Apple, Google, Intel, the Gap: Each of these companies has a truly global reach. But they’re also based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and when the Super Bowl comes to that area in 2016, they will bring a hometown attitude to the event. These and other locally headquartered companies have already pledged about $30 million in Super Bowl-related giving, and 25 percent of that amount will go to Bay Area nonprofit groups. That’s a lot of money for charity. But as recent research shows, it’s a common phenomenon.
Things that happen in a community make a difference to corporate giving, “even [for] very global organizations, even in this very global age,” says András Tilcsik, assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. “There is an elevation in the willingness to give, and we see that trickling down to the whole local nonprofit sector.”
Tilcsik and his co-author, Christopher Marquis, focus their research on events that affect a metropolitan area for good or for ill. With a mega-event such as a Super Bowl, the Olympics, or a national political convention, “we find a strong, and in some cases dramatically strong, positive relationship between the event occurring in the community and the amount of corporate giving that takes place right before, during, and subsequent to the event,” says Tilcsik. Small-scale natural disasters have the same effect on philanthropy. After a flood or a storm, for example, locally based companies typically rally in support of their neighbors.
But with respect to an adverse event, scale matters. And it matters in a seemingly counter-intuitive way. “With a really large, devastating, Katrina-scale disaster, we see the opposite” of corporate generosity, Tilcsik says. In that scenario, locally headquartered companies temporarily—and often dramatically—reduce their charitable contributions.
Big events can strengthen—or sever—the links that connect organizations. “A mega-event can be a magnet, if you will, that really gathers the corporations around,” says Mary Ann Glynn, professor of management and organization at Boston College. She cites the example of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta: “Suddenly, companies were in touch with each other that may not have been in touch before.”
With peers comes peer pressure, and that can be a good thing. “You want to be around the best,” says Daniel Lurie, a Bay Area nonprofit executive and the chair of the Super Bowl L host committee. “We had some of the best companies in the world signing on. It made our ‘ask’ a little easier.”
In the wake of a mega-disaster, meanwhile, the breaking of ties between local corporations and local nonprofits can have far-reaching consequences. “A lot of times, the focus is on recovery, in the sense of physical rebuilding and infrastructure,” says Tilcsik. “But if the local corporate sector cannot or doesn’t help the recovery of the local nonprofit sector, then you might see a much longer lag in the recovery of local civil society.”
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.