In an effort to educate our readers about the philanthropic efforts of Nevada businesses and foundations, Nevada Business Journal recently sponsored its first-ever philanthropy roundtable meeting, which was attended by some of the biggest givers in the Silver State. They discussed issues important to all companies involved in community giving campaigns, including the challenges and rewards of fundraising, methods of engaging employees in volunteerism, and strategies to ensure dollars make the most impact in the community.
Connie Brennan, publisher of Nevada Business Journal, served as the moderator for the event as part of the magazine’s monthly Industry Focus series, which brings CEOs together to discuss pertinent issues in their industry or profession. Following is a condensed version of the discussion.
Connie Brennan (Nevada Business Journal): What is the process for granting money to nonprofits? What do you look for?
Kirk Clausen: Requests come in a number of ways. We see a minimum of 30 unsolicited requests a month – maybe as high at 50 or 60, depending upon the time of the year. A lot of us here also use the grassroots approach; our employees are out in the community, they see an organization or a cause they like, and they run it up the flagpole with the team. We have a committee, which is fairly representative of the different positions within the bank, which makes decisions on how to spend the budget we have for charitable giving.
Steve Schorr: As a company, we have been involved with certain groups for a long time, but we also get suggestions from members of our team, and we give each of these equal weight. We have been able to narrow down the scope of our giving to three things: children, families and education. They’re not necessarily in order of one, two, three because they all have equal importance. We don’t typically get involved in anything outside of those three categories. Our philanthropic efforts have actually grown over the years, so each year it’s a little more of a challenge.
Rob McCoy: The needs, especially in Southern Nevada, have far outstripped the funds available.
Gina Polovina: Yes, and too few of us are being asked to do the majority of the giving.
Doretha Easler: Nevada Power has a charitable foundation and, like Cox, we try to narrow our focus down to four specific areas. For anything that falls outside of that, I have a budget I can use to purchase a table at an event or things like that.
Brennan: If you’re considering supporting an organization you haven’t worked with before, what do you look for?
McCoy: To begin with, we want to verify that the organization has a 501(c)3 classification. We also want to see who is running the organization and who’s serving on its governing board. If it’s a local group, this basic information is usually enough to help us separate the contenders from the pretenders.
Clausen: We look for United Way certification, too. If we see United Way is supporting them at some level, there’s a strong likelihood we may support them.
Schorr: We demand a face-to-face meeting. We want to be on a first-name basis with the people running the organization, and we want them to know who we are as well.
Paul Stowell: We have people we can turn to as a resource – specifically, the Business Community Investment Council (BCIC). We tap into its resources on a monthly basis to find out about nonprofit organizations that we may not be familiar with. A lot of companies are affiliated with BCIC, but more importantly, I can pick up the phone and call Steve [Schorr] and say, “Hey, Steve, have you heard about this organization?” Nine times out of 10, if he hasn’t heard about it, it’s probably not a group that’s worth the affiliation.
Julie Murray: BCIC meets monthly with the goal of strengthening and improving philanthropy in Southern Nevada. In fact, there are four past and current presidents around this table.
Brennan: Of all the requests you get, what percentage actually get funded?
Clausen: If I had to guess, maybe four out of 10 are getting approved. That’s taking into consideration that we’ve been supporting some organizations for the last 10 years, so very few new organizations are coming on-line. We look for ways to support as many as we can and to make as much impact as we can, but in the end, we have a responsibility to make sure our stockholders are getting the most bang for their buck.
McCoy: Sometimes what we can’t support with dollars, we will support with in-kind contributions, such as technology. We can also send volunteers to a group to help them out.
Mercedes Warrick: At BCIC, we’re hearing a lot of questions from members about how to make the most impact. They’re asking, “How can I collaborate with other businesses and organizations to make an impression?” Organizations are coming together and pooling resources, whether financial or in-kind, to make the most impact for their contribution.
Schorr: The challenge for corporations today is, we have to do things differently. Before, if there was a problem, we would throw money at it. We can do other things now besides that. With Cox, it’s not just technology – it’s everything from public service announcements to volunteering our employees, and sometimes that’s as valuable as giving money. I think that’s the key for philanthropy today – it’s not just money – it’s partnership.
