More Dubious Behavior in the Chase Contest

I've been following the Chase Community Giving challenge closely here, including documenting their extremely questionable behavior during the first round of the competition in this Open Letter. As the higher-stakes second round gets increasingly competitive, it is now one of the competing organizations -- Invisible Children -- who is behaving badly.

This morning, FORGE founder Kjerstin Erickson woke up and signed into Facebook to discover that she had been tagged in a picture that said "I Voted For Invisible Children" with a link to Invisible Children's Chase Giving page. Just like any photo tagged on Facebook, the photo appeared in all of Kjerstin's 1000+ friends wall feeds, leading them quite rationally to believe that she was supporting Invisible Children, and maybe they should, too.

The problem was that Kjerstin was NOT, in fact supporting IC, and was none to happy to see that they had made all of her contacts think she was.

This is an extremely clever -- and extremely deceptive -- strategy to help Invisible Children win this contest. They are not breaking any rules -- of the contest or of Facebook -- to do this. What's more, if this strategy gets them in front of a lot more eyeballs, with the sole cost being that a bunch of people who weren't going to vote for them anyway get angry, whatever -- right?

See what this looked like when one of Kjerstin's other friends was tagged in the same way:

The problem is one of trust, privacy and brand capital. While the privacy norms of the internet are still evolving, it's pretty safe to say that while people are more and more open to their behavior being public, they very much want the control to determine which things they broadcast. This kind of strategy to win a contest is a pretty flagrant violation of that general operating ethic of Facebook, and it has a pretty serious ability to rot IC's brand in the eyes of people who feel violated.

It's important to note that there isn't any indication that IC as an organization is promoting this strategy. That said, at least one of the people who is tagging masses of people in the photo claims in the caption to be "working" for them.

In the end, how bad is this? My honest guess is that the individuals who have been tagging people in the photos thought it just seemed like a good way to get the message out to more people and didn't anticipate that some people would see it as a major violation of trust or best practice.

That said, it's a pretty silly thing for IC to get involved in. They have arguably the best media machine in the nonprofit biz (with the one possible exception of charity:water) and an incredible devoted following -- particularly among high school and college students. The last thing in the world they need is to deal with bad PR in the middle of this.

For me, this is one more example of the way that corporation-sponsored online giving competitions are increasingly turning into a farce. I'm glad to see a form of cause marketing that does result in some value to real organizations doing real work, but the amount of energy they require and the way most of them reward gaming the system rather than doing good should be raising the bar on what we consider a valuable contest.

UPDATE: TWOLHA - the group competing with IC for #1 in the contest - also has supporters doing this. Dudes, this is seriously bad mojo. If you tag me and trick my friends into thinking I like you, not only will I go out of my way not to support you this time, I'm going to talk you down and for a lot longer than this contest, treat you as organization non grata. I'm not alone, and it's not worth it.

Photo credit: Kjerstin Erickson