Corporate Giving for Performing Arts is Scarce—Here's How One Bank Has Made it a Priority
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dancers from MADCO perform during the 2019 PNC Arts Alive announcement event in St. Louis.
Corporate giving has “never been a great panacea” for performing arts organizations, said Zannie Voss, director of the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University, in an interview with American Theatre.
She was being generous. According to her research, individual donors (non-trustees) provide the most funding to the arts, while corporations provide the least. “If you’re covering no more than 2% of expenses from corporate philanthropy, that’s normal,” Voss said, citing her study on the topic in 2019.
In light of this data, it’s always refreshing to come across a corporate grantmaker like PNC Financial Services, which, of the top 10 U.S. banks by assets, is the only one that lists “arts and culture” as a giving priority, IP’s Liz Longley points out.
The bank’s support for the arts flows through PNC Arts Alive. Since its inception in 2009, the initiative has awarded more than $18 million in grants to cultural organizations in Central Ohio, Southeast Florida, Greater Philadelphia, Southern New Jersey, Delaware and Greater St. Louis. Recipient organizations focus on issues like arts education, boosting curatorial diversity, and optimizing virtual engagement.
I recently dialed into a webinar on the state of performing arts philanthropy and heard Debbie Marshall, PNC’s senior vice president of client and community relations, talk about the program and the corporation’s approach to arts giving. I reached out to her a few days later to get some additional insights.
“When we collaborate with an arts nonprofit, we want to understand how its vision or concept is unique,” she said. “That’s what most funders want to hear about because the current landscape is one where virtually all arts organizations are taking a closer look at how they operate and move forward.”
Explaining the disconnect
The reasons behind corporate America’s meager support for the arts will sound familiar to experienced fundraisers. “Corporations need to see ROI,” American Theatre Wing’s Heather Hitchens told me, “and it’s hard to show them the ROI they want. Even their grants are a business decision.”
“A lot of corporations have questions about ‘what do you have in terms of programs that I can put my name and logo on now?’ and that’s just different than a private foundation,” said Jerome Foundation President Ben Cameron, who, as the former manager of community relations at Target, speaks from experience. “A private foundation isn’t looking for market share; corporations, though, have a bottom-line responsibility to shareholders.”
Further muddying the waters, corporate support for arts organizations frequently takes the form of sponsorships—a business transaction in which the corporation gives the organization money in exchange for something that will boost the brand, generate income, or reach new consumers. For example, Metropolitan Opera corporate sponsor benefits include “client entertaining opportunities, including priority reservations at the Grand Tier Restaurant.”
Sponsorships, Hitchens said, are “never disguised as philanthropy.” However, surveys on giving often fail to differentiate between sponsorships and “pure” charitable contributions, making it difficult to gauge the true extent of corporations’ non-transactional support for the arts.
In 2018, the Conference Board reported that 61% of 113 corporate survey respondents support the theater field. That figure jumped to an impressive 88% for the 16 surveyed companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 billion. “Financial contributions typically come from philanthropy/foundation budgets,” the report states, “but companies often fund their support through sponsorship budgets, as well, which could explain the high response rate of companies making financial contributions.”
Profiles in grantmaking
The following PNC Arts Alive grants underscore the program’s support for timely issues like education, inclusion and audience engagement.
Performer’s Project, a Jacksonville-based open-mic night and workshop for at-risk youth, received a grant to pay for supplies, transportation and other programming costs. “The fact that PNC is willing to stand behind it and fund it and give teens in Jacksonville a safe place to share and a platform to exchange.… I’m over the moon,” said the project’s organizer, Ebony Payne-English, in an interview with local news.
PNC Arts Alive awarded a $25,000 grant to the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis to launch two diversity fellowships as part of its Museum Pathways Project education program. “Throughout the museum field, we are motivated to make our profession more diverse—to make sure museums are welcoming, inclusive and relevant to all,” Lisa Melandri, CAM’s executive director, said in a statement. “Thanks to PNC Arts Alive, we are providing more opportunities to a new generation of arts professionals.”
