Giving without the post

In the last days before Eid al-Adha, the same photograph goes up on a lot of company pages. The sheep, or the boxes of meat, the staff in branded t-shirts, the caption about giving back, the hashtag.

I have no quarrel with the giving. The sacrifice is meant to be shared, and a company that feeds families this week has done a good thing. What I want to look at is where the money came from.

In most companies I have seen, it came from marketing. The line was called community, or Eid activation, or CSR, and it was approved on the strength of a mock-up, the photograph that would exist afterwards. Nobody wrote a business case for the meat. Somebody wrote one for the post.

That is the tell. Giving that sits in the marketing budget has been hired to do a marketing job, and the job is status: to be seen to be generous by customers, by partners, by the founder's peers, by the family group where the post gets forwarded. The families who received the meat are, in the budget's own logic, production.

Here is the test I use. Imagine the post is forbidden. No photograph, no caption, nothing on the office wall. Does the giving still happen, at the same size?

For some companies, yes, quietly, every year, out of a line the marketing team has never heard of. For a great many, the honest answer is smaller, or later, or not this year, and nobody in the room is cynical. They are reading a budget that made the photo the deliverable and the meat the cost of producing it.

Generosity is not measured by what a company gives when someone is watching. It is measured by the size of the gift when the camera is not invited, and the budget structure decides that long before Eid does.