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<< Oct 16, 2006
Hello everyone,
I've realized one thing -- CharityFocus is a posse, not an organization. Instead of fundraisers, we invite people to sit in silence. Instead of paid employees working 9-to-5, we have passionate be-the-change volunteers. Instead of stalling projects until we secure resources, we just jump and trust that the net will appear. It's a more effective, faster, and dynamic response to life. And quite frankly, the posse is rockin' the house.
Posses are real. Couple months ago, I get an email, "My friend is depressed and I'm too far away to help. Can you do something?" We activate the underground networks - a TV news anchor invites her to walk in the park with the best cookie in NY, a singer leaves her a voicemail with her favorite song, a tiger-team member has coffee with her, strangers from across the country send her greeting cards and flowers and that friend who was too far away writes a note saying, "I'm in tears. I need to help someone else. Tell me what I can do." Two days ago, another young woman writes about transforming her bachelorette party into service bonanza; we load her up with ideas, connect her to a big-name guest speaker, and give her full support. Yesterday, a father emails about tagging his own son's wedding with kindness; we plan on getting a group of youngsters with smile shirts, who will relieve the waiter-crew unexpectedly, serve the food as usual, stick a smile card under the dessert plate, go up on stage to declare their kindness-tag, ask others to look under their plates and pay-it-forward and disappear from the back door. This is real stuff. No brands, no measurement, just real spirit of service. And it happens everyday in CharityFocus circles.
Posses simply do what makes them come alive and trust in organic self-organization. This year alone, our website traffic has received more eyeball time than the opening weekend of "Inconvenient Truth." For three years now, we have hand-shipped more than 4000 orders of Smile Cards around the globe, with distributed shipping units on three continents - North America, Asia and Europe. And of course, 350,000 cards later, still no cost! Everyday, more people get our daily Quote-A-Day than can fit into PacBell park; James, as the voice of Quote-A-Day, can tell you how many lives are changed by a simple email. ProPoor, our development portal for South Asia led by Yoo-mi and Nisha, posted a record traffic month in September with 38 new NGOs, 53 blog entries, 155 comments from the community. We do all this yet we don't even have a brochure for our organization. It's all very "unprofessional", "unsustainable", yet people everywhere take note. From last month's ABC interview to a SFGate article to a BBC mention, dozens of media articles have been written about us without any PR effort, media specialist, or any of that. Even Google.com's board member, Sheryl Sandberg, writes to us -- since we're the 'top grantee' of their Adword campaign and will be featured in their annual report -- to understand how exactly we can have such influence without being a "real" organization.
A posse's strength lies in its ability to be-the-change; their values are their organizing principle. Our three values -- no staff, no fundraising, only small acts -- keep us anchored. Earlier this year, we didn't have enough money to last the year; we send 15 million Quote-A-Day emails/year and it's so, so easy to send a fundraising note and lock up our security. But, then, we wouldn't be CharityFocus. Incidentally, couple weeks later, we got a random note with a "can you send me your address, I'd like to send you a small check." Considering that we get at least one $3-or-less donation every month, Jennifer responded in her usual 'voice of CharityFocus' manner. Next month, we receive a check that covers us for couple years! Again, we went to the drawing board with our guiding principles and concluded that posses don't fear, posses don't accumulate. So we started to give away our reserves anonymously! Then, Google says, "We will give you half a million in Adwords donation if you can match with $18K." Phenomenal offer. But we didn't have the money, so we declined. Charade of circumstances will arise and pass, even CharityFocuses may come and go, but we don't comprise our values. That's what makes us a true posse.
Posses attract, don't promote. We serve spontaneously with what we have and don't try to secure resources for a pre-meditated scheme in our heads. That unconditional giving put us in a tremendous position of incredible leverage, a strength that attracts without any active promotion. Just in the last quarter, we've had invitations to keynote a conference of 800 youth in Connecticut, think-tank session in Colorado on 'philanthropy without money' with 30 foundation leaders, Web of Change conference in Canada to engage with co-activists, Be-the-Change day pep-talk at Rutgers University, leadership retreat led by Robert Gass, Seth Godin's coveted 'Making Things Happen' workshop, Alliance For New Humanity in Puerto Rico for a share-CF-story speech, Jain convention in Singapore for a talk on 'selfless service.' All full scholarships. In fact, we could easily charge for some of these events, but that again wouldn't be CharityFocus. :) "You guys are like happiness entrepreneurs," Tom Hurley -- founder of Chaordic Commons with Visa-founder Dee Hock -- declares after a deep look at the CharityFocus model. "I want to nominate you for the MacArthur Genius Award but I wouldn't even know which category you'd fit in. And I guess that's the whole point."
