Whether cor­po­ra­tions real­ize it or not, they are explic­itly and implic­itly cap­ping their char­ity. I under­stand they want to pro­tect their lia­bil­i­ties as a com­pany and do not want to look fool­ish say­ing, “Sorry, we actu­ally can’t donate $1 tril­lion, but thanks for all the RTs.” If you’re going to match dona­tions or donate a por­tion of the pro­ceeds up to a cer­tain amount, why not just donate that amount? Make it mean­ing­ful and purposeful.

Here’s an explicit exam­ple from South­west Air­lines today:

For #VetsDay2011, we are giv­ing @ $1 per drink sold onboard our planes today (up to $50k)!  Details here:  http://t.co/iuVw8Pwu
Novem­ber 11, 2011 8:00 AM via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite
@SouthwestAir
South­west Airlines

Donat­ing $50,000 to the IAVA is very com­mend­able. Just do it. Bas­ing this act of char­ity on drink sales and cap­ping it is a cheap act after doing some quick math.

Southwest’s inflight menu sells energy drinks for $3 and booze for $5. One could eas­ily assume there’s at least a $1 mar­gin of profit per drink. They have more than 3,400 daily depar­tures. Their fleet con­sists of only Boe­ing 737 jets which seat about 180 peo­ple. (If you’ve flown with them, you’ll remem­ber they have board­ing groups A, B, and C num­bered 1 through 60.) If they have 3,400 flights with 180 pas­sen­gers try­ing to sell 50,000 drinks, less than 13 drinks per flight need to be pur­chased to meet the cap.

That’s less than 7% of pas­sen­gers per flight that need to buy some­thing for them to meet their cap. It’s not a goal of how much they’d like to raise, it’s a cap on how much they are will­ing to donate. Either donate all of your prof­its from drink sales for one day, or cut a check for $50k. Give what­ever amount you are com­fort­able giv­ing. It sounds cheap to put a cap on what you’ll give. Make mean­ing­ful donations.

If you’re going to make dona­tions based on pas­sive social media actions, make sure they are mean­ing­ful. This sum­mer Wendy’s offered to donate 50₵ for each retweet.

RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in fos­ter care. #TreatIt­Fwd
June 15, 2011 2:13 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Wendys
Wendy’s

Again, the math fails the sen­ti­ment, and they’re implic­itly cap­ping their dona­tion. Twit­ter pub­lished the most retweeted tweets of 2010 but didn’t give any met­rics for what each lit­tle dude rep­re­sented. There are 90 of them for the #1 retweeted tweet. If they rep­re­sent 1,000 peo­ple, that’s 90,000 RTs. If Wendy’s took this into account when “pric­ing” their RT dona­tion, they set their cap at $45,000. Even if they were retweeted 900,000 times that’s less than half a mil­lion dol­lars that’s not going to bank­rupt a com­pany with a mar­ket cap of $2 bil­lion.

Being a cynic, Wendy’s also may have noticed that Twit­ter doesn’t give an exact num­ber of retweets. After it reaches 100 RTs, it just says “100+” so no one has any way of keep­ing them hon­est. (Even the API returns “100+” as the retweet_count)

Fifty cents a RT isn’t mean­ing­ful. Write a check for $45,000 and tweet about how oth­ers can con­tribute what they are com­fort­able giv­ing. I guar­an­tee that approach will raise more money than pas­sively hop­ing your tweet goes viral.

Cor­po­ra­tions don’t have to put explicit and implicit caps on their dona­tions when rely­ing on oth­ers to meet their “goal”. Take notice of how Char­ity Water and Movem­ber are empow­er­ing indi­vid­u­als to raise more for a cause than a sin­gle corporation’s cam­paign could. Cor­po­ra­tions should use their social media fol­low­ing to make mean­ing­ful dona­tions, not cap their charity.

Update

Twit­ter announced today that the most retweeted Tweet of 2011 was from Wendy’s. It was not the one men­tioned above (it came in 2nd), but one exactly like it sent a week before. The announce­ment states they raised $50,000 which means the two Tweets com­bined for 100,000 retweets. (That makes my math above pretty accurate.)

Wendy’s Tweet is also notable because it was a Pro­moted Tweet, part of a Twit­ter adver­tis­ing cam­paign that Wendy’s ran in June to cel­e­brate Father’s Day.

What wasn’t appar­ent until now is that Wendy’s paid to make their tweet go viral. Accord­ing to this Quora post by an ex-PMM at Twit­ter, that costs between 20c and $5. If you assume they were on the low­est end of this and only had 50,000 retweets from their cam­paign, they spent $10,000 (50,000 x .2) to donate $50,000 instead of just donat­ing $60,000 in the begin­ning. Sounds like a suc­cess­ful cam­paign to me.