The Research Unit of the Arts Council of Finland has regularly collected information on the financial support for the arts and culture by Finnish industries since 1987. Before this date, little was known about the amount of the support and the extent of the support activities, even though companies, along with foundations, were important supporters of art and culture. After this date, the development in company support for the arts and culture has been monitored at regular intervals by examining how much different sectors support the arts and culture, and how the support is allocated.
The topic of this survey was company support for the arts and culture in 2008, and changes in the support after 1999. The survey included all large Finnish companies with a minimum of 250 employees, and one in ten Finnish companies with 20–249 employees. An exception to this was the financial intermediation sector of which companies with a minimum of 10 employees were included in the sample. The sample was taken from the Business Register maintained by Statistics Finland, and the material was collected from the companies via a mailed questionnaire. Each group of companies surveyed has been affected to some extent by the changes that have happened in the business world in the 1990s, as well as by several revisions in sector classification.