T O P 3 C H A R I T A B L EC O M P A N I E S O F 2 0 1 5

HOLDEN BUCKNER

Tallying around 4.8 billion in total funds,companies in both finance and healthcare havegiven away money to a long list of charitableorganizations and causes. The Chronicle ofPhilanthropy reports that the corporate donationoutput has increased two percent from the 2014year, further indicating that this number will onlybe expected to increase in the coming years.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has paired heavy data withpublic reporting to aggregate numbers to determine thetop charity giving companies within the last year.

This organization thoroughly analyzed the country’s 150largest public companies/ fortune 500 companies withinthe last year. During this data-driven process, theChronicle of Philanthropy reviewed public financialdocuments filed with the Internal Revenue Service,Securities and Exchange Commission and public reportsof the company’s outward finances. Its extensivedatabase consists of 68 companies in the 2015 year.

This comprehensive report includes dataaggregated from pretax income, total cashgiving, donated products, and grant making.Amidst all these cases, there were only fourcases that pointed to a untracked donations.These figures take domestic figures, along withinternational giving patterns into account.

The top charitable giving company on theChronicle of Philanthropy’s list is Pfizer,whogave 93.3 million in cash and the rest consistingof services, products. It is clear that Pfizer was aleading force in increasing the overall corporatecharitable output, with the company’sphilanthropic engagement rate raising forty-fourpercent.

A close runner up to Pfizer is Gilead Sciences,which is a biopharmaceutical company basedout of California. Gilead Sciences gave over 2.3billion dollars, indicating a little over a hundredpercent increase over its charitable giving rateof the previous year.

Merck & co., the well-known healthcare firm hasdonated close to 2 billion last year, with 133million in the form of cash. Similar to Pfizer, aportion of the company’s donations was given incash, along with other givings. The datacompiled in this report points to product givingat market value and areas such as volunteer orfundraising is not included in this total amount.

Paying close attention to companies thatmaintain solid corporate social responsibilityprograms is also important when also thinkingabout making a career related move. How acompany is aligned with their CSR programscan also appeal to employees in the workforcenavigating the market.