Donors Choose and Goliath
Thanks at least in part to your votes, Donors Choose has made it into the final round of the American Express Members Project — one of five finalists.
One of the other five finalists, though, isn’t so much a non-profit organization, it seems. Sure, drinking water for children is a concept everyone can get behind, but the problem in this case is that “everyone” is actually Procter & Gamble, which is a for-profit corporation. P&G and Amex have both tried to claim that the project is the brainchild of a P&G employee, who is working in concert with Unicef, so the entry violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the contest’s terms.
Uh…no. Not buying it. First of all, the text of the clean-drinking-water proposal is nearly identical to the text found here, which touts P&G’s PUR water filters. Amex has stated in an official message that “the project idea Cardmembers are voting on is not the P&G’s clean water program with PSI,” but given that the Amex/P&G web sites are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable, this is hair-splitting — if you’re feeling generous. If you’re not, it’s merely absurd.
Second of all, even the appearance of impropriety is something Amex should strenuously avoid. If Amex is trying to reward a legitimate non-profit, P&G of course does not qualify, and Unicef is a fine organization, but it does not need the extra help, methinks. Why P&G can’t just write a damn check if it wants to address the clean-drinking-water issue, or give away the PUR filters FOR FREE if it feels that strongly as a corporation about it, I don’t know, but I do know that this entry’s presence in the contest is hinky, and Amex really shouldn’t allow a large retail company to muscle in on the territory of real non-profits who genuinely need this prize money. I’m all for co-opting viral-marketing strategies to try to move your products, but not at the expense of charities.
So. Amex isn’t booting the P&G project out of the finals, and the guy who posted it isn’t taking it down. A hundred thousand P&G employees read about the project on his blog, and a lot of those people might vote for it, and again, I’ve got nothing against clean water or the kids who might drink it, and I don’t wish to slander the guy who entered the water project, or P&G — I don’t think this is an evil plot. But I do think it’s unfair to let a big for-profit company game the system, and I would ask that you please vote in the final round for a quality organization that played by the rules AND that will let you spend the prize money if they win: Donors Choose.
If you voted in the semifinals, you can vote again in this round, and I urge you, please, do so. If you haven’t voted yet, please, do so. (Instructions are here.) And while you’re up, leave a comment or send an email to Amex and tell them that defensively choosing to believe P&G’s disingenuous explanation is not the correct response here. But if Donors Choose wins, it’s a moot point. Please vote today.
[edited at 10:20 PM to correct a couple of points]
Tags: contests curmudgeoning friends sites
This is disgusting – no matter how worthy the cause, having P&G horn in on this type of contest is reprehensible. My only question is why didn’t AMEX boot the project from the contest when this came to light? Donors Choose seems to be running a close second in the voting right now – hopefully they’ll pull it out at the end.
Speaking of Donors Choose – I just received a packet of thank you notes from a 5th grade class in San Francisco. The direct feedback, and the proof of direct impact of the contributions makes it a great charity.
Sars, thanks for telling people about Donors Choose – I learned about them through Tomato Nation, and I’ve given every year since then.
What’s really funny is that Amex makes it more or less IMPOSSIBLE to contact them other than by phone or mail if you are not a member. I know from being a phone rep who handled complaints, that the people who take those calls rarely escalate issues to anyone who matters, and mail won’t make it there before the contest ends. Franky, I agree that the appearance of impropriety taints the whole thing, and it’s really just one more reason why I don’t purchase Proctor and Gamble products, and just one more reason why I will continue tossing every “You’ve been pre-approved” mailing I receive from Amex. Life’s too short to buy into that sort of crap.
That being said…all you Amex card-holders hurry up and vote Donors Choose!!
American Express Members Project…
As both an American Express cardholder and a prior donor to DonorsChoose (which is an awesome charity, by the way, and you should go donate to them regardless of whether they win), I had been dutifully voting for them in each round of the American Ex…
I agree with everything said, except that it’s a moot point if Donors Choose (or another actual NPO) wins. This is wrong even if the P & G project ends up losing. Let’s not let a Donors Choose victory blind us to the precedent this could set.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Sars.
