Too Big For A Bullet Point

Searching for 'Fedex' in my inbox unexpectedly brought me to this message from Nipun, sent many years ago. 

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• Smile Cards were born at a coffee table conversation in Chicago in summer 2003 (roughly), during an orientation meeting of ServiceSpace's Chicago chapter. The key point was to turn pranks into something constructive. Rough story is narrated in this video clip.

• Printed first 100 for distribution: the Kinkos employee behind the counter gave it to us for free; distributed on a Wednesday in December, when Rev. Heng Sure had come to speak and about 80-100 were in the audience.

• Started HelpOthers.org website to allow people to download the card (and print on their own) and order pre-printed cards too. No charge for orders of pre-printed cards; from address: "One Compassion Way, Mother Earth, Universe". Business plan was gratitude. Over million cards have been printed and distributed in that spirit.

• People started sharing stories of what they did with the cards; we were inspired; as we got more, we started sharing the stories online with everyone. People did very creative acts with Smile Cards, and we shared those online too. Created lots of momentum and more Smile Cards were in use.

• We started a weekly newsletter that featured top stories, an idea and a user comment. Today, it hosts 76,000 active subscribers. In 2010, we also started a daily newsletter that reaches over 8000 subscribers already.

• Lots of published stories went "viral", generated tens of thousands of hits. Stories like An Unsuspecting Restaurant Table and Learning from a Cabbie and 12 Minute Ride to Penn Station ... Magazines, publications and books republished lots of stories -- and we gifted it to them, so long as they kept the stories in the public domain. Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul, for example, requested more than a dozen stories. They opened with this story: A Blazer, Red Scarf and Fifty Bucks

• A user said, "I love to be kind, but I often get lazy. It would be great to have a kindness buddy, even if he/she was anonymous." Based on that, we created Smile Groups, where people committed to do an extra act of kindness every week, write a story about it, and share comments on other stories. To date, 15,000 stories and 58,000 comments have been generated.

• Early on in Smile Groups, a user said he/she was really moved by a comment that someone left on his/her story -- and wanted to know if there was anyway she could thank him/her. So we created this idea of "Karma Bucks" -- whenever you contribute to the ecosystem, you get Karma Bucks and use them as a virtual currency to thank someone. Most importantly, you can't earn Karma Bucks; they have to be gifted to you. For example, if someone loves a story you posted, and they add a "smile" to it, you would get some Karma Bucks. People really took to it. The density of interactions within Smile Groups took off.

• We started a Smile Store, where you can use your Karma Bucks to "buy" smile-card related things. Primarily, this was used for Bulk order of Smile Cards -- so if someone wanted more cards, we were happy to ship it to them, provided we knew they were using them. And Karma Bucks also provided a way for us to know that.

• Along the way, we received a heartful $1000 donation. In the spirit of the donation, we created $100 challenge -- "If you had an extra $100, how would you use it to bring more kindness in your community?" Lots of beautiful ripples.

• Lot of offline event were generated along the way too. Yale Business School did a kindness competition, Warren Buffet was personally tagged with a Smile Card, a woman in Australia did regular events, a walk-a-thon in New Mexico urged everyone to do an act of kindness with a Smile Card, a Church in Canada was handing out cards to their congregation, and the stories went on.

• On a car-ride with Andrew, we brainstormed an idea about creating a deck of cards with a unique idea on each card. Couple years later, it manifested. We weren't sure of how to sustain it; at a meeting with some friend, they donated the first 1500 decks. That created momentum. In just a few months since, 6000 decks (54 cards each) have been printed and they're flying off the shelves. :)

• Sustenance: it costs us about 6 cents/card to print and ship each Smile card (w/out labor costs). Whenever we didn't have enough monetary resources, we first simplify and then give more ... when we had the first major bump in demand for Smile Cards, a person showed up on a Wednesday and offered to get them printed in India; we would have friends bring back 10 Kg of Smiles in their suitcases. Then, at one point, FedEx donated us an unlimited shipment, so we shipped 100 Kg of cards ... then, they offered free shipping for every one of our orders, if we put their logo on the cards -- and we refused and stuck with our grassroot campaign. At a conference, a woman heard the story of CF, found out about how we much effort we put into saving costs, and offered us free printing for our cards. Subsequently, her business went down but she connected us with her printers for low-cost and high-quality printing. Of course, we do get donations -- anything from $1 to a sheet of stamps to big amounts. There is a donation button on our site, but its subtle and is provided not to solicit but to give people an opportunity to participate in the chain of kindness. Simplest way for us to raise money is to put a small ad in our millions of email newsletters -- it would take five minutes and handily sustain everything; but we don't advertise either.

• Still, with the exponential growth in demand (and inevitable continuation in the future -- we ship to over 100 countries every year), we needed to try something more creative. Turned out that lots of people were willing to ship small amounts of orders every week, and pay for the postage (which is bulk of our cost per card). So we initiated volunteer shippers, who would ship 10 orders/week after we ship them some supplies in bulk. This was particularly helpful for international orders, where the shipper would only have to pay local postage. Dozens of volunteers signed on for this, and at any given point in time, we have 20-30 active shippers who ship orders every week. So, whenever someone in the ecosystem placed an order, someone else would fulfill the order. Beautiful.

• To operate such an ecosystem requires lots of manpower, good amount of intelligent technology, and monetary resources for the basic cost of material goods. If were to put a value on this whole operation, ie. if you were to replicate this in a commercial setting, it would easily be in the 7 figure range -- and still, success wouldn't be guaranteed (as has been witnessed by failed experiments of the same concept by Starbucks, etc.). So I think the most important point is that this whole ecosystem (which is a sub-ecosystem of ServiceSpace) ends up creating value that is typically untouched by paradigms driven by financial incentives.

• Impact of Smile Cards is too huge to contain in a bullet point. :)

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For the next 20 minutes, I read all the stories in that mail. It was a beautiful reminder of the power of small on a Monday morning, and I am filled with gratitude for ServiceSpace and all the smiles it has spread.