Year-end thoughts by a fellow citizen and entrepreneur

Dear family, friends, colleagues and SoRewarding community,

Before the hustle and bustle of the holidays begins, I wanted to take a moment and thank each of you for your continued support of SoRewarding and our mission to spread goodness and integrate giving into people’s daily lives.

Today, an incredible man named Nelson Mandela passed away.  As I read all the kind words and farewell posts on social media from around the world, I’m reminded that no matter how long a person lives (in Mandela’s case – a good long 95 years), our time on Earth is still limited.  So the question is: What is it that you plan to leave behind? In Mandela’s case, he left behind a wealth of love along with examples of how to care for one another and promote peace.

His life is a good reminder that serving others, doing good, and spreading love is so much more fulfilling than only serving ourselves.  I work a lot – almost 18 hours a day between the two companies I founded, SoRewarding and Demetrio Tequila.  But recently, I’ve also tried to make more of an effort to appreciate each day and enjoy the people whom I’m fortunate to have in my life. 

Many of you who know me know that my goals in life have been simplified over the last few years.  I want to live a life that I can be proud of, try and never hurt anyone, help those in need, spend time with the people I love, take care of my family, and help as many people as I can without any expectations or needing anything in return. 

I’m sure most of you aspire to some similar goals – and I’m sure you all know how easy it is to get distracted by “the daily grind” and forget about what you want to get out of life. I’ve struggled with it for years and continue to even today.  But I’ve realized that when I truly stay focused on achieving these goals, I find myself to be a much happier and grateful person.

If you stop and think about it, most of us are extremely fortunate.  If we have something to eat, a roof over our heads, the love of family and friends and the spare time to be reading this crazy rant of mine, then we’re doing better than most of the people in this world.  But how often do we actually stop and feel grateful for all that we have?  For me, it actually takes quite a bit of reminding each day and then only does my day start to really feel spectacular.

2013 has been an interesting year for SoRewarding, to say the least.

I knew when I founded SoRewarding that it was not going to be an easy road.  Although social enterprises are somewhat of a hot topic today, five years ago, it really wasn’t.  So trying to convince investors and even nonprofits and businesses that we were building something truly innovative and useful that would benefit communities as a whole was difficult.  But with the help of a few investors and a great team, we headed towards making SoRewarding a reality.

After four years of tinkering around, research, development, re-development, etc., we finally launched our go-to-market site at the end of 2012 and we started off on full throttle, heading to the stars.  Towards the middle of the year, we ran out of gas as one of our lead investors and friend of mine exited the company for personal reasons.  This was an extremely tough time for the company and we had to lay off a good portion of our staff while we tried to figure out how to keep the momentum we had built up.

So, our lead investor leaves and there we were, trying to figure out what to do next.  Do we close up shop?  Do we sell it?  What to do?  Well, as it turns out, I was only good at doing one thing at that point.  I’m terribly embarrassed to say, but I just moped around for a few weeks while feeling extremely sorry for myself.  But more importantly, I felt horrible for having to let go of some of my colleagues who had also become good friends of mine.

So what did we end up doing?  The few of us who were left decided that we were going to pursue our mission of making SoRewarding the stellar site we knew it could be – so that’s exactly what we did. 

Today, I’m extremely thrilled to announce our latest and greatest release of our site.  Our CTO, our Director of Ops and our development team have outdone themselves with this release and I couldn’t be more proud.  Below are some quick highlights about the website, and some other exciting news from the past couple months:

• This week, SoRewarding.com hit its 1 millionth unique visitor – a big milestone for us.
• Today, we unveiled our newly designed site – a much cleaner and simpler experience with some really cool technologies.  Have a look when you get a chance. 
• With today’s launch, we also opened up our site for 3^rd party integrations. (http://www.sorewarding.com/developers)
• SoRewarding won the “Next Big Thing” award at Denver Startup week in September.
• We recently announced a really exciting new partnership with PVBLIC Foundation.  Together, we plan to make a lasting and meaningful impact in the philanthropic space.
• We are extremely proud to see a financial company like Janus Capital Group taking a leap into enhancing their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) efforts.  We are seeing more big names join us in making a positive impact in the community.  Janus Capital Group has many cool initiatives planned, but one example of how they plan to work with SoRewarding is through the use of SoRewarding’s trackable “Spread Kindness” wristbands to promote kindness as a company – really awesome to see. 

 As 2013 draws to a close and we eagerly look forward to 2014, I’m truly energized for the future of SoRewarding and excited to watch as our platform continues to transform communities and make philanthropy and spreading kindness a part of people’s daily lives.

I guess all this rambling is a long way of saying thank you to all of you who have supported and continue to support SoRewarding and our mission. What I’ve learned is that if you want something bad enough and if you believe in what you’re doing, there is always hope.  And a big reason that this company has been able to come as far as it has is because of the people – our investors, employees, nonprofit partners, business partners, community supporters, family and friends. Together, we will continue to charge forward and make a difference in this world.

Remember that question I asked earlier about “What is it that you plan to leave behind?”  Well, I don’t know about you, but for me, I just want to cut out all the superficial stuff and enjoy each day, each person, each moment as though it was the last thing I did.  And when my time comes, I hope to somehow (not sure exactly how yet – I’m working on it) leave this world knowing that I hopefully made a positive impact in the lives of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet, but also in the lives of those I didn’t.   

