a federated nonprofit. A little more than eight years after its founding, Operation Kids is now on solid ground. But like all startups, there were some moments when it was touch and go; when the charity could have as easily failed as succeeded.

It’s fair to say that say that Operation Kids would not be in same the place were it not for an early corporate sponsor, itself a startup called XanGo. XanGo is a multi-level marketing organization (MLM) that sells a supplemental juice drink made from the Asian fruit called mangosteen.

It’s beyond the scope of this blog to talk about the relative merits of the MLM business model or of XanGo as a health elixir. Suffice it say that XanGo has hundreds of thousands of adherents worldwide who have made their choice.

Let me also stipulate that by all accounts XanGo is doing well financially.

However, within the last year the Food and Drug Administration (which regulates food and drugs sold in the States) sent a letter to XanGo asking it to account for an extravagant claim made by a related party about the health benefits of drinking XanGo.

In the United States the supplement industry is allowed to sell their goods with relatively little regulation so long as they don’t make unsubstantiated claims about the supplement’s efficacy and so long as it is safe.

XanGo has also recently gotten unflattering press coverage in Forbes Magazine, an Associated Press story, and elsewhere. The coverage mainly consists of dismissing XanGo as ‘snake oil’ sold to the unsuspecting based on emotion rather than steely-eyed science.

XanGo’s response to the FDA was that the party making the claim was not the company itself and also that the claim has long since been withdrawn.

XanGo’s response to the skeptical press and by extension, to the medical establishment is something like this: “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and science.

And of course, XanGo is right. Here’s just one example of many I could site. It’s only in the last 20 years that science realized… kicking and screaming… that it’s not stress that causes 70-90 percent of peptic ulcers, but a bacteria called helicobactor pylori. The discoverers of this truth, the persistent and daring Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2005 for their discovery. Read the fascinating backstory here.

I could list more, but it’s enough to say that science has blind spots and prejudices just like any other entity, collective or individual.

So then what responsibility, if any, does a charity have when a sponsor faces bad press or worse?

Let’s begin by getting the obvious out of the way. Operation Kids owes XanGo nothing more than a hearty and sincere thanks for all the money, time and expertise. Any suggestion that a quid pro quo is required taints the generous donations XanGo has already made.

But, by the same token, XanGo and Operation Kids are closely joined. No doubt Operation Kids’ board and management feel obliged to offer some show of support if for no other reason than self-interest; the donations they get from XanGo are based on the number of bottles sold!

Operation Kids must also feel some measure of conflict. It’s not impossible that this could be the undoing of XanGo. And in so failing reflect badly on the charity.

In order of increasing of daringness here are some things Operation Kids could do to throw a line to a friend:

• Redouble their recognition of XanGo’s generosity in their internal and external materials/publications.
• Send notes and letters of support to XanGo management and key distributors.
• Nominate XanGo for notable corporate citizenship awards.
• Get an accounting from the charities in the federation of how they’ve used the money from XanGo to bring XanGo’s donations into focus.
• Send a letter to the editors of the publications critical of XanGo highlighting the company’s many donations and include in it some of the specifics found in the accounting from the affiliate charities.
• Pitch story ideas about how XanGo’s money is used by Operation Kids charities.
• Backdoor the mainstream media by launching a charm offensive to the alternative and social media.
• Encourage their affiliated charities to do any or all the above.
• Do some behind-the-scenes lobbying of trade groups, business groups and other influentials and ask them to take a public stand against the FDA and/or the critical press.
• With XanGo’s sponsorship, mount a touring exhibit about Operation Kids that makes stops in major media markets.
• Enlist the aid of key federal lawmakers, saying, in effect, that XanGo is a generous corporate citizen and the FDA is being overzealous of what amounts to a small indiscretion by third-party.
• Send a letter in support of XanGo to the FDA.
• Publicly denounce as misguided the FDA and/or the publications in question.

These are very thorny issues and I don’t envy the decisions that Operation Kids’ board and management face.

How to Sign up for the Cause-Related Marketing GoogleGroup

Mariana asks how to sign up for the Cause-Related Marketing GoogleGroup.

