In 1983, Jerry Welsh, an executive vice president at American Express, observed from his Lower Manhattan office that the Statue of Liberty was undergoing a major renovation. Within a short time, the company inaugurated an advertising campaign promoting its interest in the project: For every new credit card application, American Express would donate one dollar to the statue’s restoration; for every transaction, it would contribute one penny. Eventually, the effort raised $1.7 million. As Mara Einstein, a professor of marketing at Queens College, explains in her recent book, “Compassion Inc: How Corporate America Blurs the Lines Between What We Buy, Who We Are and Those We Help,” this was essentially the beginning of what is known as cause marketing.

That the practice has found some of its most aggressive expression in the aftermath of natural disasters is surely obvious to anyone who has observed the second and third chapters of Hurricane Sandy, as businesses have gone about the yoked work of advancing their interests while igniting charitable impulses, occasionally to unseemly, or at the very least, utterly confounding, effect. Last week, for instance, an obscure company called VenueBook, which offers online party planning, announced that from now through Dec. 31, it would donate 15 percent of its “proceeds” to City Harvest, which has worked to help feed storm victims.

“For New Yorkers hosting holiday parties, this is the best way to give back to those in need after Sandy,” VenueBook’s chairman, Kelsey Recht, said in a news release, providing no apparent basis for the claim. As it happens, VenueBook is giving a percentage of the commission it receives from the event sites to City Harvest, but there is no real indication that using the company as a charitable pipeline would be more beneficial than discreetly asking every guest at your buffet table to please put $5 in a ceramic Santa that could then be sent to a relief agency.