This paper investigates whether a greater intensity of public oversight can induce firms to trust charitable foundations in managing their donations. Under a three stage analytical framework of the non cooperative game with oversight costs, we first construct a form model for evaluating the tradeoff between outsourcing donation management to third party charitable foundations and making donations directly to donees. Then, we utilize data on Chinese publicly listed companies from 2006—2018 to test our theoretical prediction that the presence of third party organizations does affect the willingness of companies to donate and donors will choose charities to operate their donation given strong public monitoring. The empirical findings are twofold. First, firms tend to donate via charities if there exist more media exposure and wider analyst coverage targeted on them. Second, this intention becomes more prominent for non state owned enterprises, publicly listed companies headquartered in East China and those belonging to the agricultural and manufacturing industries.