Merlinda Gallegos: At MGM Mirage, when you count the requests for table purchases and auction donations, we get around 400 inquiries per week, which is a bit overwhelming. And out of those, I would say about 75 to 80 are requests to actually support programs. Of those, a very small percentage actually gets funded.
Brennan: When you are looking at a proposal, do you ask how much of your donation will actually fall to the bottom line?
Debi Puccinelli: Always. We actually request they put it in writing.
Schorr: We always want to know what percentage goes for administration and what percentage goes for whatever the cause may be. That’s a critical factor to determine what we’re going to do. If a disproportionate amount of funds goes to administration, we typically stay away.
McCoy: With some organizations – for instance, the Salvation Army – we know the dollars are being passed straight through to the needy.
Stowell: Nonprofit groups need to understand that they have a responsibility to be accountable to their donors, especially those that are contributing shareholder dollars. If you’re not going to be accountable and provide that kind of feedback, then I guarantee the funding is going to dry up.
Gallegos: We have specific focus areas: working with at-risk children, public education and community development. We’re starting to look at more of a continuum of care and also focusing on systems issues. For example, right now we’re sponsoring one of the empowerment schools, Peccole Elementary, and we will be building some of our philanthropy efforts around that. We’re going to have more volunteers actually at the school site. We collected 1,500 backpacks and had our employees distribute them there, because we see it as part of our corporate responsibility to help our employees get more engaged in the community.
Clausen: There are also opportunities to restrict your giving. For example, we’ve been able to go to universities and target specific dollars to first-generation scholarship winners. We know 100 percent of that money is going to the student to pay for books and credit hours and there are no administrative costs. As a giver, we love that.
Bret Bicoy: One of the things we in the philanthropic world forget sometimes is that when you are dealing with human services, overwhelmingly the biggest cost is the human beings. You need a person to actually provide the service – to do the counseling, to be the teacher of the young person or the caregiver for the senior citizen. So, when we look at where we invest our dollars, it’s important to consider how much of it is going to those kinds of costs, but we must also recognize that those are appropriate in some ways. You have to pay someone to teach in a classroom. That’s an appropriate expense. It’s when you have to pay for five bureaucrats for every one teacher that you begin to know something is wrong.
Schorr: Looking around this room, I would guess we’re talking about at least $20 million to $30 million in philanthropic giving, in both cash and time. I will speak for everybody by saying that none of us do it for the publicity. We do it because it’s the right thing to do for the community. But the organization receiving the money needs to respond in a proper way. And that is, to use that money for the reason it was given, and to then report back to the organization on what it did with the money.
Gallegos: With the MGM Mirage Voice Foundation, we build in a reporting time twice a year. Grant recipients send us outcome reports twice a year, and we also have site visits so our employees can see their dollars at work. I was really proud of our employees this year. They took a chance with a fairly new organization that I hadn’t heard much about. The group is working with youth, and has a prevention focus, so we decided to take a chance this first year, and we’ll keep an eye on them. I think we’re in danger of not being as innovative as we can be if we’re basing our decisions on small-town relationship giving. It’s also good to add some spice and get some outside influences in to solve community issues.
Bicoy: I couldn’t agree more. There are well-established charities that are very good investments for our community and they have a proven track record. But where do new ideas come from? Where does innovation come from? From people who are willing to challenge the way we’ve always done things and look for something different.
Warrick: At BCIC, we are really encouraging smaller and medium-sized businesses to join the philanthropy world. Our organization allows smaller companies to ask questions like, “How do I get my employees more involved?” and “How do I bring the themes of my business together with the needs of the community? How I can make an impact?” And we get some great ideas from companies that have small budgets for giving.
Schorr: There are some wonderful ideas out there, and I think it’s okay for us to steal ideas from each other. I am not afraid for somebody to take an idea I started, and have it grow for their company. I have learned a lot from the Agassi Foundation. The greatest joy of my life is that I have an elementary school named after me. However, there’s not enough money to go around for education – there aren’t enough books in the library or enough computers in the classrooms. So I appreciate having access to the ideas the Agassi Foundation developed to build their school.
Murray: One of the great things about Las Vegas is there’s such a “can do” spirit. If a problem or a social service need arises, everyone steps up to address it, and we collaborate with each other.
