What the giving was for

The interesting thing about the Ramadan giving is not the amount. It is the line it sits on.

In most of the companies I have seen, it sits inside marketing. Not inside operations, not inside a foundation, not on a line of its own that a finance director signs off. It sits with the campaign money, next to the film and the media, because giving photographs well and marketing is the department that owns the camera.

That is a decision, and it decides everything after it.

A gift budgeted as media gets measured as media. Somebody has to report on the line, and the only reporting language available there is reach, sentiment, coverage, a completion rate on a video. So the boxes get counted in impressions. The distribution happens where the light is good and the road is passable. It happens in the last ten days of the month, because that is where the content calendar had a slot. The number of families served becomes a caption. Then the month closes and the line closes with it.

You can see what the giving was hired to do by looking at the budget for the month after.

If the line continues into May at a quarter of the size, quietly, with nobody there to film it, then it was generosity and the film was a by-product of it. If it vanishes the day the month ends, it was media all along, and the people receiving it were the cast.

Neither of those is a crime. But the second one is a campaign, and a campaign should be argued for as a campaign, with a campaign's target, on a campaign's line, rather than borrowed from the part of the business that is supposed to mean it.