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Microsoft has been recognized through a survey of major corporations as doing the best job of investing in its community. The survey was part of a meditation published through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

The study was presented with a broader sound on the relationship between business and their communities. Seattle was one of eight cities where the report held forums through business leaders, providing a not-too-surprising please of threats to violent departure from established precedent: education, “the Seattle process,” and transportation. Read on in spite of more details.

Microsoft came out on pinnacle in an online survey, focused on incorporated community investment in 2007. The lake of companies evaluated included “large companies in larger U.S. cities along with U.S. Chamber subordinate part firms and thus responses are not truly representative of all corporations in the U.S.,” the cogitate’s authors note.

The consequence of the study was more to look at best practices in incorporated philanthropy, but survey respondents were asked to “name other companies they intention were doing the best job of investing in the communities in which they cause.” (Note: The survey is based without ceasing 468 responses from corporate employees, a response rate of 1.6 percent. The authors added this caveat: “No statistical tests of the representativeness of the sample or respondent group have been made. Therefore, all conclusions herein should not be considered representative of the inexact business community.”)

The authors introduce their communication in the context of globalization and its implications for “to what degree business leaders eye their companies’ role in U.S. communities.” Contrary to what the authors call “the popular stereotype,” numerous company companies choose to stay in a community for years, and invest significantly. “[C]orporate community investment (CCI) is motivated by a brute passion to improve local competitive conditions and quality of life, ‘give back,’ and recruit and retain employees and customers.”

Education is the top recipient of corporate philanthropy, the communication found. “This seems to proceed from a view that education is related to the future competitiveness of the communities in which they are involved,” the authors wrote. “… ‘Combination funds,’ in third place, are gifts made to organizations of that kind as the United Way and Catholic Charities. Therefore, the results suggest that very a large portion of corporate philanthropy is still not targeted about particular issues and initiatives, despite the progress the field has made toward more strategic philanthropy in the past decade.”

Seattle is one of the eight communities studied in detail in the report. Participants in a forum convened for the report focused on “how Seattle is simultaneously characterized by progressive, forward-looking leadership and conventional urban dysfunction that regularly threatens introduction of novelty.” The top three issues they identified for Seattle were schools, general body of mankind resolution making (aka “the Seattle process”), and forced exile.

The forum participants did not have much faith in existing institutions to solve the “Seattle process” problem. “They … agreed that no chambers of illicit or other commerce alliances remain that can confront the slow public processes that threaten Seattle’s continued growth, and for that believed that a unused set of alliances would need to be created to deal with the realities of Seattle’session development challenges.”

The Seattle-specific information begins in continuance page 42 of the state (72-page PDF).


Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/12/18/microsoft_named_top_us_company_for_community_inves.html