Stowell: If we don’t collaborate, and if we don’t engage more businesses to come to the table, we’re never going to solve these issues.
Brennan: How does Nevada stack up in terms of giving, compared to other states?
Warrick: Actually, that is very elusive information, because companies calculate their giving differently, and it’s difficult to place a dollar value on volunteer hours.
Bicoy: I don’t have any corporate statistics for the same reason. However, the Chronicle of Philanthropy conducted a study about five years ago that talked about individual giving. They looked at the percentage a typical community gives to charity out of its discretionary money. As a state, we consistently fall somewhere in the 40s out of the 50 states. I don’t think this shows we are less generous. For example, it’s unfair to compare Las Vegas to more established cities. If charitable giving is the manifestation of love and commitment to one’s community, it’s hard to have that love and commitment if you have only lived here for three years. So I don’t think we are less generous – we are just new. What we lack in Las Vegas is a long tradition of philanthropy, but we are beginning to build one right now. Every day you hear about another large, exciting project, like the Nevada Cancer Institute.
McCoy: We are maturing as a community. Over the last few years, when potential business customers consider a contract with us, they will ask what we are doing as a company to help the community. That information helps them make the decision whether to deal with us or not.
Brennan: I think we can assume that donations are made for the right reasons, but you can do good for the community and also get media exposure for the company. So, how do you maximize that exposure?
Puccinelli: That’s a good question, and it’s one we often wrestle with. If we give a small amount and get a large response to it, either in terms of communications or external publicity, the foundation board considers it money well spent. If we present a large gift and hear next to nothing about it, it makes it much more difficult for the next group that comes forward and asks for that type of commitment.
Laurie Susie: As a foundation, we receive charitable funding from a lot of people around this table, and we look for ways to partner with local corporations. For example, we added Boyd Gaming’s name to our pediatric unit. In addition, we did something very creative with Harrah’s; instead of saying, “We want your money to fund a bilingual magazine,” we put articles about our partnership in the Women’s Care Magazine that goes out to 360,000 people, so readers can see that Harrah’s is supporting St. Rose.
Puccinelli: We always encourage nonprofits to keep a little marketing spirit in everything they do, because it really is critical to get that feedback. I think it’s also important that nonprofits show they are aligned with a reputable organization such as Wells Fargo or Nevada Power. It gives them added credibility.
Stowell: Many times we look at the ROI (return on investment) and ask, “What are we getting out of this?” Steve made a good point that we’re really doing this to be good corporate citizens who believe in the community. But you have to understand, studies have shown that companies that give back to the community have greater loyalty among their employees, because employees want to work for companies that will support the causes they’re involved in. And the consumer will do business with companies that are more philanthropic, rather than those that aren’t, with all things being equal. So, there is a tangible return.
Bicoy: Publicity is important for several reasons, and one of them is that it’s setting new norms for our community. If I’m running a bank and I see that Business Bank is involved in the community, then I recognize that maybe I should be doing it too. Celebrating giving is important because we don’t have the long traditions of philanthropy here. One of the ways we’re going to create it is to show that it is “the thing to do.”
Gallegos: When the MGM Mirage Voice Foundation was founded five years ago, our employee giving rate was at about 33 percent. Since then, it has grown consistently to its present level of 47 percent. The more we educate our employees about the needs in the community, the more they want to be engaged. One of the quotes that goes around our company is, “There’s nothing more powerful than the human spirit on fire.” When you can educate and reach out and have a system in place that makes it easy for employees to give, and you have an accountability piece so they know exactly where their dollars are going, that’s the human spirit on fire.
Colleen Bacchus: Corporate philanthropy gives you a competitive advantage as an employer as well, because employees are demanding that we do things for the community. This is especially important to the new generation. They’re not only asking how much we’ll pay them, they also want to know how involved we are in the community. So we pay close atention to what our people are asking us to do, and we do a lot of community involvement based on that. We also try to match up their skills and desires with what the community needs.
Stowell: Punam Mather from MGM helped us understand how we can craft charitable giving into our employee benefits package. Employees want to work for you if you are philanthropy-minded. When Kirk [Clausen] serves as chairman of United Way of Southern Nevada, guess what? Employees are going to say, “Caring must start at the top,” and they appreciate that.
