chase community giving | Returning Home From Exile

In a previous post, I urged you to vote for Students for a Free Tibet in the Chase Community Giving campaign on facebook.

When the official tally was released, it was obvious that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

(… Actually, there IS something rotten in the state of Denmark. Anyways…)

Students for a Free Tibet, among other leading-at-the-time-Chase-closed-the-vote-visibility charities, did NOT make the final cut of 100 charities (nor did any charity Tibet-related place).

But a quick run-down of the charities that did place in the top 100 will tell you that by golly gosh, people (mostly Americans) really care about the Chinese!

Some of the top 100 charities included:

Let me say here that I know nothing about most of these charities, and am in no way making a judgment call on the kind of work they do. I am fairly confident that most, if not all, of the organizations that won do good work. I just find it odd that such a big (okay 12.5%) slice of the pie went to Chinese charities.

Initially, I was a bit skeptical when it came to the idea that Chase Community Giving wasn’t exactly playing fair. But things started snowballing, and soon many people on facebook were asking for Chase Community Giving to be more transparent–and to start by publishing the number of votes the charities in the top 100 received.

It’s a simple request that Chase has refused. Why? Probably because Chase knows people were keeping track of the votes, and even though Chase disabled the viewing of the votes in the last day or so “to build excitement” (NYT), if some of the winners in the top 100 received less votes than some of the other charities that did not place, it would effectively blow Chase’s cover.

… Not that they didn’t prepare themselves for that possibility, by adding, in fine print, “Any organization determined to be ineligible at any time will be disqualified. Sponsor retains the right at its sole discretion to determine eligibility and reserves the right to disqualify any Charity for any reason whatsoever” (Chase Community Giving Official Rules).

Anger with Chase stems from many different angles: why was SFT disqualified? Was it disqualified or did it not get enough votes? Why isn’t Chase being transparent? Was there a way Chase knew what organizations were in the running, and if so, why didn’t they inform those organizations that they were deemed “ineligible” before the last minute?

In addition, Chase claims that their goal was to help “small and local charities.” In their rules they define this as “501(c)(3) charities with an operating budget of $10 million or less” (FAQ) which, apparently, includes such charities as:

Now, these are all great charities but I would hardly call them “small” and/or “local” even if they do operate on less than $10 million. (This is just a side comment I wanted to make. I feel as though opening up the list to every charity is a great thing, but if Chase really wanted to focus on “small and local” charities, they should have researched their eligibility cap a little more.)

The New York Times noticed the scandal, but Chase still seems to be quiet on the matter.

In the meantime (which might be a while; the second round of the Chase Community Giving campaign doesn’t start until January 15th), read about The Chase Boycott and read Tendor’s letter to Chase Community Giving.