Santa’s broken
Over lunch today, we started looking ahead to Christmas. With our Web 2.0 hats firmly on / rammed up appropriate cavities, we began thinking…
The whole culture of Christmas seems to have lost the plot. We do things we’d never countenance doing the rest of the year.
We meet up with relatives we carefully choose to avoid the rest of the year. We watch and listen to the Queen (in the UK - I’m guessing less so in Australia etc…)
…but most of all we give each other cards on a massive scale. Of course card-giving happens the rest of the year too, but only at Christmas does it all come at once.
By far the silliest type of card-giving is that between two people who regularly see each other anyway. Surely if cards have a point it’s to exchange a personal correspondence with someone you don’t see all the time?
In the UK Christmas cards are big business, and charities have successfully begun to dominate the commercial card market. The business model is simple: a percentage of the price of the card goes to the charity who endorse the card(s) you choose. My guess is, and I don’t know this for sure, that this percentage isn’t very much.
On top of this you’ve got the obvious environmental aspect of sending people bits of dead trees. Yes, cards can be nice to receive, and yes they do feel nice, but at what cost? Even if your cards are 100% recycled, there’s still the process of recycling itself, plus the road miles involved: surely there’s a better way?
So to the idea: it’s a charity eCard application with a twist…
- Instead of buying cards & stamps, you put the money you would have spent into an account
- You upload/enter your recipient list
- Personalise each eCard as much or as little as you like (from the image chosen - upload your own? - to the message itself)
- Decide when the cards get sent
- Each recipient receives an email inviting them to view their eCard online
- <em>the important bit</em>Before they can view the card, they get to choose which charity (from a list) their proportion of the total amount in the list goes to. So, for example, if you invest £50 and send to 50 people, the recipient chooses who your £1 goes to
- If the recipient doesn’t open the eCard in time, the amount goes to the sender’s chosen charity
So the eCard isn’t just a way of cutting down on dead trees - you’re also giving your recipients the opportunity to decide which charity benefits from your good intentions.
Comments on this post