Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Embedded Giving - actually, we have NO idea about numbers

My sincere thanks to Lindsey Siegel of CECP who corrected my inaccurate assumptions about how and where embedded giving gets aggregated and counted. Turns out corporations are not factoring it in to their contributions - at least not those who participate in the CECP surveys.

Thanks Lindsey. The money is not in that pool, so its not part of the $191+ million.

I am glad to have been corrected on this. I still have two questions, however:
  1. Where does this money get counted? (the dollars and nickels donated by customers who bring their own grocery bag, add $1 to their drug store bill for juvenile diabetes, or send $1 through their ATM to a disaster relief agency, etc. etc.)
  2. How much money is given away this way and is it increasing (as everybody I've asked seems to think it is)
Please let me know, if you know. And send me your examples of embedded giving - I'll catalogue as many as I get and celebrate the most unusual ones in a later post.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Lucy,

I, too, am interested in how embedded giving gets counted. Many of the corporate websites I visit say that the "X Corporate Foundation contributes more than $100 million each year to X cause..." when the $100 million was raised by customers. So, when a company collects $1 from each customer, is that money being deposited into the corporate foundation and then being re-gifted to a non-profit? If that is the case, then the corporate foundation must be accounting for that $ on their 990. If so, then couldn't a company actually say "We donated more than $100 million to X cause..." even though they raised the money that they donated? It seems to me that this is the same model used for fundraising foundations, such as community foundations. Raise the money and reinvest it in non-profits to maximize impact.