It's simple, just send an email to me, Paul Jones, with your name, email address, city, state (if applicable) and country.

I don't sell your email address to anyone. And I ask for your name and location only because it helps me know who my audience is.

So to subscribe, send an email to: aldenkeeneatgmail.com. And of course you'll need to replace the 'at' with an @. I do spell it out that way to keep the spam at a minimum.

Cause-Related Marketing Home Sales

Buy a house, give a house

On January 10, 2008, I highlighted the streamlined cause-related marketing campaign of TOMS Shoes, whereby for every pair of their Argentine-inspired alpargatas shoes you buy, another pair goes to needy kids in places like Africa and South America.

Now drawing inspiration directly from TOMS Shoes… and with just a little bit of puffery… LJ Urban says that when you buy one of their 35 LEED ND certified homes from their ‘Good eco-community’ in urban Sacramento, California, a home gets built in Burkina Faso. LJ Urban calls the campaign, ‘Do Some Good Now.’

In fact, LJ Urban, an eco-real estate developer in Sacramento, pays for the training of masons in Burkina Faso in a technique called Voute Nubienne. It includes using locally-made baked earthen bricks, making vaulted ceilings using an ancient Egyptian practice, and a locally-sustainable way of sealing the bricks against water. The training is provided by the French nonprofit, Association la Voute Nubienne.

LJ Urban will also pay for the training of one Burkina Faso mason for each 100,000 people that visit their website between now and July 1, 2008. Yesterday, I was visitor 5,149.

Using Voute Nubienne method means that these aren’t normal Burkina Faso homes.

They’re better.

Homes in Burkina Faso are typically built with metal roofs, which are expensive and turn baking hot in the Sub-Saharan summers. The vaulted roofs (see above) are notably cooler. Metal roofs also require timber for support, which is in chronically short supply in the Colorado-sized country of 13 million people. Finally, the Voute Nubienne technique helps obviate the problem with the mud brick homes literally dissolving into dust within a homeowner’s lifetime.

While many of the people of Burkina Faso are capable of creating their own bricks and even laying them, the vaulted roofs require masons trained in the 3,000 year-old craft. Cash is in short supply in Burkina Faso… metal roofs might require several year’s savings, for instance… so the barter economy there is very lively. Right now the trained masons are likely to take barter in payment rather than cash money. And the masons typically take on apprentices, meaning they train the next generation of masons in the Voute Nubienne technique.

I like this campaign a lot. The Californians that buy LEED certified homes in urban Sacramento are almost certainly the same kind of people who would donate to a cause like the Association la Voute Nubienne. LJ Urban oughta email the development’s brochure to Daryl Hannah now.

LJ Urban’s website has page devoted to answering the questions skeptics like me. I appreciate that. And I marvel at the genius of the architects who have stepped forward to address some real-world challenges.

If I had one suggestion it would be to make the Do Some Good Now website easier and cleaner to navigate. Nowadays people could come directly to almost any page in your website… they won’t necessarily enter through your front page.

And so every page on the site has to be self-contained enough so that visitors can quickly understand and navigate the content.

Advice To a Promotional Products Company

[Blogger's Note: What follows is an email exchange between Jack, who owns a promotional products business in Greensboro, North Carolina, and your's truly.]



Hi Paul

I have a small promotional products logowear business and want to donate a portion of sales to my client’s charities. How do I get started? Please add me to your GoogleGroup.

Thanks,
Jack

Hi Jack:

To really answer your question I’d need to know what your goals are.

Warm regards,
Paul

Paul,

My ultimate goal is to donate a significant portion of my profits to my client’s charities. In order to do that I have to generate enough cash to sustain my company and provide for my family. In other words you have to create a healthy company first so you can be around long enough to make a difference.

The great and somewhat unique thing about my business, my clients who purchase their products from me, through co-branding promote themselves at the same time they are promoting their causes.

I’m writing to find out how other companies have been successful with CRM strategies.

Thanks.
Jack

Jack:

I’m going to speak in generalities here since I don't know your business or market specifically.

