Imagine you turn on the news and you hear:
“...surprised the world by announcing they would be introducing a line of automobiles. While quite a leap from the computer industry, _____ said...”
How very different is your reaction if the person being quoted is Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs. For me it’s amusement mixed with dread versus a quick mental check of my finances and credit score. Is this because I’m a mindless Apple fanboy? No, it’s because Apple has something Microsoft does not: the benefit of the doubt. As a business, this is one of the most important things you can ever have.
Unfortunately so few us have the charisma of Steve Jobs backed with a 30-year track record and a small army of geniuses. The good news is, humans do not have to rely on nature and luck because we have tools. Charity is a tool that has the power to give you an instant boost of credibility. Armed with that, you can explore novel solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems with the side-effect of doing some good in the world.
Karma in action
I’ve give you an example. Our product, Delicious Library, uses Amazon for data simply because it’s the best solution for our users. It provides us with a lot of fairly accurate information about many items in many categories for many countries. It’s not perfect, but it stands head and shoulders above any other one source. Moreover, they give us an API, which means stability for our users.
The trouble is, this generates money for us as an unintended side-effect. If people buy media through Delicious Library (again, something added for the convenience of users), we get a small referral fee. Many people assume this is a major part of our revenue stream and the reason we insist on using Amazon in the first place. They ascribe sinister motives to things we do (or don’t do) and point to this money as proof.
In reality, the referral money we get from Amazon is a drop in the bucket compared to the money we make selling licenses. We don’t even want the money, but accepting it is not optional, and our reluctance earns us nothing from the conspiracy-minded.
So we just give it to charity—every penny of it. No matter how convinced you are that we have black hearts fueled by consuming the flesh of kittens and puppies, it’s nigh impossible to come up with a good conspiracy theory that involves us compromising our user experience to earn money for charity.
I can’t take credit for that, but it did teach me the power of charity, which I then applied to solve another problem: people who want to buy Delicious Library but can’t do so because they can’t get through their firewall, they don’t have a Visa or MasterCard, or they don’t trust us (or the internet) to protect their credit card information.
When I took over support, the solutions to these problems were extremely involved and required repugnant actions like configuring network settings, calling us long distance, or getting setting up dummy credit accounts. No product should be that difficult to buy, and often we couldn’t reach any kind of solution, leading to frustration, bewilderment, and perhaps worst of all, a tremendous waste of valuable engineering resources.
So I said hell with it and just started giving people free licenses. As a solution, it was better than what had been going on, but it still wasn’t a very good solution. One obvious problem is that if word got out, it could be easily abused, but that wasn’t really what killed it. Rather, it was that customers hated it. People would get pissed off because they felt like they were being dismissed or given a handout that they didn’t want. They wanted to pay for the program, damn it.
Now what I do is issue a license and send back a form letter explaining that they are to give the cost of the license to the Madagascar Fauna Group. I also enclose a little blurb about the group’s mission, their efficiency, and all that other stuff I’m always talking about. Since they are a charity, the MFG is both more willing and better equipped to deal with some weirdo who wants to pay with a sock full of nickels.
Customers love this. They go from being extremely frustrated to extremely impressed, which probably nets us more sales in the long run from word of mouth. It saves me a lot of time, and has also gotten the Madagascar Fauna Group a few new patrons. I used to dread dealing with these customers, but now I love it, particularly the extremely pissed off ones, because the angrier they are, the more passionate they are, and the more I’ll be glad to have them on my side, and on the side of my cause.
I have another crazy idea to solve a problem that plagues every software company: getting good beta testers. The trouble is, most beta testers don’t take it very seriously. They’re just tempted by the lure of free, pre-release software. You can give prizes to people who find bugs, and that helps, but what you really need is to get people invested in the beta program.
What I propose is this: hold a Dutch auction and make people bid on your beta testing slots. A Dutch auction is where you have a quantity of the same object up for bid and there are as many winners as there are objects. Good beta testers from the last round will of course be invited back for free. By making people pay to participate in the beta program, they will be invested in it and do a better job.
The glaring problem with this is that it would be a PR nightmare. Imagine the press you’d get. Greedy bastard charges for privilege to test software. Oh, you could protest you’re just doing this to make sure people take the job seriously, but nobody will believe you. Unless, of course, you gave all the money to charity. Suddenly you’ve not only made this a viable solution, you’re also generating good press.
Shift happens
The great thing about charity as a tool is you can’t overuse it or wear it out. The more you use it, the more good you do. It’s like a car that runs on trash and produces purified drinking water. Nobody’s going to criticize the length of your commute or begrudge your Sunday drives.
