Free Bagels & Corporate Philanthropy

These days social media is being utilized for a variety of innovative campaigns; whether as a way to attract potential customers, garnering attention or brandrecognition. Einstein Bros. Bagels’ used a Facebook campaign as a way to gain fans(friends) of their product. Be my friend, get a free bagel! Was the motto behindtheir fan page. The bagel give away increased Einstein Bros Facebook fan count from a 4,700 to a336,000-plus. Their Facebook wall was plastered with praise from bagels eaters. 

So what does a bagel give away have to do with philanthropic giving you ask? The Einstein campaign is very similar to that of JPMorgan Chase, who also launched a socialmedia contest. The massive bank, which operates in more than 60 countries, used their Facebook page as a platform for their latest philanthropic initiative, where charities were voted on by Facebookusers to receive a donation from the bank. The JP Morgan Chase and Facebook partnership donated $1 million to the winning nonprofit, $100,000 each to the five runnersup, and $25,000 each to the next 100 finalists.  JP Morgan’s program provided over 500,000 local organizations with a nationalplatform, the ability to promote their missions, attract new supporters andgain visibility with more than 1 million Facebook users.

The contest launched in mid-November 2009, and will culminate January 25,2010 when the additional charities JPM Chase’s Advisory Board picked to sharean additional $1 million will be revealed. This new approach to corporate philanthropy referred to as"crowdsourcing" is vastly different from the traditional model of corporate giving, where charities would normally have to apply for funds through alengthy grant process. Kimberly Davis, President of the JPMorganChase Foundation says they "hope that people will see this as an exciting venture in innovation and for philanthropy” she continuesto say, “We think this is the wave of the future, and hope that this will be amodel that others will want to follow.”