Updates: corporate giving, poetry, and another Smithsonian problem

Some updates today on past topics, in no particular order:

Say I bet you've heard the conventional wisdom about corporate charitable giving being on the decline. (Can't work in or read about this sector for more than two minutes without hearing it, really.) Or perhaps its more-specialized cousin, the one about how corporate funding for the arts is shifting to marketing budgets. Um, nope. Say how about we open nominations for a couple of new cliches to fret about, those two ceased being original or interesting back around the Carter administration.

Poetry seems to have just burst out all over within the last generation or so in the U.S., and Chicago has for some reason played a huge role in that. When I graduated from college in 1985 poetry appeared to have a smaller place in the national consciousness than competitive ballroom dancing or ultimate frisbee. Since then the poetry-slam phenomenon, created in Chicago by Marc Smith, has burst out all over the place; and I've written about the sudden creation of a large well-funded non-profit to promote classical poetry (big enough to fight over you might say) which is headquartered in Chicago. Now I read, in the Chicago Tribune, that the University of Pennsylvania two years ago started making readings of poetry available for free download to iPods, and last year the site had 8 million downloads!

And over at our misbegotten national museum, sigh...turns out that the Smithsonian has been charging for prints of photographs of iconic historical items like the Wright Brothers' plane, and citing copyright rights to justify the prices. A notable flaw being that the photographs are not in fact copyrighted, as Public.Resource.org points out, meaning that the museum has been collecting money in exchange for rights which it has never actually owned. The advocacy group applied a nice example of the radical democratization which the information age can enable: they simply downloaded all 6,288 photos from the Smithsonian and posted them for free elsewhere! Cheers to them both for the originality and the point. (And kudos to my favorite blogger Harold Henderson for the tip.)

Corporate funding

The biggest surprise in the 2005 Giving USA report on philanthropy was that U.S. corporations today give away more of their profits than they did a generation ago. In fact a lot more: during the 1960s and 1970s total corporate giving never exceeded 1.0 percent of pre-tax profits but since 1981 it has averaged almost 50% more of total annual profits, and hasn't dipped as low as 1.0 percent even during recession years.

Er, /blush...if I had a dollar for every occasion in my career when I used "the decline of corporate philanthropy" as the reason for foundations or board members to dig deeper...well I could buy the 2006 annual report, for starters. Is there in the non-profit world any piece of conventional wisdom more universally repeated and believed?

(Note that the above figure covers only giving by corporations themselves, not by individual businesspeople like Warren Buffett or foundations that were funded by business fortunes.)