CHARITIES CRITICIZE ONLINE FUND-RAISING CONTEST BY CHASE

JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it
conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.

At least three nonprofit groups -- Students for Sensible Drug Policy,
the Marijuana Policy Project and an anti-abortion group, Justice for
All-- say they believe that Chase disqualified them over concerns
about associating its name with their missions.

The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they
appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.

"They never gave us any indication that there was any problem with
our organization qualifying," said Micah Daigle, executive director
of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. "Now they're completely stonewalling me."

Three days before the contest ended, Chase stopped giving
participants access to voting information, and it has not made public
the vote tallies of the winners.

"This is a problem of accountability," said David Lee, executive
director of Justice for All. "Simply publish the votes and let us see
that the 100 organizations named as winners won."

Contests using social media to award or raise money for charities
have exploded, as companies and nonprofit groups test the use of
Facebook, Twitter and other online tools for marketing and fund-raising.

The Chase Community Giving contest is one of the largest ever
mounted, open to more than a half-million charities. More than a
million people signed onto Chase's fan page, where they were awarded
20 votes to cast for the charities of their choice.

In an e-mail message to Mr. Lee, Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for
Chase, explained the thinking behind the changes in the contest.

"Regarding the vote tallies," Mr. Evangelisti wrote, "we have taken
down individual charity counts with a couple of days left to build
excitement among the broadest number of participants, as well as to
ensure that all Facebook users learn of the 100 finalists at the same
time and so we have an opportunity to notify the 100 finalists first."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Evangelisti declined to give the vote
tallies for any of the organizations or to say whether any of the
groups that are complaining had been disqualified. Chase's
eligibility rules make it clear that the bank can disqualify any participant.

"We are proud that through this effort we're giving $5 million to
small and local charities," he said, "raising awareness for thousands
of charities and helping them gain new supporters."

In such contests, companies typically select a group of charities and
ask people to vote for one of them. But Chase opened its contest to
any charity whose operating budget was less than $10 million and
whose mission "aligned" with the bank's corporate social
responsibility guidelines. Organizations also had to affirm that they
did not discriminate in any way.

Chase did not create a public leader board showing a ranking of the
charities based on the votes they had received on its Chase Community
Giving page on Facebook. Instead, participating charities had to go
to Facebook to find out how many votes they had received and who had
voted for them.

So some participants created informal leader boards. For instance,
the National Youth Rights Association, a tiny nonprofit that works to
teach young people about their rights and how to protect them,
compiled voting data on almost 400 contestants, and 82 of the
organizations that it tracked were among the 100 winners Chase named.

The association itself was among those winners, and the $25,000 it
will get from Chase is more money than it has raised all year and the
largest donation it has received in its 11-year history, said Alex
Koroknay-Palicz, its executive director.

"For the most part, the organizations Chase picked were exactly the
organizations we expected to win, because we had spent a lot of time
and effort tracking it," Mr. Koroknay-Palicz said. "So the biggest
surprise was Students and a couple of pro-life groups, as well as the
organization called the Prem Rawat Foundation, didn't make it,
because they had been doing pretty well."

According to the leader board he created, Students for Sensible Drug
Policy collected 2,305 votes through Dec. 9, when organizations no
longer could track their votes or see who had voted for them. The
Marijuana Policy Project had 1,911 votes, and Justice for All had 1,512.

The Prem Rawat Foundation, a humanitarian group, had 4,324 votes. It
did not respond to a message left at its offices. Mr. Evangelisti
said the 100 finalists "reflect those organizations that received the
most votes among eligible participants."

Mr. Lee, a veteran of these types of contests, said the changes Chase
made on Dec. 9 had made it much more difficult to continue attracting
votes. After the changes, would-be supporters of Justice for All
called and e-mailed to say they could not get their votes to go through.