Why would rational and opportunistic new ventures engage in philanthropic donations under the circumstances with insufficient market restriction? Integrating the strategic and institutional perspectives, this paper investigates the influence of new ventures’strategic orientation on their philanthropic donations, and then explores the moderating role of firm visibility from three different levels, that is, market development, industrial membership, and political connection. With data from The Large Scale Survey on Private Enterprises in China in 2008, this paper empirically finds out that prospective strategic orientation positively influences new ventures’ philanthropic donations, and that the positive influence gets significantly weaker either in more developed market environment or in firms with industrial membership. Such findings demonstrate the instrumentality of the new trend of “bringing corporate social responsibility forward to new ventures”. On the one hand, philanthropic donations are adopted to mitigate external competition and respond to institutional requirements; on the other hand, with the increase of firm visibility, the instrumentality of philanthropic donations gets weaker to some extent, and new ventures’ dependence on philanthropic donations is reduced or even replaced by more favorable approaches.