A rather interesting article in the China Daily yesterday:

When it comes to public perception of corporate responsibility, more money isn’t always better, according to a recent survey on business charity efforts following the May 12 Sichuan earthquake.

So, if the research is right, with results such as:

The majority of the public said that the direct actions by enterprises were more important than large cash donations.

Instead, realistic, efficient and relevant solutions were factors that attracted the greatest public attention.

“Providing professional technical support for earthquake rescue and post-disaster reconstruction” was the greatest expectation of the public for enterprises fulfilling their corporate social responsibilities.

Then it seems the media is totally out-of-step with the public, since the media generated the ridiculous competition between corporations and lambasted those who had not donated enough (often they had, but the media had done inadequate research) and did not see any value in those who provided useful in-kind services (aka ‘technical support’). Or, alternatively the online public (which also got rather worked up about all the sizes of donations, is out-of-touch with the ‘real’ public (as those interviewed for the research quoted in this article were done by telephone so they might not be so called ‘netizens’ and unlikely to be the million or so very active netizens.

Alternatively, an explanation could be that in the last 2 months, the public have changed their mind?