The New Generosity
Have you noticed that after your new (and hopefully nifty) product arrives in the mail from Amazon, it is quickly followed up with a request from Amazon in your inbox? “Geoff, will you rate your transaction at Amazon.com?”
When I leave seller feedback, I am making a valuable contribution along with Amazon’s broad base of customers. Every review of each product and each seller helps make the Amazon buying experience easier, more informative and confidence inducing. If you think about it, people are quite generous with helping absolute strangers on the internet today.
I had to fix the digital clock on my daughter’s ’99 CRV. Too cheap to spend money, my first step is always a quick google for an easy solution. After a couple of hours chasing down links, I cobbled together a solution from several kind-hearted former-sufferers of non-working CRV clocks. I was very thankful to fix it for nothing… sufficiently so, that I posted my fix procedure at my blog in the hope it would help someone else. Which, from the comments at the bottom of that post, 3.5 months later made “Bravoj” a “happy man.”
There are lots of people doing lots of nice things online. According to Anya Kamenetz in, “The Case for Generosity” found in the March 2011 FastCompany magazine, Wikipedia, eBay, and Yelp are a few of the most visible ways that ordinary people help others.
Do you need a couch to crash on while on the road? Or, want to host a stranger needing a place to stay for the night? Try CouchSurfing.org. Have an extra “____________” (fill in the blank) that you’d be happy to give away for free, especially if someone else needed it? Try TwoShirts.org. Do you have skills in copywriting, design, marketing, fundraising? Online volunteering “for busy people (like you)” is made easy at Sparked.com.
Take a look at the article and see if you don’t come up with a creative way to leverage your gifts, those of your small group, or even those of the mass of humanity on the Internet to make this world a better place.
Our Cascade committee would love to hear what you might come up with.