For years, Apple seemed intent on changing the world though its array of computers, software, and devices rather than by giving large sums directly to charity.
Since co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, however, the tech giant has increased the profile of its giving under the leadership of its CEO, Tim Cook, who this week said he will give the majority of his personal wealth to charity, according to a report in Fortune magazine.
Recent corporate gifts from Apple, including more than $40 million to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund this month, have raised expectations among nonprofit leaders that the most profitable company has charted a new, more generous course.
Many nonprofit leaders are pleased by this turnabout. Mr. Jobs was known to place a premium on developing technology tools that would benefit people and rewarding shareholders, rather than donating to charities, they say.
“He wasn’t known as a philanthropic leader — that’s the kindest thing to say,” says Peter Hero, a philanthropy consultant who was president of a precursor organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. “There were some [philanthropic] leaders during the growth spurt of the ’90s, and Apple wasn’t one of them.”
Matching Gifts
Under Mr. Cook, Apple instituted a program that has matched $25 million in employees’ financial contributions to charities since 2011.
Last year it announced that it would extend its matching program to include employee volunteer time. For the first three months of this year, the company matched volunteer time at double the normal rate of $25 an hour, meaning for every hour an employee volunteered, Apple would give $50 to a charitable organization of the employee’s choice. Since Mr. Jobs’s death, the company has donated tens of millions of dollars to improve health care and education and fight poverty, but the extent of Apple’s generosity is unclear, because the company declined to provide figures on charitable giving.
Rachel Wolf, a company spokeswoman, declined to comment and would not provide figures for how much Apple steered toward charitable causes last year but referred to media reports that mentioned Apple gifts, including $50 million toward new hospital buildings at Stanford University in 2012; a total of $100 million over several years to Project Red, an effort to end HIV/AIDS led by the rock star Bono; $500,000 in 2014 to SF Gives, a Bay Area antipoverty effort; and $100 million in Apple products and cash grants over an unspecified time to ConnectED, a program to provide poor students access to technology at school.
This month, the company announced a $50 million gift to promote technology training for women and minorities. More than $40 million of the donation will go to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund to support technology training at historically black colleges and universities and to create a database of gifted tech students at those institutions. The remainder will go to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Apple hopes the gift will establish a pipeline of women and minority technology workers to fill jobs in the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters and its other corporate offices.
Those announced gifts pale in comparison to the size of the tech colossus, which last year paid out $11 billion in shareholder dividends and notched a profit of $39.5 billion on sales that reached nearly $183 billion. It donations are also much smaller than other tech companies’ charity programs, including Intel’s similar commitment to diversity, a $300 million effort announced in January. (For more about giving by big companies, see The Chronicle’s annual survey results.)
But Mr. Hero says the recent gifts are a sign of things to come. The Marshall Fund gift, he says, is a pure Silicon Valley business play: While it does seek to improve the job prospects of women and minority techies, it could also go a long way toward ameliorating criticism the company faces for not having a diverse work force.
“You can’t guilt people into giving,” he says. “If you have a solution, you can get people’s ear. If you have a problem, you won’t get through the door.”
The Story Behind a Big Gift
That’s the tack Johnny Taylor, the Marshall College Fund president, chose when he approached Apple.
About a year ago, Mr. Taylor first met with Apple’s human-resources chief, Denise Young Smith, herself a graduate of Grambling State University, a historically black college.
In their talks, Mr. Taylor stressed that making a gift was a “talent proposition” for the company rather than a charitable enterprise.
The gift, he says, is larger than the $40 million announced by the company and surpasses the $42 million given to the UNCF in 1998.
Mr. Taylor wanted to disclose the full amount but said the company had other plans.
“They resisted the notion,” he says. “It feels a little braggy, and that’s just not their style.”
Once the gift was made final, Mr. Taylor pushed to make the announcement in February, to celebrate Black History Month. Again, the company pushed back, he says, and decided to inform the public at its annual shareholders meeting in March, where it also debuted its new Apple watch. The company never explained why, but Mr. Taylor surmises the computer giant wanted to send a message by publicizing the gift at the same time it discussed new products and stock performance.
“The entire context of the announcement was not that this is philanthropy but that this is the way we do business,” he says.
Philanthropic Impulses
Under Mr. Cook’s leadership, the company has an opportunity to establish itself as a charitable leader, says John Cary, a philanthropy consultant who has been critical of Apple’s giving in the past. Mr. Cook, he says, seems more motivated than Mr. Jobs to make his mark in ways that can’t be read on a corporate balance sheet.
“Clearly he’s got the instincts,” he says. “He’s got all the right impulses.”
The biggest companies gave a median of 0.1 percent of their total revenues, or about $58 million each, to charity in 2014, according to responses by 62 Fortune 100 companies surveyed by CECP, a coalition of corporate leaders that urge businesses to focus on the social good. For Apple, giving that share of revenues would equal about $183 million last year.
Margaret Coady, executive director of the coalition, which does not list Apple as a member, thinks it is likely the company will increase its philanthropic work.
“All companies are seeing a rise in social expectations and a desire among their employees and customers for the company to be a force for good,” she says. “Being one of the largest companies in the world carries this expectation.”
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