People – that’s what life is about.  Not material things, not our status in life, not ourselves, but others.  As 2014 begins, let’s focus each day on how we can serve one another and make this life worthwhile.

Here’s to a happy life!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to7uIG8KYhg

Marion

Connect… Give… Grow… Community

It’s a novel concept, doing something that not only benefits you but also benefits others around you.  You may have heard of it as a ‘win-win situation’ – designed to benefit all participants.  People have heard about it, but not many of us have seen it in practice.  It’s more like some unachievable goal in a distant far off land, it’s possible, but takes too much effort.  Often times the mindset is something like this: for everyone to benefit – I’ll need to benefit first and then I’ll help everyone, which can results in a perpetual ‘me’ state.

SoRewarding helps you, your business, or your organization to make a positive and long-lasting impact for everyone in your neighborhood.  For this blog entry, let’s elaborate on how Businesses can use SoRewarding.

Connecting

For businesses, the goal is to make connections with people.  As a business, you make connections with a positive, kind and generous audience by creating a page on SoRewarding.com.  Individuals, fellow businesses and Nonprofits will see your business page on SoRewarding.  You’ll want to make sure your information is complete (links to your website, FB, etc.) so that users are able to explore who you are and make that initial connection.

Giving

To give… is easier said than done.  How can my business give?  I’m sure it’s something that every successful business owner has put some thought into.  After all, we’re here because of the loyal support of our friends, family and community… It’s only natural to want to give-back. 

How about offering your product or service at less than the normal rate?  This rewards your current customers and attracts new ones to try your business.  How about giving a percentage of the sales to a local non-profit?  … ready for the Matrix moment? 

What if I told you that you could do both, through SoRewarding.com and it’s easy.  It doesn’t take more than a couple minutes if you have your business page set up.  As to not detract from this blog entry, you can learn more about publishing discounts, here. 

Growth

I’ve connected with a new audience by having my business page on SoRewarding.  I’ve published an offer that rewards my customers and that also gives to local Nonprofits.  My question is this, has this really helped the growth of my business? 

Well, let’s look at the numbers.  In 2011, 65% of households donated to charity.² As a household that donates to charity, you should assume that that same household will also be more inclined to support businesses who donate to charity versus those who don’t.  A study conducted by Cone Inc. in 2010 found that 90% of consumers (about 278 million people) want to know what cause your business supports. A whopping 79% of consumers would switch to a brand associated with a good cause and 83% wish more of 

the products and services they purchase and retailers they use would support causes.³

Community

If you’ve followed along up until this point, I hope you’re able to paint a picture of how everyone in a community benefits from socially responsible businesses.  Focusing on philanthropic work as a local business has the added benefit of being able to see the people you are helping too.  So now that you’ve been given the information and the tools… get to giving! I invite you to use www.SoRewarding.com for an easy-to-use site that connects with kindness.

1.              http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=42
2.              http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics
3.              http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/marketing-sales/2012/01/31/philanthropy-and-small-business-win-win-situation/

Morgan Adams Foundation & Thrifty Shades of Cray

Thrifty Shades of Cray, not to be confused with Fifty Shades of Grey is tomorrow!  Instead of bringing your book, throw on your thriftiest outfit and head downtown to The Ginn Mill… where 30% of all sales between 8-11PM will be generously donated to The Morgan Adams Foundation.  That’s huge..!!

Companies like Smashburger, Popchips and Demetrio Tequila have hopped on-board and teamed-up with SoRewarding and Gin Mill to put this night over the top!  You can expect some pretty snazzy giveaways… BUT better than that, you can also expect some awesome outfits. No thrifty stuff? No worries.  There’ll be a rack of clothing for those of you who don’t have anything thrifty enough for such an occasion.  Have some fun, spread kindness and enjoy yo’self is the motto of the night.

Connecting the community & Spreading Kindness

This event is completely free.  More info, directions and RSVP:  Here

The Launch of Kindness Bands: A Generosity Movement!

As you know, since our launch, we have been using our website and events to try and change the mindset of the younger generation of Denverites and emphasize the importance of giving back. But for the SoRewarding team, creating this original platform for helping local nonprofits raise money through the activities of the community is not enough. We want to do more.

Our CEO, Marion, truly inspires our team to go beyond the website and events and spread generosity. “The idea is not just to get people to donate to local causes, but to give back to the community in general and spread compassion” says Marion Mariathasan, CEO. “Giving can be very sporadic for many and what we really want to inspire is a lifestyle change. We want people to take pride in doing good and spreading kindness to others all the time. That’s how we came up with the idea for the new SoRewarding kindness bands.”

This belief is why we are launching a wristband movement with the intention of having people give their “kindness bands” to others when they engage in random acts of kindness. These wristbands can then be tracked using a unique ID code on SoRewarding.com by every individual that the band is given to. This feature allows each person to see what acts of kindness their band has been involved in and where in the world it has traveled.

We will be spreading the first batch of kindness bands as we begin to engage community members in random acts of kindness. Kindness bands will also be available for purchase on SoRewarding.com later this month. So, if you want to become part of a community around the globe that is united through random acts of kindness, visit www.SoRewarding.com to learn more and get your hands on some wristbands!