Target: Quietly Dominating Educational Philanthropy

For a huge company that is known for getting it right with design, and even changing big-box discount retailing by offering customers great design, rather than treating them like slobs with leftover-quality slop in a sloppy setting, Target should be known be known for something else it really gets right.

Target is the ultimate corporate activist in several critical areas: social services, the arts, and most notably, education.

One problem: other than it's own occasional PR, who's talking about it? The Minneapolis company, at 33 on this year's Fortune 500 with $59B in annual revenue, gives away $3M weekly to a variety of education-focused and other social programs, according to their website and the wikipedia snippet below:


Target Corporation is consistently ranked as one of the most philanthropic companies in the country. According to a November 2005 Forbes article, it ranked as the highest cash-giving company in America in percentage of income given (2.1%).^[54] Target donates around 5 percent of its pre-tax operating profit; it gives over $3 million a week (up from $2 million in years prior) to the communities in which it operates. It also gives a percentage of charges from its Target Visa to schools designated by the cardholders. To date, Target has given over $150 million to schools across the United States through this program. Target's corporate by-laws state it must give 5 percent of its pre-tax profits to charity.

So here are some blog posts and articles on Target's educational activism.

(cue crickets)

There AREN'T ANY. Isn't it enough to simply give away a lot of money in a bunch of ways to a bunch of deserving recipients? Not that they do it for the press...but a little press is nice recognition for a deserving company. Is it that they don't get it because they're a huge company, or because they're relatively quiet about it, or because education itself isn't as sexy as green?

UPDATE: Forget to link to this BusinessWeek article about one of Target's scholastic programs. I guess they're getting some press anyway, on top of the cool, if slightly conceptual, tv spot about designing classrooms that just shows a guy drawing a 3D visual of a classroom on a 2D surface...