So you’re a major banking institution who decides to give some money to 100 deserving charities and causes, and decide exactly what small groups are most deserving by turning to the people of Facebook and setting up a page for the votes. “Why, Chase, that’s just a great idea!” say the people of Facebook, and vote heavily for their causes.
Rig, hide, and bullshit. Change the poll so it won’t display up-to-date results. Then, when the voting period ends, announce a list of winners that does not reflect vote tally boards kept up by other groups. Make sure to do a bit of 'splaining yourself but make sure to do it without justifying why four high-vote groups don’t make it to the list:
Congratulations! You have now made yourself look like a jerk. Of course, if you’re a huge bank, you’ve probably got a lot of people hating on you anyway, and one more girl outraged more on her boyfriend’s behalf than anything else (he’s involved with SSDP, I’m not, at least not yet) isn’t going to change much. But stirring up negative sentiment during the holidays is not such a good plan.
More info available from the New York Times, Huffington Post, and SSDP. It’s possible that the anti-abortion group has more info on this, but I didn’t want to be on their website for any longer than it took to confirm I had the right link. (I’m for reproductive rights and don’t want to give anti-rights groups increased web traffic.)
As much as I appreciate the wit of FB users, it’s a bit naive to think that Chase was ever going to donate millions of dollars to The Marijuana Project or the Pedophilic Men’s Society or whatever politically charged and/or controversial cause the FBers could dig up. It just wasn’t going to happen.
So while Chase deserves to be pitted for not foreseeing this happening, and simply allowing voters to choose from 100 pre-selected charities, I don’t blame them for changing the rules midstream. At the end of the day, it’s their money and they can create, and change, the rules as they like.
If, on the other hand, they solicited money from people, and then changed the rules, that’d be a whole 'nuther thing.
Stupid move on Chases part. Stupid expectations on the part of the facebook crowd. Chase shouldn’t have outlined rules for which the money would be awarded.
It should have been on Chases part ‘hey we want suggestions on who we can donate to.’ ‘Ok based on your votes we’ve selected organizations we are comfortable giving money to’ ‘It’s our money if you don’t like how we chose to distribute it get bent’
Wow. That’s as petty, trivial, and pointless as your post.
Y’know, I hate to threadshit (well, like all human beings, I enjoy it, but I know it’s wrong), but what did you expect? People did some stupid-ass sheet and Chase gave themselves a collective :smack: and moved on.
It wasn’t pointless, exactly: I wanted to explain why I might not have all the info. Possibly petty, but hey, I don’t give money (or eyeball time that could be used to justify increased ad sales, assuming they have ads) to causes I don’t support, and it sounds a bit better than half of the real reason, which is “I’m sorry, but those pictures are just disturbing. I know that’s the point, but damn I’m not going to look at those any longer than absolutely necessary.”
I don’t think it’s far to compare marijuana policy groups with pedophilia promoters. Marijuana legalization/de-criminalization has a lot of popular support, and, if done properly, could generate a lot of tax revenue. Pedophilia- not so much on any count.
The charities that could be voted for had been approved by Chase before voting: they had rules regarding size, social responsibility, and discrimination.
Since when are public policy advocacy groups “charities”? Advocating the legalization of drugs may be good work, but I would never think of it as a charity. If the company wanted to fund it on their own - great. But it’s not reasonable to ask for people to submit charities and then get miffed when a group that doesn’t do charitable things gets nominated. Sounds like they didn’t do anything wrong here, outside of making sure the guidelines specified actual charity work here.
Possibly excepting the humanitarian rights group - I don’t know what’s up with them or why they were rejected.
Heck, you’d think the number of things named after Stephen Colbert (or at least voted to be named after him and then denied) would have given Chase a good idea of how explicit you need to be with online voting rules.
A company decides to give millions to charities, opens up the decision making process to the public while explicitly reserving the right to make the final decision, then awards the promised money to charities selected from among the top vote-getters. For at least one of the groups, it’s not only the most money they’ve gotten from a single donor, it’s more money than they’ve raised since their inception.
Sorry, I’m not seeing the evil. A bit clumsy from the PR aspect, but I don’t get angry over bad PR moves.