Polovina: Boyd Gaming has a long history of philanthropy in this community, having operated for four or five decades, and one of the things we found to solve the challenge of getting publicity was creating our own charitable giving report. It is a way we can communicate with our internal customers – our fellow employees, our boards of directors – as well as our external customers. We do that on an annual basis and also post it on our website.
Steve Anderson: One thing you don’t want to overlook is the value that the recipient gains from the recognition of receiving the grant. We require every building constructed with a capital grant to include the name Donald W. Reynolds. People tell me that this helps them approach other funders because they have been recognized as being a successful organization.
Brennan: How do you motivate your employees so they become engaged and have a passion for giving?
Gallegos: We have a great program called Dollars for Doers, which donates $10 for every hour of volunteer work. For example, if an employee volunteers 25 to 50 hours per year for his kid’s soccer club or something else that’s within our focus area, we write out a check to that nonprofit in his name for $250, and send it to him so he can present it to the organization. If any of our employees volunteers 51 hours or more per year, we write out a check for $500 to that organization.
Melissa Nelson: We put together a calendar of events all year long, so there’s constantly some sort of activity going on. And it’s not necessarily giving money – it’s giving your time. Maybe a school needs help, a house needs repairs or a project to clean up Red Rock Canyon has been organized. We like to provide as much opportunity as possible to our team members in various community-related activities.
Puccinelli: We do a lot of senior-related initiatives, including delivering birthday cakes to seniors. We’ve found that if we get an employee to go out on one of those deliveries, nine times out of 10 he or she becomes a real advocate of the program and starts recruiting other employees to volunteer as well.
Stowell: We pay our employees to go out during work hours to mentor and tutor and get involved with students at at-risk schools. But communication is crucial if you want people to volunteer time over a weekend. They’re not going to show up if you don’t communicate that information to them. At Business Bank, we don’t want management pushing volunteerism on our employees from the top down. We want our employees to communicate it from the bottom up. Our employees actually sit on the grants committee, and they are the ones driving the voluntarism of the employees who get involved.
Polovina: However, I don’t think you can underestimate the importance of the hierarchy in your organization, because they lead by example. And when you have people who are philanthropically inclined, it’s going to filter down throughout the entire organization.
Puccinelli: Recognition is important too. We sponsor a nice employee recognition luncheon on an annual basis. And we’re always looking for ways to recognize employees who contribute.
Clausen: We encourage our team members to get involved in organizations, even sitting on the boards of nonprofits.
Stowell: Our company actually mandates that everybody at VP level and above must sit on at least one nonprofit’s board; senior VPs and above sit on at least two boards, because if you are going to set the example, then you better go out and get involved. But what’s very rewarding for a company is seeing your employees put together a program by themselves and carry it through. A couple years ago, Center for Independent Living was remodeling and trying to furnish their center. Our management had no clue that employees were collecting donations for the project behind the scenes. Management found out about it and asked, “Why didn’t you get us involved?” and the employees said, “We didn’t need your help.”
Murray: One final thing – Bret mentioned that we rank in the bottom 10 in many areas of giving, but when you look at our ranking with regard to high school dropouts, teenage pregnancies and crime, they’re just tied in side-by-side. And when you look at the companies around this table, they are the ones funding health and human services and capital campaigns and so many great causes. It has to spread to the rest of the community, or else we won’t get off of the bottom of the list for these indicators.
Schorr: We have to be innovative in what we do, to take care of the major issues we face: education, healthcare, homelessness and others. A lot of people knock the business community by saying we aren’t doing enough for civic and charitable organizations, but I believe we are accomplishing a great deal, and I am proud of what the people around this table do on a daily basis.
The Volume of Corporate Giving Participants at the Philanthropy Roundtable were asked to estimate the amount their business or foundation contributes annually to communities in Nevada. While individual results were confidential, the total dollar amount was staggering: the 15 organizations represented at the roundtable contributed more than $110 million to local nonprofits and community groups. The participants represent just a fraction of all the companies in Nevada with charitable giving campaigns, which illustrates the immense impact philanthropy makes on the state’s well-being. Congratulations to all businesses, large and small, that make our state a better place in which to live.
