1. Your vote counts most right now! If you voted in prior rounds, thanks! But you'll need to vote again, because it's down to the Final Five organizations. Voting ends this Sunday, August 5th! We're currently in second place, and need every vote we can to win!

2. It's for the children. Education, is you know, our future and stuff.

3. DonorsChoose is a great organization, and not just because I work there. We have a 4 star rating (that's the highest) from Charity Navigator. Amazon.com and Stanford Business School named us America's Most Innovative Charity. The New York Times calls us "the Future of Philanthropy." And did I mention that I work there?

4. You'll get to pick where the million bucks goes. If we win, we'll give out DonorsChoose gift certificates to every Amex cardmember who voted. You'll go onto the DonorsChoose website and use those certificates to fund classroom projects of your choosing, using American Express money. Pretty cool, huh?

5. It's more fun to root for David than Goliath. The current first place project is not only sponsored by Unicef, which has an annual budget of 2.7 billion dollars, but was proposed by Procter & Gamble, which had a net income of 8.7 billion dollars last year. You can read more about P&G's involvement with the Safe Drinking Water project in the New York Times: A Reverse Profit Strategy Faces a Commercial Test:

   Procter is also traveling incognito in the American Express Member’s Project, a Web-based initiative that encourages people to submit ideas for solving a societal problem. . . . Mr. Allgood entered the science and theory behind the Children’s Safe Drinking Water program. But he said that the Member Project’s rules precluded him from naming it, or mentioning Pur or Procter.

   And here's a second NYT article: P.& G. Link in Amex Contest Raises Questions of Fairness. Tomato Nation calls P&G's involvement "hinky".
   

So that's it, then! If you have an American Express card, go vote for DonorsChoose right now! Then tell everyone you know! Ishbadiddle commands you!

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