The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: A Chase Postmortem

Now that the Chase Community Giving program is finally over, it's time for some serious reflection. The $1 million winner (Invisible Children) and five $100,000 runners-up have been announced amid controversy surrounding tactics ranging from bad taste to fraud. Taken altogether, the contest was a pretty big blot on the reputation of these kinds of crowd-sourced giving events.

The Good

That's not to say there wasn't some good. The best thing about this contest is that in the first round there was enough offered to encourage a lot of young or small organizations to hustle to win $25,000. That's a good thing, even if it highlights the usual lack of funding available to social start-ups.

The other good part was how the contest created an opportunity for honest conversation about the shortfalls of the cause marketing approach it embodied. My post about Chase's bad behavior in the first round has been seen almost 40,000 times. While that's great, it might also be a Pyrrhic sort of victory, if the response is simply a number of corporations looking at the social sector and deciding that the lesson here is that it's just not worth investing in.

The Bad

I strongly believe that the tone Chase set made this contest one of the worst of its kind. Most clearly, to me, the lack of a leaderboard suggested that Chase was in it entirely for the eyeballs. That sort of attitude dictated the contest's terms of engagement, and much of what we saw that was "ugly" about the contest was the direct offspring of such an attitude.

Another problem -- unfortunately common across these kinds of contests -- is that Chase rewarded the fan favorites, not the best organizations. And this kind of system didn't even reward those with simply the best mobilization machines, as you might expect. (If that was the case, you could at least argue that it was rewarding an important skill for nonprofits to have.) Instead, it rewarded those groups who have good mobilization machines as well as incredibly sexy topics.

Not to hate too much on Invisible Children -- northern Uganda is one of the most important areas in the world to me, and I have great respect for the number of young people they've gotten involved -- but their organization is dedicated entirely to making that war a sexy issue. Whether the benefit there outweighs the harm is another conversation, but that fact still put them at an advantage coming into the contest. That's not their fault, and IC would have been dumb not to push that angle, but the IC case does show how these contests bias results with their very structure.

The Ugly

Man, was this thing ugly.

First, Chase pulled information about the number of votes each organization had just before the end of the first round. Since they haven't felt the need to comment at all about the tactic, I'll go ahead and say it: this was a move designed to have complete control over which organizations made the top 100. All indications point to a sanitized slate that made your votes -- particularly for hot-button issues like medical marijuana -- irrelevant. This was perfectly allowable, based on their legal fine print, but also some pretty obvious ethical BS.

Second, we saw organizations and their supporters go to extremes to suck every last possible vote dry. First, it was Invisible Children staff and fans tagging people in photos that said "I Voted For Invisible Children," effectively hijacking people's friends for promotion without permission.

But more serious, frankly, the allegations that second-place winner the Isha Foundation was creating fake Facebook accounts to vote. In the final hours, many of those accounts -- such as "Gdfg Kcjbvkljv" -- were created solely for the purpose of voting. According to a statement given to the Huffington Post by an Isha volunteer, the votes represented an effort to reflect votes from the organization's Indian stakeholders "whose names are not in Latin characters."

It's a plausible, if weird, explanation. At best, though, that kind of explanation highlights how such contests block international constituencies, while reinforcing the "givers" in philanthropy as the only powerful members. At worst, it's actual fraud committed by an organization desperate for resources. I think it's questionable enough to warrant some investigation, although I also think that we should all be open to the possibility that Isha's explanation is true.

The Damaging

Beth Kanter wrote her own great postmortem on this fiasco, which suggested that the promotion of scarcity thinking was one of the more damaging elements of the contest. In other words, her concern is that the contest promoted a sometimes hostile attitude that pitted organizations against each other in a fight for a limited pool.

That's true, but what I worry more about is voter fatigue, and general brand weakening in the nonprofit sector.

Nonprofits, like Democrats, are constantly fighting against the image of being too bleeding-heart, ill-organized and always desperate -- a kind of support-us-not-cause-we're-great-but-because-we-try attitude. Like modern mendicants, most nonprofits live hand-to-mouth off other people's charity.

Among young people right now, the brand of "good" has never been better. People actively want to get involved, and in many cases are choosing careers of meaning over material wealth.

But if what "good" looks like are frustrating contests such as the one Chase hosted, we risk not only massive "voter fatigue," but a broader fatigue spilling over that will damage the sector's brand as a whole.

Photo Credit: thelearnr