Incidentally, English (in dialects other than my own) is not unique in treating institutions as plural. In Carrier, the native language of much of the central interior of British Columbia, institutions are often treated as human plural, e.g. “lugurma budayi” = “government chief”, where bu- is the third person duo-plural possessive prefix, though they can also be treated as “areal” non-humans (and therefore necessarily singular since only human beings and dogs take plural agreement), e.g. “‘Awhuz UNBC huba ‘int’en eh?” = “Are you still working for UNBC?”, where huba is the postposition “for” inflected for an “areal” object.

Either “Sears is having its annual sale” or “Sears are having their annual sale,” but not “is … their,” at least in careful written usage.

This is my thought. But in the world of “Egg’s 0.99c/doz” it’s probably a lost cause.

FIFY.

PersonFromPorlock: How about creating an all purpose pronoun for when meaning is clear from context but grammar is a tossup? “Smish,” maybe. Thus: “Thanks to [organization] for smish help.” And ““Sears is having smish annual blah blah sale.” …Sigh. I thought not.

A college professor did this with gender neutral singular pronouns. “Hesh” became the way of avoiding he/she. The professor wouldn’t mark off for not doing it, of course, but it avoided the mess when writing papers.

The Brits, of course, say “Parliament are …,” but we say “Congress is … .”

Thus: “Thanks to [organization] for smish help.” And ““Sears is having smish annual blah blah sale.”

…Sigh. I thought not.

A quick google search for Exxon reveals the in general the “Exxon is” construction is more common, with 62,000 hits to 42,000, and only one (or two) of the hits on the first page for “Exxon are” is actually relevant. The others are things like “X and Exxon are” or “Dealers who deal with Exxon are”, or the borderline “They (Exxon) are[.]”

I think there is strong evidence that “[Organization] are” is non-standard, perhaps so much so as to be incorrect. But apparently also strong evidence for “Thanks to [Organization] for their…” as standard, and probably more common than “for its…” I can see two explanations. First explanation, language is inconsistent. There is nothing inherently wrong with a plural construction being required in one context, and allowing choice in the other. That is just how language works sometimes. Language isn’t logic.

Second explanation; this is not switching from plural to singular in different constructions, it is just use of singular they. In the construction “Thanks to [organization] for their…” their is not referring to the organization as a plural, but is referring to it as a singular. This is pretty standard in English, and a natural shift from using they to refer to a singular person where gender is unknown or necessarily general (and it is inappropriate) to substituting they for it (their for its). The reason we don’t see this in “Exxon are” is because there is no equivalent to the substitution of singular they when talking about verbs. If Exxon is a singular noun it will take is as its verb, not are. If we then shift to using they to refer to Exxon (as in the borderline case above) we necessarily shift to using ‘are’ because *”They is” is nonstandard and very marked speech.

Of course, my evidence for “[organization] are” being non-standard is based on very brief research, and someone could obviously convince me otherwise.

Snaphappy: I’m speaking here of the usage in thanking (and the evidence from my quick and dirty queries on the subject), and not of the usage in broader references to the actions of entities.

David Schwartz: Using ‘their’ treats the organization more as a means of organizing the actions of its members.

Silence. If you keep saying things like that, the Gender Neutral Pronoun Brigade will add another rule to its book.

P.S. Its.

Everyone must choose their own path.

Each student selects their thesis topic.

Note in the second example the jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun. This is the future.

I would suspect that the larger, more formal, and more bureaucratic the organization, the more frequently you would see “its”. An exception will likely be organizations that by their name suggest a group of people. For example, “X Committee for its” is less common than “X Committee for their” because the word “committee” strongly reminds us that it’s a group of people. (And same for “group for its/their”.)

If you want to use “they” in this context, then rephrase it as “I would like to thank the editors at Attorney.org for their kind words…” or “to thank the members of Attorney.org…” Otherwise Attorney.org is a singular noun.