I believe Amazon and their one-click donation started it.
Apple followed up on it.
Microsoft, as usual, did a better job than Apple, but after a while.
IBM, as usual, still doesn’t get it.
Oracle, as usual, cannot spare real-estate beyond the Peoplesoft deal.
Walmart, as usual, offers it to you, but only with one brand (Red cross?!)
Samsung, as usual, doesn’t want to link to it, least someone blames them.
Ford, as usual, just talks about it’s heritage and brand.
GM, as usual, put in enough to keep moving.
Virgin, as usual, is a pedestal for Branson next quest. Hope it includes south-east asia and relief.
FedEx, as usual, is low-key in approach, but hugely helpful.
Here ends my recap of how some of the big corporate houses are responding to the urgency in the Indian Ocean countries.
11 Jan 2005 at 1:42 pm
Did you look at what Home Depot offered to their customers AND employees? First, the company itself donated an emergency grant of $1M (a drop in the bucket, but only a downpayment).
Then, they set up a dontations webpage, and yes, it did recommend using Red Cross or a handful of other agencies. HOWEVER — the link to Red Cross was implemented in EFT, and there was a space to indicate the EMPLOYER for your personal gift. Why? Because Home Depot, as well as other major employers, do a MATCHING contribution on their employees’ gifts.
Because this was set up, an efficient channel for donating CASH to the world’s relief agencies was set up, with ample mechanism for those agencies to come back and claim documented instances of gifts from millions of small sources.
I don’t usually give through Red Cross, et al, because they DO have high overheads, and because they DO sometimes get caught (in local situations) with somebody’s hands in the till. However, in this instance, the partnership between the two was effective, timely, and well done. Contrast this to the tepid response made by Royal Dutch Shell, whose major underpinnings as a petroleum major grew out of their INDONESIAN holdings! Their website said NOTHING about the disaster victims and relief, only about their concerns for their own employees.
The philanthropic spirit of the American people has been often noted, and often manipulated for personal and political gains. But what is often overlooked is the role of our corporate titans in providing LEADERSHIP for these campaigns, as well as “in-kind” resources (websites, advertising, cash channels, merchandise, etc.). The “average American” doesn’t have a clue how to make a solidly-directed contribution, and, had it not been for timely advertising, the Red Cross would have been deluged with donations of canned foodstuffs, which couldn’t have been mobilized to Asia for MONTHS (not enough shipping).
Not all corporations share the same ideals, or the same reputation for social good works. Moreover, they are often damned if they do [oh, that was just a drop in the bucket] or damned if they don’t [we wanted to avoid the criticism, so we took a non-public role with our donations]. The US isn’t leading the fight in this effort — our friends Down Under are produly doing that — but the sum total of the nightly news doesn’t cover the thousands, and millions, of individual efforts above and beyond that will ultimately lead to survival, then revival, in this stricken world.
Let’s reserve criticism for the ones (such as Al Qaeda) who are opting to increase misery, or line their own pockets with relief cash, rather than condemning ANYONE who opts to make a genuine contribution — no matter HOW small it may be.