I find the Ask Me campaign in bad taste

I am very sensitive about what/how much people are contributing to causes and NGOs. Since college I have been volunteering with non-profits. I never really donated any money though because I hardly earned any. Once I did start earning a decent amount I have been planning where and what to donate to. I have ideas on it, and I will elaborate more on that later and probably on my other personal blog as its not social media related 🙂

What I don’t plan to do is to follow facebook pages which say they will donate Rs 1/- for every fan they get. I know this trend started out a long time back with Drew’s Cancer tweets being one of first and then many others also followed the trend.

Donate to causes sure – but if you are promoting your services by saying “oh you should use our services because we donate to an NGO” thats just lame. More than lame its playing with peoples guilt and good sentiment – and you are just generating business out of it.

The Ask Me campaign just seems in bad taste,

Lack of a Genuine Premise

One of the first such social media campaigns – the Drews Cancer campaign – there was a genuine premise there. I remember a similar campaign by Anaggh for Goonj and it was genuine and I also tweeted etc.. there. Moreover these were started by individuals as a small effort and then it snowballs.

Making Profit

Ads on Facebook to increase their fans would cost Ask Me atleast 5 INR. Here they are getting fans at such a cheaper rate. So the least they can do is donate all that they saved by not putting ads into the NGO – that would make it better. For a company like AskMe I find a donation of Rs 1 too small. After this campaign which they hope will go viral if they do get say for example 10,000 fans then they just pay 10,000 INR to the NGO. Isn’t that a wee bit small amount for a company to be donating?? And in return aren’t the increase in 10,000 fans a much bigger thing that the company is getting in return?