Chase Financial Services, started a community giveaway campaign on Facebook, some three weeks back. As part of the campaign, Chase would be giving away $5 million to charities. Facebook users get to vote for their favorite charities in the first round till midnight today. The top 100 charities as determined by user votes would get $25,000, and a chance to get an additional $1 million in the second round.
The Charity give away has been designed as a Facebook application. The app currently has around 1.7 million active users. Chase might have used advertising or some other mechanisms to attract the users. The community app, has also been developed by Context Optional.
Application Details
The app is nicely built, which is probably the biggest driver to its growth. The homepage includes a search box, using which you could search for your favorite charity. You can search from around 500,000 charities by name, or could search for local charities by providing the zip code.
Everything related to the context is clearly spelled out, right on the front page. The first round will end tonight, with the top 100 charities getting $25,000 each. The results of the first round would be announced on Dec, 15th. The voting for the final round would begin from 15th Jan, 2010 and would last till 22nd Jan 2010. The results of the final round would be announced on the 1st of Feb, 2010, with one charity getting $1 million and 5 charities getting $100,000 each.
You could also see your friends activities, and the charities for which they have vouched. Every user gets 20 votes. There is an additional page, show casing other ways in which you can get involved, such as posting your votes to your Facebook profile and news feed so that your friends could find out about this giveaway.
Campaign Achievements
The Chase Community Giveaway is the biggest non-profit effort undertaken on Facebook to-date. It would be unwise to think of this campaign to be a mere philanthropic effort. The effort is a mix of marketing, brand building, philanthropy and social outreach. Some of the outcomes of the campaign include:
Philanthropic Decision Crowd Sourcing:
Web 2.0 applications such as Digg, Reddit crowd sourced the editorial jobs of picking up the best stories from around the web. Chase’s Community Giveaway campaign is one of the most significant examples of crowd sourcing philanthropic decision making. These decisions were previously made behind closed doors and usually represented hidden agendas. By crowd sourcing the decisions, non-profit organizations might achieve more even with less money spent.
According to Allison Fine, a senior fellow at Demos, a New York City think tank, this is the start of the democratization of philanthropy, and is excited about its immense potential. However, some non-profit veterans are cautious about this gimmick, and consider it to be a popularity contest that might reward organizations with distorted reputations.
Brand Building
It is obvious, that the program will benefit a few organizations, the biggest beneficiary is Chase Financial Services itself. The recent financial crisis has really blackened the name of financial organizations. The on-going media scrutiny of executive bonuses, financial fraud or financial incompetence doesn’t help either.
In such a scenario, it is obvious that at least the participants of this Community Giveaway would view Chase in a different light from now onwards.
Triggering Event for Non-Profit Outreach Campaigns
There are some non-profits that have already been quiet active in the Social Media world. However, there are others who might not know a thing about Social Media marketing. For the social media literate, this has been a tremendous opportunity. Some non-profit organizations such as ArtPride/NJ, have created a hyperlink to the Chase program on their websites. There are some who have sent mass emails to their supporters asking them to vote for them in the Giveaway.
However, there may be some organizations that neither have a Social Media presence, nor consider it important for their future fund generation activities. While for such organizations, this campaign might serve as a wake-up call, or else the social media train wont wait for them.
In any case, this campaign would likely trigger a paradigm shift in the way non-profit organizations conduct themselves on Social Media outlets.
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