Cause-related marketing can be utilized as a tactic or a strategy.

In a tactical use CRM is a promotion with all that that usually implies. You would make a donation whenever a product (or products) are sold. Like a sales promotion, a tactical CRM promotion usually has a deadline. It usually requires that you take steps to publicize the promotion.

In general, the higher the donation the better customers respond to it. Your best bet in terms of the charities you support is that they generate high levels of affinity for your customer base.

Given that you're thinking about supporting your client's charities, you'll
probably experience a certain variance from promotion to promotion because
affinity varies between causes and audiences.

You can also implement CRM as a strategy; that is a key component of your business model. General Mills and Campbells both use label campaigns that support local schools in an attempt to maximize their profits. Their respective CRM campaigns help them maintain those campaigns year-round and they are continually expanding
their footprint.

Target, the big retailer, gives away 5 percent of its profits, a tidy sum. Timberland, the shoe and apparel company, does something similar. They also support their favorite cause... City Year... with in-kind donations and substantial donations of employee and executive time in addition to money. The relationship between City Year and Timberland is so close it transcends the usual sort of CRM campaign.

Those kinds of relationships are more common than most people know. But they don’t come about overnight. In almost every case those kinds of relationships develop after years and sometimes decades of close interaction.

You're a B2B business so you have a couple of extra wrinkles. CRM promotions are most commonly directed to consumers. But B2B cause-related marketing happens ever day. Since your goal is to generate orders and increase goodwill rather than to sell a logoed key fob or pen directly to consumer, you must take a different tack.

Again, I don't know your business, your market or your customers, but you might consider sponsoring a golf tourney for the cause(s). If that doesn't suit you or your audience, it could be a shooting event, a motorcycle rally, a car show, etc. You get the picture.

You could do customized catalogs for key clients, with some or all the products themed to the company’s charity or even co-branded. Most promotions these days center around holiday periods; Valentines Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, etc. You could carve out one or more of the lesser holidays… say Groundhog Day… to promote the catalog. Just make sure the creative makes sense.

Hope this helps. Let me know if there's any specific aspects of CRM I can address. It probably goes without saying that setting up these kinds of campaigns is what I do for a living. So if you need professional help, let me know.

Best wishes,
Paul

Rosa Loves T-Shirts for a Good Cause

Cause-related marketing from the avant-garde

Founded by an avant-garde group of artists-designers-developers, Rosa Loves is a proto-nonprofit charity that sells limited-edition t-shirts meant to raise money and tell personal stories of the dispossessed in North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

On the outside, the t-shirts feature art meant to illustrate the stories. Inside the t-shirts… placed over the heart… is a printed summary version of the story.

The wonderfully evocative t-shirt above illustrates the story of grandmother… raising three grandchildren alone… who lost her home of 27 years to fire.

The t-shirts are made in men’s and women’s fitted sizes in limited editions for $25. Sixty percent of the purchase price goes to the cause it illustrates. The edition is limited by the number of t-shirts it takes to reach their fundraising goal.

The t-shirts are sold online at rosaloves.com and through select retail outlets.

The problem with these for-profit social entrepreneurs is that when it comes to the amount of money that they raise and distribute to the cause all you can do is trust that they promise do it the way they promise. There’s really no check on them besides self disclosure. Note that Rosa Loves says it has applied to the IRS for 501(c)(3) status. At which point it will be obliged by law to open its books to the public.

Until then, here’s what their website says on distributing the money it raises:

“Once and a while we try our best to mention the amounts as much as possible
whether it be in an announcement, news post, or newsletter, etc. We are working
on a more efficient and public way of constantly providing this information on
our website. For the time being, if you're curious about how much ROSA LOVES has
raised for a specific shirt (or all of them), feel free to e-mail Mike Fretto."

Your charity of choice or social entrepreneurship venture could do something very similar, although make sure you first learn all the lessons from Rosa Loves.