And last March, just as the pandemic was shuttering concert halls, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra launched Instrument Playground Online, a resource that features videos, photos and activities that introduce audiences to the instruments of the orchestra and the musicians who play them. The orchestra funds the series through a PNC Arts Alive grant.
Click here for previous grantees and here for region-specific grantmaking information.
Arts as an investment
Back in 2015, Americans for the Arts published a report by Lynn E. Stern called “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Arts.” Stern wrote that “as corporations integrate their philanthropic giving into the ‘double bottom line’ with an eye toward quantifiable return on their ‘investments,’ arts and culture are often at a disadvantage in relation to other programmatic focus areas (e.g., education, health and the environment), which may benefit from a greater array of ‘countable’ outcomes.”
This is an important observation, but corporate funders’ support for the arts can be viewed as a form of investment in community, as PNC funding demonstrates. In November, the PNC Foundation committed an additional $1 million to nonprofit cultural institutions in Greater St. Louis. This funding will be distributed over a five-year period and represents what the foundation called “an extension and evolution” of PNC Arts Alive.
“Since establishing a presence in Greater St. Louis 10 years ago, PNC has helped local institutions make the arts more accessible to diverse audiences,” said Michael Scully, PNC regional president for St. Louis. “While that objective remains, we recognize that now is a critical time for the arts community as it adapts, rebuilds and reimagines the landscape for visual and performing arts.”
PNC has granted $3 million to visual and performing arts groups throughout the region since 2010. One could even go so far as to frame this support as an investment. “The arts help make a community a thriving community and a community that’s attractive for workers and businesses,” Marshall told me. “The arts contribute significant revenue to the community, as well, by bringing in tourists.” In fact, she told me that the arts draw a larger attendance than all of St. Louis’ professional sports teams combined, suggesting that corporate leaders can at least partially quantify an investment in the arts.
Six years and one pandemic after Stern’s report, Marshall’s commentary suggests that corporate funders need to be reminded that support for the performing arts can have a powerful “return on investment” by kickstarting a home city’s post-pandemic economic recovery.
As Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Executive Director Brooke Flanagan told me, “In order for any city to get back up and going, they’ll need performing arts organizations to attract audiences.” Reopening venues will foster and strengthen the “broader ecology of the community. It’s good for the city’s image and brand, and for tourism.”
“Inclusive and equitable”
PNC’s November announcement also noted that it will enhance Arts Alive in St. Louis 2021 “to help arts nonprofits improve their business resilience and sustainability.” Grant recipients will “benefit from next-generation capacity-building sessions and access to experts—including members of PNC’s enterprise innovation team—who will encourage the consideration and adoption of ‘next practices,’ such as design thinking and various principles of successful startups.”
Marshall told me that she and her team will continue to challenge organizations to ask themselves how they are relevant. “That is key in this environment, and by putting some definition around that, there are possibilities for some really unique and creative approaches to the arts,” she said.
“We’re not necessarily looking for what might be considered traditional programming; we encourage them to think about what they may be wanting to pilot, or how they’d like to take their current programming to a new level. That’s what we want—for organizations to think in new and different ways.”
PNC will also be looking for performing arts organizations that are “creating belonging,” Marshall said. “It’s about creating an inclusive environment where all feel welcome and asking how organizations are being inclusive and equitable in what they’re offering to audiences. It’s about expanding the thought process around defining the audience and aligning programming to be accessible to that audience.”
PNC will announce the 2021-2023 Greater St. Louis grant recipients in April 2021. PNC Arts Alive’s evolution will unfold concurrently with the bank’s June 2020 grantmaking initiative, pegged at over $1 billion, to combat systemic racism and support economic empowerment of African Americans and low- and moderate-income communities.
To read more on this topic, check out my chat with Bank of America’s global arts and culture executive Rena DeSisto concerning the company’s support for the Bank of America ACTivate Awards. The awards support theater programs that accelerate change in the areas of EDI and expand the audiences and communities engaged with theater throughout the country.