I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, and I am not going to comment on whether the P&G employee project belongs in “Donor’s Choose,” but I think you’re being too harsh on P&G’s motives. Diarrhea caused by unclean drinking water kills approximately 2 million children every year, and even big, well funded organizations such as UNICEF don’t have the cash or infrastructure to fix the whole problem. Some of the most successful projects addressing sanitation issues have been collaborations between for-profit companies (eg P&G and Unilever) and non-profit social marketing operations such as PSI and JHU’s CCP. For example, CCP worked with Unilever and USAID to develop a large handwashing campaign in Indonesia. Handwashing saves lives and Unilever gets to sell more soap: everybody wins. Similar projects for water filters could also save many, many lives.
You ask why P&G doesn’t just give the filters away. Unfortunately, much social marketing research shows that people don’t value things that are given away. They are much more likely to use and value things that cost them something to acquire. (There’s a possibly apocryphal story about a health worker returning to a village to find the malaria bednets she had distributed to one family turned into a wedding dress.) Plus, if companies find that they can actually make a profit (or at least break even) from selling health-promoting product X to poor people they will continue to supply product X even if funding dries up (and it does dry up– anyone who has studied global health funding knows that the cash and attention comes in waves– family planning funds, anyone?)
So again, maybe this project doesn’t belong in Donor’s Choose, but please don’t discount the crucial role that for-profit companies can play in global health.
(Full disclosure: I work for a non-profit global health organization, but we have collaborations with several large companies that some of you may think of as bad corporate citizens. However, they have distribution networks and other resources we lack. I wish more big for-profit companies would put as much effort into corporate social responsibility as P&G!)
I don’t have a problem with P&G per se. I don’t have a problem with the project per se, as I believe I said explicitly. What I do have a problem with is that this contest was alleged to be focused on “the little guy,” to give the smaller non-profits (and some private citizens) a chance.
This isn’t really about Donors Choose at this point. It’s about Amex refusing to admit that this was a mistake on a number of levels, and compromising the integrity of the whole thing as a result.
Not to mention the fact that, by the time the X million dollars makes its way through P&G’s giant infrastructure/overhead complex, there’ll be like 14K left for actual water treatment. Not the case at DC. Just saying.
jeccat – if Procter and Gamble were so humanitarian and really cared about this issue for the thing itself, they could easily afford to just fund it outright with no help from AmEx. They turned a profit of something like $74 billion last year. They are in this for one thing only and that’s marketing.
Proof? P&G put those water purifiers on the market in the US the day before their project made the top 5 in this contest. And they have been giving them away overseas for years.
No one’s saying kids don’t deserve to have clean drinking water. That’s not the issue at all. The issue is that P&G is using this great contest in the wrong way, and they’re deliberately being shady about it, and AmEx is ignoring all of that.
I’m sure you’re right, Angela and Sars. I’m positive P&G is using this contest as a whitewash, and as a way to promote their corporate social responsibility program (we in the biz call that CSR). All I’m saying is that motives don’t always have to be pure in order to achieve the greatest effect.
Yeah, just to reiterate, I don’t think anyone’s arguing that dysentery is harmless and should be ignored. It was *the* leading cause of death during the Civil War and remains one of the most common, preventable causes of death worldwide today.
However….as has already been pointed out, that’s not really the point. As you pointed out yourself, Jeccat, these enormous corporations DO have the infrastructure to work directly with not-for-profits to disseminate the information and products that would help eliminate or at least reduce the problems they are targeting. Taking money and marketing time away from the smaller, grassroots, not-for-profits seems to be directly opposed to what Amex was intending to do. And that should have been acknowledged and corrected. Disingenuous explanations should not have been accepted as reasons why this is “ok.” It’s not ok. Something like this really has the ability to turn people (like me) off of the whole idea…it comes across as yet another way for the big guy to gain $$ and free publicity at the expense of the little guy, who loses proportionately WAY more money and publicity.
Just my 2 cents