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David Hungate
United Way
Is Dixon Hubard, Feinour & Brown the Roanoke Valley's best corporate-giving company? The generous staff: Seated, from left: Stebbins Hubard, Jonathan Grace. Standing, from left: Becky Fritts, Jean ReMine, Walter ("Watt") Dixon III, Whitney Brown, Tracy Snyder, Angie Carroll, Ted Feinour. Not in the photo: Walter Dixon, Jr.
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United Way II
The United Way, dependent on about 400 corporate donors and about 20,000 individuals, saw its annual contributions peak a decade ago in 2001, at $6.6 million.
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Corporate Giving in Roanoke
Companies with the deepest pockets aren’t always where workers dig deepest. Total funds contributed to United Way, 2010.
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David Hungate
United Way
Is Dixon Hubard, Feinour & Brown the Roanoke Valley's best corporate-giving company? The generous staff: Seated, from left: Stebbins Hubard, Jonathan Grace. Standing, from left: Becky Fritts, Jean ReMine, Walter ("Watt") Dixon III, Whitney Brown, Tracy Snyder, Angie Carroll, Ted Feinour. Not in the photo: Walter Dixon, Jr.
Once you get past the apples/oranges factors of size of company versus per-capita giving, a few local firms do rise above the rest when it comes to providing for charity.
No, you can’t really present a Best Corporate Giver award to a Roanoke Valley company. Combine understandable United Way reluctance to provide precise dollar numbers with matters of company size versus per capita giving, and things get sticky quickly.
But there’s certainly a strong contender for the top spot. The investment firm of Dixon, Hubard, Feinour & Brown not only got 100 percent participation from its 10 employees in the most recent United Way campaign, it was also among just 16 companies valley-wide where employees averaged a Platinum Award level $1 per day ($365) in contributions. And DHF&B was one of just four of the $1-per-day firms to get employee participation of at least 75 percent.
At the top for raw dollars? Roanoke’s only Fortune 500 company, Advance Auto Parts, at $727,503 in United Way giving for 2010.
Also among larger firms: SunTrust Bank was the only United Way participant giving at least $100,000 in 2010 and among the 16 whose employees reached that Platinum Award standard of $1 a day, or $365 annually.
Then there’s the unique case of Carilion Clinic, a $417,806 contributor to UWRV and also provider of a mammoth $154 million in community benefit when you factor in charity medical care.
As is clear from the contribution levels of Dixon, Hubard, Feinour & Brown and other smaller firms, the biggest aren’t always the most benevolent when it comes to corporate giving to charity.
The Roanoke area certainly depends on its highest-profile payrolls for donations to hundreds of causes, but the companies with smaller pockets are often the ones where workers dig deepest.
The other leaders in total giving to UWRV in 2010 are a familiar lineup – and as indicated with the list that accompanies this story – either based here or have large local presences. Behind Advance Auto Parts’ $727,503, the next hightest donors were: Carilion Clinic, $417,806; Norfolk Southern Corp., $350,000 and Kroger Mid-Atlantic, $250,000.
But the United Way declines to disclose the exact amount of other major donations, citing privacy on behalf of contributors. The organization expresses concern about embarrassing some employers whose names have disappeared from the list in recent years. Instead, UWRV limits disclosure about top overall donors to ranges that identified the top 13 givers in 2010. (See the list on page 47.)
Indeed, even those ranges of giving reveal some volatility among the donor ranks since the economic downturn began in 2007. For example, the Allstate Insurance National Support Center was among UWRV’s $100,000-$249,999 contributors in 2007. But Allstate disappeared from the list in 2008, returned in 2009 and was missing again in 2010.
The list of donors whose employees each give $1 per day has been through changes too: four of the 15 companies that were on it in 2009 didn’t make the list in 2010.
Being among the top per-capita contributors isn’t guaranteed even when the boss is the volunteer head of United Way’s campaign drive. Consider that Debbie Meade, publisher of The Roanoke Times, was UWRV’s campaign vice chair in 2010, and the newspaper is consistently among the $100,000-plus aggregate givers. But on a per-capita basis, Times employees didn’t come close to the $1-a-day bar in 2010; UWRV records them in a lower category: 25 to 49 cents a day.
Of course it may be easier for smaller companies to make the personal appeal that can persuade employees to open their wallets. Consider that the 16 $1-per-day contributors to United Way last year featured many locally owned concerns such as Dixon, Hubard, Feinour & Brown’s 10-person payroll.
