Sunday, February 7, 2010
Paying for the Olympics: The Toughest Course
With the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the United States Olympic Committee has been very busy organizing the US teams. The USOC is a nonprofit group and relies heavily on sponsors. In 2009, Home Depot, General Motors, and Bank of America stopped sponsoring which lost the organization almost $15 Million a year. Much of the USOC's money comes from financing from the International Olympic Committee. Then after losing its bid for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago, they removed the CEO. The US does not predict to be in running for an olympics for 10 more years so they are relying heavily on the IOC for financing. The IOC is beginning to find the US "self-interested and greedy" and want to cut back on financing.
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5 comments:
its interesting but unfortunate to see how a recession can affect non-profit organizations like the USOC due to a loss in funding. Its possible that the economic situation going on in the U.S. had an affect on the voters decisions when it came to the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.
This is incredibly unfortunate. I am originally from Chicago, and was so excited when they were in the runnings for being an Olympic spot. I agree with Ricky, that the economy currently could have affected this decision though.
I'm doing an apprenticeship for the Central Ohio Symphony right now and writing my paper on corporate philanthropy. This raises the question of whether or not corporations should be involved in philanthropy (Milton Friedman would say no) and if so what leads a corporation to do so? This raises interesting questions of the role of a firm, which is especially interesting when mixed with an organization that represents American "pride".
While taking Organizational Behavior, one of the topics discussed were Corporate Social Responsibility. It's showing that the company cares about doing something more than just making profit and focuses on helping out somewhere outside of the company. Perhaps the IOC could market this as a type of "good ethics" towards companies to participate in funding.
It would be a good way for companies to participate in corporate social responsibilities, I agree. This in turn would help them in the end, because if they are viewed by consumers as a moral and ethical company that is willing to take out of their own profit to fund such an important tradition, then more people are going to do business with their company compared to companies who do not help out.
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