eli5 How does donating to charity help corporations? They don’t keep the money, so what’s the benefit?

Question

I always hear how corporations only donate to write off on their taxes. But how does that make sense? They don’t keep the money, it’s gone – they’ve given it away.

Does the government say “if you donate x amount of money, we will reduce your tax rate by x percentage”? This is the only explanation that makes sense to me, but from what I’ve read that’s not the case.

In: 2

Answer 1

They don’t even really do it for the taxes they do it for good PR. As an example door dash gave sesame street 1 million this year. They then spend 5.5 million on adverting telling people that they gave 1 million.