Corporate philanthropy: Strategic responses to the firm’s stakeholders. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

Corporate decisions about philanthropic contributions have become more strategic in recent years. Contributions aim not only to benefit recipient nonprofit organizations but also to fulfill major business objectives. This article develops a typology of strategic corporate philanthropy that distinguishes between strategic process and three strategic outcomes. It reports the extent of strategic philanthropy categories in an exploratory study of large firms headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Relationships between strategic philan-thropy and industry sector, organizational placement of the phil-anthropy function, firm age, and firm size are identified. Tension between two forces affecting business corporations in the 1970s set the stage for a strategic orientation to corporate philanthropy. Re-source scarcity brought a critical change in how managers perceived their organizations and environments, and managers increasingly began to focus on the strategic use of organizational resources-on effectivenes