The sacrifice by individuals at the firm came despite the nature of their industry, which puts DHF&B on the front line of the recession – heavily dependent on a segment of the economy that has been hard hit by the roller coaster of Wall Street stocks.
Still, in its 2010 fundraising campaign for United Way, there was no balking by employees, says Watt Dixon, portfolio manager.
“Things went pretty smooth,” he says. “I think everyone takes a little pride that we all participate. I think everyone in the office has participated since I’ve been here – 2000.”
Of the 16 organizations reaching the $1-per-day per capita level, only four others reported an employee participation level of at least 75 percent. (The United Way doesn’t disclose the exact percentage.) Three of those are Roanoke-headquartered companies: the accounting firm of Anderson & Reed, HomeTown Bank and Thomas Rutherfoord Inc. The other $1-per-day organization is – perhaps not surprisingly – the United Way of Roanoke Valley itself, which has 15 paid staffers.
Working out of modest downtown offices on Campbell Avenue near the Roanoke city jail, the United Way is arguably the area’s highest profile charitable organization. But its fundraising efforts have been challenged in recent years. In fact, the UWRV, dependent on about 400 corporate donors and about 20,000 individuals, saw its annual contributions peak a decade ago in 2001, at $6.6 million.
In recent years, since the nation’s economy dipped in 2007, the organization’s giving totals have stagnated at $6.1 million, or 7.5 percent below the peak in 2001.
That year marked a record for donations to United Way of Roanoke Valley, says Frank Rogan, president and chief executive officer, partly in response to the national effort to help victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks: “When we added it all up there was more than we’ve ever had before. For me it reinforces that people here are very generous.”
The Roanoke area’s generosity has held up much better than the rest of the nation. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a for-profit research firm and publication based in Washington, D.C., donations to the country’s 400 biggest charities plunged in 2010 by 11 percent, the worst decline in two decades. The Chronicle said six of the 10 largest charities, including United Way Worldwide, reported declines.
Maybe Roanoke’s philanthropic psyche is a logical local personality trait, says Dana Ackley, a business psychologist who is president of the EQ Leader Inc. consulting firm and volunteers as a UWRV board member: “Roanoke doesn’t have the economic ‘flash’ that some larger, faster-growing communities have. Paradoxically, Roanoke appears to be a more generous community than those that are more economically dynamic (and volatile). Why? Maybe we stay better connected to human principles, better able to recognize and value the fabric of community.”
Roanoke’s steadfast giving to charities has found a bastion among employers. Large ones such as SunTrust typically organize dozens of their workers for internal United Way fundraising campaigns that include meetings in which their co-workers’ giving is wooed. Such efforts highlight the trenches of corporate charity – the cubicles and reception desks, the store aisles and bank lobbies, the hospital rooms and car dealership parking lots – where the message is gentle but persistent: Someone needs your financial help.
To be sure, the United Way is far from the only charity to which many workers give, either through work or on their own. But the umbrella group’s donation effort is the community’s widest, and so is the list of organizations to which it distributes funds: to hundreds of causes from the Adult Care Center of Roanoke Valley to the YMCA.
And while some other charities are huge fund raisers on their own, such as the Roanoke Rescue Mission, with an annual budget of about $4 million, and the Foundation for Roanoke Valley, a nonprofit that relies heavily on endowments from individuals that have ranged from $2 million to nearly $14 million in recent years, the United Way is the most active group at seeking donations in the workplace.
Further, because neither the Foundation nor the Rescue Mission discloses information about its donors, the United Way – which permits considerable though not complete transparency about its sources – provides the best available measure of Who’s Who in corporate giving. And 92 percent of United Way’s contributions come through the workplace, with the rest from individuals.
But while the United Way’s public records represent a leading indicator on trends in corporate giving, some organizations do much more. Consider Carilion Clinic, a hardy perennial in UWRV’s annual workplace campaign. In addition, the 12,000-employee nonprofit medical system, with Roanoke’s largest payroll, says it provided a whopping $154 million in overall community benefits in 2009, including $41.7 million in charity medical care.
Still, relatively small businesses such as HomeTown Bank, Davidsons clothiers and Dixon, Hubard dominate the list of 16 employers whose workers topped United Way givers locally in per capita donations.