4 ms·

Understood and agreed with, but you know as well as I do that advertising matters. You said it yourself, people "just aren't seeing" the entire warehouses of f

Understood and agreed with, but you know as well as I do that advertising matters. You said it yourself, people "just aren't seeing" the entire warehouses of food. Empty donation bin means a snap judgement to "heartless." According to the weekly Kroger ad for their store in north Fort Worth (Texas), a can of Simply Organic beans (very tasty beans, I should add) is $1 with a Kroger card; the same goes for a can of Hormel chili (no beans in chili, please). My back-of-the-mousepad calculations say that approximately 37 regular cans will fit in a 55-gallon drum, the kind usually used for these food drives. That means that, in a regular 8-story office building with two deposit locations per floor, filling all of them to the brim will cost $592. If you go the other way and just put three cans in the areas visible to the public, that's $111 to make a small but visible impact. Yep, it's advertising and showmanship, but that food also does go to people who will actually use it, so it has the benefit of doing a little bit of good, unlike most advertising.

throwaway092834 13y ago
I understand your argument but frankly I don't buy it. I don't think filling up inefficient bins of food on closed tech campus is visible to anyone outside the company; I don't see the potential for impact. I'll be completely honest: I think much of this anti-tech sentiment (such as: tech people don't give) is wishful thinking and willfully divorced from reality. Most large tech companies have public giving foundations and publicize their donation programs. Here are a few examples: http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers https://www.google.com/giving/ https://www.google.com/giving/ http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-outreach.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-... These kinds of programs are strongly promoted at most tech companies. A large amount of giving happens outside these programs as well, but they do help establish a baseline well in excess of any food drive. While trying to dig up the data for some of the bigger tech companies in the area I also stumbled across this report, which claims that area workers not only donate above the average but spend significantly more of their time actually going out into the community http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving-levels-exceed-national-average http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving... The article throws around the term "average" a lot which tends to raise my eyebrows, but it does mesh with my anecdotal experience that tech workers on the whole care a lot more about their community in the bay area than workers in general in other regions of the USA.
- mikeyouse 13y ago
  Companies do a fair amount of giving, but on an individual level, the Bay Area isn't particularly generous. San Mateo county is in the bottom 1/3 for '% of income given', Santa Clara in the bottom 1/4, SF is a bit better and is in the 42nd percentile for counties. Long Link to Data: http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-How-America-Gives/133709/#{"panelsStates":[0,0,0,0],"panelShowing":0,"searchString":"","searchChoiceIndex":0,"autoSuggestObject":{},"clickResponse":null,"clickEvent":null,"mapLatLng":null,"mapZoomLevel":"county","initialTextTitle":"","initialParagraph":"","contibutionCatagories":"3","incomeBrackets":"0","cObj":{"bbox":"-124.573974609375,34.376220703125,-117.454833984375,39.70458984375","width":648,"height":485,"matchCoords":{"lat":37.474365234375,"lng":-122.442626953125},"x":194,"y":203,"layer":"generosity:counties_join","zoomLevelKey":"county","entityData":null,"click":1 http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-How-America-Give...},"obj_data":null,"conveyor":0,"noSplash":1}

throwaway092834 13y ago

I understand your argument but frankly I don't buy it. I don't think filling up inefficient bins of food on closed tech campus is visible to anyone outside the company; I don't see the potential for impact. I'll be completely honest: I think much of this anti-tech sentiment (such as: tech people don't give) is wishful thinking and willfully divorced from reality. Most large tech companies have public giving foundations and publicize their donation programs. Here are a few examples: http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers https://www.google.com/giving/ https://www.google.com/giving/ http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-outreach.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-... These kinds of programs are strongly promoted at most tech companies. A large amount of giving happens outside these programs as well, but they do help establish a baseline well in excess of any food drive. While trying to dig up the data for some of the bigger tech companies in the area I also stumbled across this report, which claims that area workers not only donate above the average but spend significantly more of their time actually going out into the community http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving-levels-exceed-national-average http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving... The article throws around the term "average" a lot which tends to raise my eyebrows, but it does mesh with my anecdotal experience that tech workers on the whole care a lot more about their community in the bay area than workers in general in other regions of the USA.

mikeyouse 13y ago
Companies do a fair amount of giving, but on an individual level, the Bay Area isn't particularly generous. San Mateo county is in the bottom 1/3 for '% of income given', Santa Clara in the bottom 1/4, SF is a bit better and is in the 42nd percentile for counties. Long Link to Data: http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-How-America-Gives/133709/#{"panelsStates":[0,0,0,0],"panelShowing":0,"searchString":"","searchChoiceIndex":0,"autoSuggestObject":{},"clickResponse":null,"clickEvent":null,"mapLatLng":null,"mapZoomLevel":"county","initialTextTitle":"","initialParagraph":"","contibutionCatagories":"3","incomeBrackets":"0","cObj":{"bbox":"-124.573974609375,34.376220703125,-117.454833984375,39.70458984375","width":648,"height":485,"matchCoords":{"lat":37.474365234375,"lng":-122.442626953125},"x":194,"y":203,"layer":"generosity:counties_join","zoomLevelKey":"county","entityData":null,"click":1 http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-How-America-Give...},"obj_data":null,"conveyor":0,"noSplash":1}