Posses have the raw power of people, without an HR department. Tiger team posse keeps growing with new folks -- Birju joins us from Columbia B-school and is likely to help with PledgePage, Lee joins us from Orgeon 'just because', Heena (who just graduated from UC Berkeley) is spreading some major smiles -- even on airplanes, Stanford PhD student, Neil, is helping us with Adwords algorithms, Hemanta and Neelam have come on board ProPoor, soccer-star Silas joins Rahul on the iJourney effort, Amitabh jumps in from Yale where he has recruited the Dean for an underground 'kindness bandits' program, Wayne is a meditator from UC Santa Cruz who will help manage our machines. The list goes on. How do we retain the people? We don't. There is no HR at CharityFocus. Our values do the work for us. While most organizations spend time doing fundraisers, hosting events, and fancy retreats, we have an open door invitations for weekly Wednesday meditations in an everyday living room, or local events where you can share a meal with the homeless, hold 'Got Smile' posters on the streets, and bind books to preserve Tibetan culture. Thousands of people have attended these events, thousands more have been affected by these events, and they're replicated around the globe. Yet no cost, no overhead, no line-items that IRS will see. Just raw, grassroots people, people like you and me.
Posses are always pushing bounds. Smile Cards are growing into SmileGroups (many thanks to Fred, Shveta, & Krupa!) where people commit to an extra act of kindness every week; just two months into its launch, SmileGroups are adding 4 new members and 2 new stories everyday. Smile Decks are coming next. Trishna and Ashish are giving 'Service eXchange' model a Web 2.0 face lift, SignsOfLight is being consolidated with Quote-A-Day under Viral's leadership, cShops is morphing into 'smile store' where the currency is good-deeds ("KarmaBucks"), Inspiring Messages is evaluating spreading memes in post-banner-ad days of the Internet, iJourney is turning hip as a video blog of service 'tipping points'. Lots going on but stay updated with our blog for the latest.
Last but not least, posses have stories. Because of our be-the-change volunteers, you hear stories around CF that you don't get anywhere else. Someone tapes 50 cents on a vending machine to surprise the next person with a free coke, an NGO in Himalayas requests computers to empower a rural movement, a group of friends bike across the US to raise awareness for global warming, Deepak Chopra sends "let's go for it" email for an iJourney video blog we are starting, a 15-year-old reflects on her Dad doing magic tricks for a lonely child on a plane, a cousin hosts a free car wash to celebrate a 10-year-old's birthday, Subba Rao gives a live talk on how he non-violently got 611 bandits to turn themselves in, Pavi writes a heartfelt poem to share smile-stones in public places, a compulsive gambler recovers with smile-card stories: "I am forever grateful to all of you at Smile for allowing me to smile again and being able to make someone else smile. God bless you." Or even a celebrity like Ethan Zohn -- a professional soccer player who won Survivor-Africa and donated his million bucks for AIDS prevention - wants to do 50 smile-card tags anonymously, in 50 days, in 50 states. Page after page after page can be filled up with original stories that keep us constantly pumped.
This is all heavy duty, paradigm bending stuff. And this is why I volunteer for CharityFocus. Thank you for your partnership in the revolution.
Last week, I received a bouquet of flowers following a talk at Rutgers University. After the talk, I continued my be-the-change stories to dozen students who had come up for more questions. Just then, I unwrapped the bouquet of flowers, gave one to each of the students and asked them to tag an underappreciated bus-driver, receptionist, a TA, anyone. Baam! Inspiration turns into action and the rest is history. By the time I got home, there were already orders of Smile Cards. Some even sent me personal stories. By the end of the week, Rutgers students had self-organized in their own posse and requested 1000 more cards.
When happiness entreprenuers are happy, happiness multiplies organically. Simple, elegant, contagious.
With smiles, :)
Nipun [??]
CharityFocus is an incubator of compassionate action. The collection of our coordinators forms the Tigers Team with 137 members. To jump on this list or to get off, email Nipun anytime. Thank you for your partnership in "Helping Others Help Others."
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