I've been hearing a lot of after-the-fact complaining about the Chase Community Giving project and the incessant influx of messages from all their friends asking them to vote for a variety of Chicago theatres. This is seen as shilling for a corporation, an annoyance, and even downright crass.

I'm a little surprised at the backlash, frankly. In an average week I get 20-30 Facebook messages, nearly all of which are people asking me to come to their shows. I get 20-40 e-mails a day in my personal account, at least half of which are those same theatres asking me to come to their show and sometimes, even, to make a donation.

Why is this acceptable, while asking someone to install an application that has a bank logo on it and place a vote an annoyance? I have over 1,000 Facebook friends. Over half of those people are active theatre folk. And I was not bombarded by messages. I saw a lot of status updates about it (and posted a few myself), but for me, at least, it was nothing that made logging into Facebook intolerable.

Perhaps part of my tolerance for this comes from understanding the theatres' need and Chase's motivation. Corporations give money to not-for-profits for two reasons:

1) It's in their corporate mission statement to support certain kinds of projects or to improve communities in which they're based. Usually this aligns with other aspects of their business. IBM, for instance, gives computers to schools.

2) They're looking for a marketing boost. This means that they need a decent ROI (return on investment). Which, usually, means they give to the largest arts organizations, because those orgs can get the corporation's logo in front of the highest number of people. And it's all a numbers game.

What Chase has done—and done brilliantly—is figure out a way to fulfill need number two while giving to small not-for-profits. They've realized that a relatively modest amount of money for them would yield a high level of activity from eager organizations who really need the $20K. That's why they capped the size of participating groups at $1 million. They need us to ask all our friends and get the Chase logo out into the world as often as possible.

I don't get annoyed that when I get a mailing from Steppenwolf and  see the logo soup at the bottom from all the corporations that support them. It's part of doing business. For the small organizations that went after Chase's money, the activity was the cost of doing business. Let’s be honest, no corporation was going to give $20,000 to Stage Left (my former theatre). That theatre doesn't see enough traffic to warrant it. The only way Stage Left has a chance at the money is by hooking up with a bunch of other theatres to get a collective sponsorship.

The real story is how Chicago theatres jobbed the system. We got $300,000 from Chase. Find me 15 organizations with the same core mission in the same community who got Chase support. I'll bet there aren't any. I just did a quick scan and I only see one other theatre (The Actors Gang in Culver City, CA; though there are a number of arts schools and music groups). How could this be? How could nearly 10 percent of the Chase recipients all be small Chicago theatres?

The answer is simple. We treated this like a collective opportunity. We urged our friends, not just to vote for our theatre, but for a bunch of other theatres. Eclipse, Stage Left, The Hypocrites and others sent out e-mails encouraging support for the entire Chicago theatre scene. Instead of acting like a bunch of competitors struggling for primacy, we acted like a community. And as a result, Chase made a bigger investment in small Chicago theatres than they did in any other community in the country. And, to me, that's the story here. And that's worth a few Facebook messages.