• The art has to be very, very good.
• Your audience must be tightly targeted. Remember, more people have worn a t-shirt than do wear t-shirts.
• The story must be nothing short of riveting and personal. I have a hard time believing you could use a limited-edition t-shirt to depict an ECMO machine for which your hospital is raising money, for instance.
• In the States in particular, you need to be careful about privacy issues when telling other people’s stories. Make sure you get signed releases.
• You’ll have to watch your costs closely. The art, for instance, probably has to be donated or nearly free. Likewise, be prudent when it comes to building the website.
• You need all the publicity and word of mouth you can get. Your best bet is to have in place a good list of likely buyers that you can actively market to.
• If you don’t have the will to sit on the inventory until it sells without discounting, don’t try this at your shop.
• You may need the internal capacity to do all the backend programming as well as the fulfillment in-house. Although you might be able to cobble together a system from separate vendors.

If you approach this circumspectly, this fresh idea from the avant-garde could work for your nonprofit.

Do Motives Matter in Corporate Social Responsibility?

Words I Meant to Say

On Friday, Feb 1 I was a panelist at the Global Philanthropy Symposium sponsored by the University of Utah Law School and moderated by the school’s energetic young dean, Hiram Chodosh.

There were two sessions: Public/private Healthcare Initiatives and Microfinance/ Corporate Social Responsibility.

One of the subtexts of the second session in particular was that how a company gave was as important as what or how much it gave. Or, as one of the other panelists put it directly: “I have concluded that there is no altruism in corporate philanthropy.”

Maybe not. But does that matter? That’s what Brady Stuart…a second-year law school student whose précis of the history of corporate giving in the United States had introduced the session… asked me and another panelist over lunch.

His question, I think, was prompted by this discussion about the ‘why’ of corporate giving. During the session I made the point that while direct corporate donations to charities have been legal in the United States since 1952, truly rigorous business cases for charitable giving have really only emerged in the last few years. That’s not to say that claims weren’t made about the business value of philanthropy in prior years, only that they were lax in their scholarly proof.

Or as Milton Friedman famously put it, "The discussions of the 'social responsibilities of business' are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor."

In short, for at least 50 years there was no really convincing business case to be made for corporate philanthropy. So if businesses weren't giving for mainly altruistic reasons, why were they giving?

But back to Brady Stuart’s question: do a company’s motives matter when it comes to corporate philanthropy?

Here’s how I responded: any insistence that we give purely 'from the heart' is in no small way cultural.

Under his entry for “tzedaka,” Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in his book Jewish Literacy, recounts a hypothetical developed by Dennis Prager and presented to thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish high school students.

It goes like this: Suppose a poor man approaches two men of equal wealth in desperate need of food and money for his family. The first person cries out in shared pain at the man’s situation and gives him $5. The second person does not respond emotionally. But because he feels obliged by his faith’s command to give 10 percent of income he hands the man $100 before rushing off.

Prager then asks the students, who did the better thing? Rabbi Telushkin reports that between and 70 and 90 percent of high school students say that the man who gave from the heart did the better thing.

But that sensibility is largely foreign to Jews. Tzedaka literally translates to ‘justice,’ although it’s usually rendered as ‘charity.’ Jews, says Telushkin see tzedaka as “a form of self-taxation, rather than as a voluntary donation.”

Says Prager: “Judaism says, Give ten percent—and if the heart catches up, terrific. In the meantime, good has been done.”

The Christian writer C.S. Lewis comes to a similar conclusion on the subject of charity in his book, Mere Christianity.

Charity has come to mean what used to be called alms, Lewis says. The reason is easy to tease out. If a man has charity, giving to the poor is one of the most obvious ways to act charitably. Just as rhyme is the most obvious thing about poetry, making it easy to confuse the two.

Instead, charity means love. Not the emotion, and not necessarily affection, but a state of will. “The rule for all of us is perfectly simple," says Lewis. "Do not waste your time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” The result is a virtuous cycle. You do something out of love… this act of will… which then often leads to affection. The affection in turn makes it easier to perform other acts of charitable love.

Let's ask this question then: Does it matter whether or not there is now or ever has been altruism in corporate philanthropy?

Not to the people who ultimately benefit from it.