Through a FB application, a charity who meets the eligibility requirements just needed to connect their FB page to the Chase Community Giving application so that individuals with a Facebook profile could locate the charity and vote for them. (A great win for FB too, to get more FB users!) The basics of Chase’s program include the corporation donating a total of $5million: via a first round of voting, the 100 charities to receive the top amount of votes all receive $25k. In a second round of voting, those top 100 vote recipients have a chance to explain how they would use the top prize funds and individuals with FB accounts then vote again. The organization to receive the most votes in round 2 will receive $1million and the top 5 runners up will receive $100k each. Finally, Chase Community Giving Advisory Board will select one or more nominated Charities to receive donations with a combined total of $1,000,000.

The Brilliance of the Campaign

1. Chase has received incredible exposure both in online communities and networks (FB, Twitter, blog posts, etc.) as well as traditional media coverage. As of this posting, the Chase Community Giving FB page has more than 853,000 Fans (to vote, you needed to become a Fan of their page.)
2. Chase has racked up lots of good will. Even if you weren’t a Chase customer, you probably think more highly of Chase once you saw that they were giving this money away. Most people don’t realize that many of the nations major corporations have philanthropic arms and continually donate funds to charities. With this campaign, not only do they just do what they’ve been doing–donating money to increase good will–but they’re getting exposure that is incredible. And they’re putting the decision-making power of where that money should go in the hands of regular people–even people who aren’t their customers. Now, when you’re looking at changing banks or opening a new account, won’t you be more likely to seriously consider Chase?
3. By allowing charities to sign up for participation in the contest and allowing anyone with a FB account to vote, as well as adding other outreach tools to the bottom of each page (like Tweet about this, etc.) they encouraged people to spread the word for them and made it easy for them to do so with the added social links.

I could go on about the benefits they’re receiving, but if you’re a marketing communications professional, you can probably figure out many others. So I have just one thought for Chase–What could they have done better?

Unfortunately, non-profits are probably one of the slowest groups to embrace social media. Maybe they made a Facebook page already, but they aren’t updating it and they don’t know how to reach out to others in their audience to tell them to go to FB and vote. It’s like the issue “just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.” What Chase might have done that could have extended this campaign a bit more was to offer Charities (perhaps in an offline way) help in how to do some outreach, build online profiles, tell their audiences about participating, etc. They could have teamed with a social media company to develop a few how-to guides that charities could use or even get some interns employed through Chase to help charities set up their FB account and connect them to participate in the contest. I searched for a number of charities to vote for that weren’t participating and found many, many charities that figured out how to participate, but had only a couple votes–they didn’t get their audiences to vote for them.

Social media programs may seem “free” but to do it right and make it work, for non-profits and for-profit companies, you need someone who can give real guidance. Maybe some of the Chase winners will use some of the funds to help build their social programs so that they can sustain their own awareness and increase donations and program participation far into the future.