Two days ago, I sent an email to the Smile Card team about an idea that all business school students would laugh at.  While I was hoping to be talked out of it, the smile carders, in their glorious magnanimity,  simply encouraged it! 

The next morning -- yesterday morning -- we got an email from a man on the East Coast, whom I've met once before.  He and two of his friends want to make a monthly donation for the next eight months (and I have no idea why eight months :)), that will essentially cover the cost of this latest experiment.  With one simple stroke of serendipity, generosity prevails!

Here's the note ...

hello smile carders,

i'm thinking we have a holiday sale for smile cards. :)

for the last four months, we've averaged 1500 orders/month (which is, in fact, where we cap it off).  we ship 10 cards/order and on average, each shipped card will cost us a 2 cents to print and 7 cents to ship.  so that's about  fifteen hundred bucks of material cost per month.  return on that investment, of course, are the thousands of stories on our site and thousands more comments, 32K folks on our weekly newsletter, steadily rising site traffic (from 152K hits in Jan to a record 1.2 million hits in October), and of course, hundreds of volunteer hours that are required to keep the wheels spinning.

at no cost to the recipient, we ship 10 cards/order and people can order again; they can also download the design for free and print away.  for those that want a printed bigger quantity, they can request it in bulk at cheapest market cost ($30 for 500 cards, which includes shipping!).  we average between 1-2 bulk order per week and whenever people ask for more cards and can't afford it, we blindly give it to them (but shhh, that's not mentioned on our  website).

after having tried various models, the site is still not financially sustainable.  partially, it's because everyone receives a dollar worth of stuff and it doesn't seem like a big deal; and partially, it's because we don't solicit and in an online world, people have no idea about our needs.  hence, various combinations need to be tried and we continue to experiment in innovative ways that don't compromise our idealist values. :)

now, as we approach the holiday season, media will cover more human-interest stories, gifting will be in the air, site traffic will ramp up, and we'll see a rise in bulk orders (and incoming money).  we'll probably have a banner month and i was thinking it's a great opportunity to ramp up some karma bucks!  i propose we do the usually counter-intuitive CharityFocus thing -- we remove the charge for bulk orders!  of course, this will increase our short-term monetary costs, but you know, what the heck, if anyone is going to give like there is no tomorrow, it's gotta be us. :)

practically speaking, perhaps we'll hit up the Karma Kitchen balance since it would be great to pay-forward the pay-forward money. :)

let me know if someone has alternative thoughts on this.  i would love to be talked out of this. :)  if not, though, we can setup an online form where folks can describe how exactly they're going to use the cards and if the request seems reasonable, we'll ship it.  honestly, i'm a bit nervous about giving away orders during the holiday season on a site with a million monthly hits where just domestic shipping is $10 a piece and where we have a track record of unsustainability, but BRING IT ON!

with big smiles,

nipun