{"id":1246,"date":"2007-07-31T08:54:51","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T12:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/31\/american-express-members-project\/"},"modified":"2007-07-31T09:00:09","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T13:00:09","slug":"american-express-members-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/31\/american-express-members-project\/","title":{"rendered":"American Express Members Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As both an American Express cardholder and a prior donor to DonorsChoose<\/a> (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 Express Members Project. I had noticed when I voted in the final round that they were in second place behind "Clean Drinking Water for Kids". I didn’t think too much of it at the time, both are certainly worthy causes, and I just hoped that my favorite charity got into the lead. Well, I just read over at Tomato Nation that apparently, the water for kids program isn’t exactly the "individual idea" that it claims to be<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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One of the other<\/em> 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seriously. As Sars points out, P&G has plenty of dough. They could just as easily just donate water filters (that they manufacture!) themselves to UNICEF. But apparently, beating out a truly startup and incredibly innovative charity organization that fills a major gap in our educational system was just too good an opportunity to pass up.<\/p>\n

So. Go vote for DonorsChoose. and regardless of whether they win or not, go buy some books or computers for kids<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Edited to add – I don’t want this to seem like the water program isn’t a worthy project.  It is.  It’s just that UNICEF is an organization with massive corporate underwriting and a $300 million per year budget.  When Amex touted the Members Project, they specifically marketed it as a way to help fund a possibly little noticed, underfunded, original idea.  It’s not that you shouldn’t give money to UNICEF or support them in some way.  It’s that, in this very particular circumstance, they (and P&G), are pretty much the antithesis of what this entire campaign would appear to be about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Express Members Project. I had noticed when I voted in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[8,38],"class_list":["post-1246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-blogging","tag-good-things"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-k6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}