Which budget the donation sits in

Every Ramadan a version of the same meeting happens. The company is going to fund a few hundred iftar boxes. Nobody in the room argues with the boxes. The argument is about whether they carry the logo.

It sounds like a question of taste. It is a question of which line pays.

If the money comes from the community budget, or out of the owner's own pocket, the meeting takes ten minutes and the boxes go out plain. The only people who will ever know about it are the ones handing them over and the ones taking them.

If the money comes from marketing, the boxes acquire a second job, because marketing money has to come back with something. Now there is a photographer, a caption, an approval chain, and a number to report against the line at the end of the month.

Then the second job starts editing the first one. A photograph needs light, so the handout moves to late afternoon, well before anybody is ready to eat. The boxes go where the picture works rather than where the need is. The quantity gets rounded up to fill the frame. Somebody asks for faces, somebody more sensible says no, and the compromise is a photograph of hands.

The real job of the box is to be in somebody's hands before sunset. That is the whole of it. The logo is the cheapest thing marketing money changes here. The hour is the expensive one.

And the two groups best placed to read the difference are the staff who carried the boxes and the families who took them, both of whom will describe the evening to somebody tonight.

Nobody in that meeting voted to hand out dinner two hours early. The budget line did, weeks earlier, while everybody was talking about a logo.