Welcome to Logo Land

A few years back, folks in philanthropic circles recall, the word was that the Liberty Bell was to be restored with a multimillion dollar gift from Taco Bell--and duly renamed the Taco Liberty Bell.

“That was a joke,” says Jack Shakely, president of the California Community Foundation. “This isn’t.”

The “this” he is talking about is the escalating trend toward naming buildings at centers for arts and education for corporate donors, sometimes with incongruous results: Consider the plan for a Ralph Burkle / Ralphs / Food 4 Less Foundation Auditorium at the Disney Concert Hall to say thanks for the $15 million given by the grocery chain foundation and parent company executive Burkle.

“Buildings and halls have always been named for donors,” Shakely says, “but it’s only recently that they’ve been named for corporate donors.

“There’s certainly nothing illegal or immoral about it, but it gives me some concerns.” Among these: Where do we draw the fine line between philanthropy and marketing?

Did the Rockefellers erect a landmark and call it Standard Oil Center? Did Carnegie have that concert hall and all those libraries he endowed named for his steel company?

The names of 19th century captains of industry (or, as some would have it, robber barons) are immortalized on edifices from coast to coast. But not their corporate names.

San Marino’s Huntington Library bears the name of Henry E. Huntington (not his Pacific Electric Railway Co.), Pasadena has the Norton Simon Museum, not the Hunt-Wesson Foods / Canada Dry Museum. That place in Malibu is not the Getty Oil Co. Museum.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford and hundreds of other colleges and universities bear the names of founders and other donors, as do thousands of hospitals.

What is new is “cause-related marketing,” introduced by American Express a decade ago. AmEx gave big to the Statue of Liberty renovation--based on a percentage of what its cardholders charged.

“So many companies are now tying their giving to what they’re about and what marketplace they’re in,” says Dwight F. Burlingame, director of academic programs and research at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. He calls it the old “doing well by doing good” approach.

The door to commercialized charity has been flung wide. If the trend continues, Burlingame suggests, tongue-in-cheek, America’s cultural and educational institutions may start “putting up signs in lights. For the next 10 years, it will be called X and then it’ll flip over” to blaze the name of another commercial enterprise.

The possibilities for naming buildings are, of course, titillating. The Pavilions Pavilion. Or, perhaps, U-Haul Hall, the Reebok Rotunda, the Fleabusters Foyer, the Hot Dog on a Stick Gallery at the Meow Mix Museum.

Many athletic competitions now have to carry the names of sponsors from Bud Light to Bausch & Lomb, Honda to Hershey’s Kisses. In Virginia, there’s a NASCAR event called the Goody’s Headache Powder 500.

L.A.’s Forum became the Great Western Forum. San Francisco’s Candlestick is 3-COM Park, Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome is the RCA Dome, and San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, named for the late sportswriter who was instrumental in getting it built, is to be the Qualcomm Stadium. Why? Money. Big money.

Says Shakely: “Philanthropy is supposed to be just that, with nothing coming back” other than, perhaps, immortality of sorts for the donor. But now, he suggests, we may have entered an era in which “corporations become more powerful than the people who started them.”

McDonald’s gives millions through its Ronald McDonald House charities, another example of “rubbing out the fine line” between charity and commerce, Shakely says. “If it had been called the [Ray] Kroc house [for the late McDonald’s founder], I’d have had no trouble with that whatsoever.”

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Dwight Burlingame and Dennis R. Young of the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Case Western Reserve University explore that fine line in their new book, “Corporate Philanthropy at the Crossroads.”

They began their research, Burlingame says, because “we wanted to know if there is such a thing as corporate philanthropy left. So much of what’s happening is basically marketing and public relations.” He points out that last year charitable giving in America totaled $146 billion, $7 billion of that corporate giving. But corporate cause-related marketing of various types reached about $7.2 billion.

Increasingly, he says, corporate giving is tied to the company’s bottom line. “So the arts become a logical candidate. You look at your market and determine who is going to the theater,” for example, or if your target consumer is a sports fan, you give big bucks to a city in return for getting your company name on a stadium.

Occasionally, cities do draw the line on commercialism. When Mayor Richard Riordan and the city library commission proposed renaming any of the city’s 53 branch libraries for a $1 million donor (an idea since scrapped), Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg protested: “We’re going to end up with the Crest toothpaste and Coca-Cola libraries.”

USC now has its first building to carry a corporate name, the Hughes Aircraft Corp. Electrical Engineering Center. The trustees, who must approve all namings, have no policy governing this, says Dennis Mulhaupt, senior associate dean for development, who expects corporate namings to be “an issue we will be facing more and more often.”

UCLA has no buildings bearing corporate names, although UC regents, who must approve namings, have no policy barring it. Karen Mack of development explains, “Corporations tend not to give in amounts required for buildings.” But corporations have endowed numerous chairs; among them are ones bearing the names of Hughes Aircraft, TRW, Rockwell International, Allstate and IBM.

At Stanford University, Jerry Yang and David Filo, founders of the Yahoo Internet search engine, gave $2 million to endow a Yahoo chair in the School of Engineering. No strings attached, except, Yang says, “We hope the guy or woman who ends up taking the chair is also sort of a yahoo.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has several spaces bearing names of corporate angels, among them the Shuwa Corp. Kobayashi Gallery, for a Japanese donor. Spokeswoman Dawn Setzer says that, if the gifts were large enough, “We could always find a way to work with [donors] to find language that was pleasing to them as well as to the museum.”

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This recognition of corporate donors is “pretty standard practice” for museums, says Los Angeles County Museum of Art spokeswoman Angela Dickson. LACMA boasts a Times-Mirror court and galleries named for corporate entities from Walt Disney Productions to Wells Fargo.

Eli Broad, chairman and CEO of SunAmerica Inc. and unofficial chairman of the effort to raise funds to build the multimillion-dollar Disney Concert Hall, says he “hasn’t heard of any opposition” to an auditorium bearing the name of a grocery chain. Disney Concert Hall, he adds, is open to “naming opportunities, as are other cultural institutions.” The project is also to have Los Angeles Times steps (in recognition of a $5-million gift from parent Times-Mirror Co.) and, in return for a $10-million gift, an Arco Hall. As for that Food 4 Less auditorium, Broad says only, “I’m not sure what the exact words will be at the end. The name is not carved in stone, by any means.

“In Los Angeles, you’ve got a new corporate and civic leadership, and Disney Hall has become its rallying point,” he says.

But Shakely, whose foundation manages bequests left to charity by the wealthy, thinks “there can be a problem” when corporate names and logos are tied to gift-giving. “Can you imagine if the Girl Scouts were brought to you this year by Wells Fargo?” Or, “The Food 4 Less Auditorium presents the Mercedes-Benz violin series?”

While acknowledging that corporate largess is important and should be recognized, Shakely thinks “some kind of code of conduct” is needed to curb the commercialization of philanthropy.

To Burlingame, true philanthropy is simply “if you have, you should provide charity.”

Andrew Carnegie said that the man who dies rich dies disgraced. Before he died, he gave away $308 million. Today, Burlingame says, “What we see is, ‘I will give you something, if you give me something back.’ We’ve moved from a charitable transaction to a business transaction.”

Can the Tuneup Masters Theater be far behind?