I don’t so much think it doesn’t have an impact, as much nothing on the list has any PR pizzazz.

$316.62 to a grade school? Lame.

$100,000 novelty check to a board member’s favorite charity that happens to be run by his son? Now that’s pizzazz with a capital P!

That just means bad marketing.

> Amazon has helped fund over 20 thousand charities of your choosing. These small charities couldn't have made it without your help.

easier to get promoted by replacing a program with a new one you made

Amazon in my country has an image problem. Sure people use it, but people hate it for "killing the high street" and other such nonsense.

Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.

The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.

>That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.

How is it better PR if hardly anybody knows about it?

Amazon runs a news story in local paper about how smile is benefitting $list_of_local_charities

The email they sent to me was they are going to take the money from my local charity and instead give it to ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Of course it had an impact. It's guaranteed to just be something that's not seen as 'sexy' internally, and therefore has probably had no-one championing it, and it gathered dust and finally... someone just wanted to kill the code.

I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.

I'm quite convinced the motivations for both the creation and teardown of this donation program must have come from the money people, not from the techies. It must have been a tax write-off. Nothing else makes sense, knowing how strongly Amazon is a cost-cutting company.