||| January 19, 2026 by William Rogers

Social Media Pays: Chase Giving grants $25,000 to two Chicago theaters

Many of you may have followed the Chase Community Giving Program on Facebook.  With this project Chase claims, “We’re exploring a new way of charitable giving – harnessing the power of social media to give individuals and communities a voice in corporate philanthropy.”  So engaging your audience and testing the limits of your network were crucial to winning one of one hundred $25,000 grants and becoming a finalist for the $1,000,000 prize.

The more we could personalize how we reach out to our community, the more support we gained

Out of more than 500,000 charitable organizations, only two Chicago arts organizations received the first round prizes and are in the running for the big check.  Congratulations The New Colony and Sideshow Theatre Company.  When many larger (much larger) organizations were dismissing the opportunity as too big a project to undertake, these scrappy bands of theater makers  took up arms and successfully energized their patrons.

I followed up with both companies to learn a little bit more about their tactics to engage and gather online votes. Here is what they had to say:

Megan Smith (Managing Director; Sideshow Theatre Company)
Sideshow employed a variety of tactics to engage our audiences and collect votes and we had a really good time doing it!

Sideshow's been worked hard to develop a strong web presence, through our growing email base, Facebook pages, Twitter account, and the launching of our brand new blog - http://sideshowtheatre.org/blog/. While Sideshow has a growing fan base in Chicago, many of our supporters, artistic associates, and donors are from all around the country and the globe, and we focus on strong web presence to keep in touch with everyone in a fast, easy, affordable way.

We not only messaged our friends and family constantly - through email, Facebook messages, and personalized notes, but also through phone calls. Sideshow has a full on phone-a-thon each year to stay connected with our donors and we used that opportunity to ask for support. It took off like wildfire - we encouraged our supporters to become advocates and help us get more votes. From there, supporters spiraled out into their communities and campaigned on our behalf. It was amazing and touching. We contacted friends, acquaintances, and family who have blogs and other websites and requested postings. We contacted our alumni associations (both university and high school!) and got some support there. We then reached out directly to the community - we camped out all day at a local coffee shop, with our computers ready to directly collect votes. We talked for hours about who we are, our upcoming projects, and gained a lot of exposure just chatting with a laptop over coffee.

The more we could personalize how we reach out to our community, the more support we gained. People got to learn more about Sideshow, but they also learned about who we are personally and individually. We are giving Sideshow faces to go with the name.

Andy Hobgood (Artistic Director; The New Colony)
When we saw Chase Giving, we actually waited until 10 days before voting ended to start. We wanted to see the scale of voting before we defined our campaign – did we need 2,000 votes to win? Or 20,000? We are always careful about only engaging our supporters when we know their efforts will be worth their time. As soon as we saw that we COULD win Chase Giving if we got at least 1,500 votes – we sprang into action.

Our main strategy was to define for our supporters WHAT Chase Giving would mean to us. They needed to know WHAT they were voting for – and why they should be as passionate about us winning as we were. We alerted our whole network of the opportunity, but then we took the extra step of contacting members of the network who were gatekeepers to other large networks. By getting them onboard with how much of an impact they could actually make for our company – they then became ambassadors of TNC to their own networks.

The Sunday night before voting closed - we had the entire company at HQ working on computers, spread all over the place. Everyone just worked together calling friends, emailing, facebooking, etc.  I seriously should have taken pictures - it was absurd. People were in the living room, dining room, bedroom, foyer, sharing computers, some were on "making snacks" duty in the kitchen while others were working, it was a lot of fun. 

Once our supporters started sharing our message, which was now also their message, the votes came rolling in and won us the $25,000. It all came down to defining a goal that everyone wanted to be a part of reaching, and then empowering them to help us reach it.  

Now both of these deserving organizations need your help to reach their goal of $1,000,000.  You get up to five votes, so follow these links and show our fellow Chicagoans some love. And there is only 3 DAYS LEFT!!! So tell your friends
Vote for The New Colony by clicking here
Vote for Sideshow Theatre Company by clicking here

Tags: Diversifying Audiences, Internet Marketing, Return on Investment