I have been thinking about what to write about The Members Project, American Express’ new member engagement initiative. In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s the nutshell:

Amex is donating $1 for every cardholder (member) that registers on the site, up to a maximum of $5 million. Cardholders can propose worthwhile projects that need funding, and can discuss each others’ projects on the site. In stages of voting the ideas are winnowed down to a single winning project which will receive the funding.

I hope it’s a successful initiative. As an employee of a credit union, I can attest that it’s often difficult engaging members to take action, although their healthy marketing budget will help a lot. Makes me jealous. I like this kind of social marketing, which helps a company do well by doing good.

The clincher for me was that I did a Google blog search for The Members Project and the vast majority of the results were posts about worthwhile projects and initiatives that could use the money, as opposed to a meta-level discussion about the Amex initiative itself. That struck me as a very good sign.

Here’s what I searched.

Thoughts?