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AmazonSmile ENDING - Founding team member 2013 - AMA
3 years ago
AmazonSmile was Amazon's charitable giving program. Launched in 2013. I was a founding team member of the Charity Support Department, helping nonprofits actually receive the funds through the program. Left in 2016.
Ask me anything.
For example, it was intended as a cost neutral program to get customers to stop going to Google and googling Amazon products. If people instead manually typed in smile.amazon.com, Amazon wouldn't have to pay Google for that click. The money Amazon saved was about equal to the donations it sent to nonprofits. The donation tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, and the goodwill was marketing fodder. It was also partially a response to a series of Seattle Times articles that had come out years prior hammering on Amazon for being stingy and uninvolved in charitable works.
Ask me anything.
For example, it was intended as a cost neutral program to get customers to stop going to Google and googling Amazon products. If people instead manually typed in smile.amazon.com, Amazon wouldn't have to pay Google for that click. The money Amazon saved was about equal to the donations it sent to nonprofits. The donation tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, and the goodwill was marketing fodder. It was also partially a response to a series of Seattle Times articles that had come out years prior hammering on Amazon for being stingy and uninvolved in charitable works.
I never searched anything for amazon via a search engine tho. I would pop right to amazon via the mobile app or amazon.com. I always though it odd I stopped seeing stuff about smile.amazon since early 2017.
Any reason why they're closing it up aside from the usual PR reason? And I assume you're still employed? Was worried this put you out of a job.
I know you're not there now but I'm curious if you have any insight on why they'd bother to end it, it's not like Google is any less of a competitor to them now.
Yes. Yes it did. We were smiling doing the work because it was giving money to nonprofits. The nonprofits were smiling, especially the smaller organizations, such as cat shelters in Nebraska. For at least the years we worked it, it was legit and good.
And I smiled a lot when my colleagues handed me the phone because a hate group called pissed off that they weren't included in the program. I smiled through the phone as I completely fucking shut them down and made it clear that they were not and would not be included because they were a fucking hate group and the list from the U.S government we received said so.
Repeat this about 4 or 5 times.