It also represents a shift in the way we think about charity. People have the same relationship with charity they do with broccoli. You know it’s good for you and you should have more, but in practice it just doesn’t work that way. If we all did things simply because they were good for us, we’d be a nation known as much for our generosity as for our physique.
Instead of treating charity as a handout to the potentially undeserving at the expense of ourselves, we make it into a selfish act. Selfishness, as I’ve mentioned before, is a very natural state and much more reliable than its inverse. I suppose someone out there might think it’s repugnant to give to charity as a form of selfishness, but that person is an idiot.
It’s an unfortunate coincidence things that are good for us are often unpleasant and unpalatable. If they invented bacon that was good for your heart, broccoli that tasted like chocolate, and weight training that gave you an orgasm, I’d be all over it. The point is not to suffer, but to live a good, healthy life. So it is with charity. I want to save Madagascar. If that helps your business, more power to you.
This also changes the nature of charity from a business in and of itself to a side-effect of business. Why should it be that the people who want to harvest the oceans and the people who want to save the oceans should work at cross purposes? At best, they will cancel each other out, whereas if they were a bit more open-minded and worked together they could both do better in the long-run.
This is one of the things I love about the Madagascar Fauna Group. They are, in a way, a side-effect of zoos, which are in the business of entertainment and education. I feel similarly about the Duke Lemur Center, which is not only one of the most vital forces in lemur conservation, but also the world epicenter for primatology, anthropology, sociology, and all the other scientific benefits that lemurs provide. Their charity is a side-effect of their business: providing a Duke University education.
Giving all your revenue to charity*
This brings me to another crazy idea. Right now when you license a program like Delicious Library, you go through three panels. You select what you want, you fill out your shipping and billing information, then you receive a confirmation. What if there was a fourth panel, which offered your customer the chance to make a donation to charity, with matching funds from the cost of the license?
So, for example, since Delicious Library is $40, the customer could decide to donate $20. They would be billed $60, $40 of which would go to charity, while the other $20 goes to feed the monster. If they donated $40, they’d be billed $80, and we’d get nothing, but honestly, that’s OK. The software costs us nothing on a per-copy basis. They could, of course, donate more, but you’d only match up to $40.
They could, of course, choose to donate nothing, which is fine. They just pay their license fee, and you get your money. Most will probably do this, of course, and a few might tack on a buck or so, so you’re not likely to go broke.
I like this idea a lot more than I like the whole “some percentage of this purchase supports charity” scheme for a few reasons. How awesome would it be to be able to say that up to 100% of your company’s revenue goes to charity? Oh sure, some wiseass might point out that in practice that could be no money to charity at all, but whose fault is that? The very person criticizing you. You don’t decide how much of your revenue goes to charity. They do, and I bet they’re not willing to risk their entire paycheck on your generosity. Other foot, meet shoe.
The more charitable your company is, the harder it is to attack. Oh, people can compete with you, sure. The benefit of the doubt only works when there’s doubt. If you go around acting like a douche nozzle (leaving comment spam, telling lies about your competitors, kicking puppies, etc) you’re going to burn through that pretty quickly. But imagine Microsoft trying to sue for infringing on one of their so-called patents? You would be a public relations nightmare for anyone who wanted to fight dirty.
Giving vicariously through your kids
When I was a little kid, my mom would give me a dollar to put in the offering plate. It was pretty damned easy to put it in there, too. I mean, it wasn’t my money. This is the same problem with the Mac Heist model. If you recall, Mac Heist gave a pretty good chunk of money to charity, and let you pick where you wanted your “donation” to go. Trouble is, that raises money for charity, but it doesn’t really teach you anything. Charity is a personal trait that needs to be learned. It’s one of those “good habits” you hear about. You should have learned it from your parents, but if you didn’t, it’s not too late.
Charity feels good, and is good for you. I don’t mean some pseudo new age bullshit like it’s good for your karma. It’s good for you in a real, tangible way. It makes you feel good about yourself and about the people around you. When I give to charity, I feel great. My stress level and my blood pressure drop. I don’t get angry at people on the road. I feel more tolerant toward people around me. I become less introverted, because I feel generally less afraid of people. I also feel more satisfied with what I have in life.
I’d like to share that with people. Maybe, by inducing people to give some of their own money to charity, they can try it on for size and see how they like it. Some small percentage of people might find they like it a lot, and might try it again. Maybe they’ll find it’s addictive, like some people do running. If I can make people make the world a better place, I will have made the world a better place. Not even Amway can beat that kind of multi-level marketing magic.
What if carrots were just as good for you, but tasted like fried mochi stuffed with delicious custard? Photo by Mary Brunson.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The Power of Charity
