In a pile of so many Happy New Year messages I hope this one meets your eye. And in case if you are about to move on in a few seconds than let me immediately say a BIG THANK YOU to you. The complete Team at ProjectHeena strives to work hard to make a difference and add value to the world. We strongly believe that great things happen when you do good to others. Having said that it would have been difficult to achieve whatever we have without your support.

To briefly state here are the numbers from 2013

• 46 Registered Non-profits
• 1178 Awesome Volunteers
• 3370 Hours of Volunteering
• 54 Volunteering Tasks successfully closed
• 1500 Social Media Friends
• Crazy Number of discussions

I am a person who keeps expecting more, more and more. So before you will read these numbers, my expectations are already raised. But at the same time I know how ‘short of time’ we all are and when I see people volunteering for more than 3000+ hours that deserves a #Salute No doubt a bulk of this happened with the help and support from Bhumi whose volunteers were not just accredited but certified on the platform.

We are growing

We are packing some real punch for the new year. Operationally more and more NGOs are joining us, Thanks to our Community Manager Kanupriya. We are also launching ProjectHeena SOCH which will help us connect with the Student Community to drive things ahead.

On the tech front Jigar and Nikhil have been great pillars. We have made small tweaks on the website, the last time you checked out. You can login with Facebook and LinkedIn, map exact location so that volunteering notifications are more precise, a profile completion indicator, an Achievements tab to highlight your Karma and a private dashboard for social campaigns that we plan to do. Next we are planning to get some exciting features rolled too. We always wanted to start the Donations module but as you know, it will be something which redefines how people donate online. I keep this secret to next year!

We are also rolling premium corporate features and would love to know what you feel about Corporate Social Responsibility!

Stay with us!

I hope you are following us on Facebook and Twitter and at times do read the awesome articles on our blog that Kanu and I break our heads on. There are several stories that as a Social Entrepreneur I have to share but I guess we will keep this message crisp for today.

We took the leap of faith and started ProjectHeena because we thought there would be many who would join us to do good. We have made a small community and would love to scale it from here. Have great fun this new years eve and out of many resolutions that you have, do consider Giving Back a part of you too in the list.

Do Good
Be Awesome

From a recent Volunteering activity we did in Mumbai

Here’s to a great 2014!  Cheers!

However we didn’t bother you with another mail or SMS notifying you about how awesome the New Year is. And we did right by doing that.

We are so connected

There are so many ways you can reach me. You can hit ProjectHeena team on Facebook, Tweet directly to us, send an SMS, meet at any Startup event, WhatsApp any of us on our phone etc etc. While this seems to be a world of hyper connections, we often realize it’s a hyper-disturbed world too.

Rewind life a few years back and you realize that you had to actually meet someone to greet someone. At least till last decade call them personally and waste/utilize your 2 minutes giving them your greetings. Today things are all automated. Hit a message on WhatsApp and it will send to all your contacts or write it on your wall or twitter stream hoping that it will reach to the ones who care. Will it reach all? Absolutely not! But you are relieved from the burden of wishing all of your contacts.

There are more contacts but less engagement

We are now utilizing the same 2 minutes but reaching more people to greet. At the face value it’s a huge ROI but in reality those 2 minutes are utter waste. Anything more than 2 lines in SMS for new year simply gets cleaned off without reading. These messages as we all know are not even personalized.

I received 90 New Year messages and unfortunately attempted checking a few. For most of them

• The latest message was Happy New year
• The previous one was – Merry Christmas
• further back – Happy Diwali
• and back – Happy Dashera …..

The list goes on. The person wishing me these greeting only contacts me on an occasions like these. We never talk, never interact, and never collaborate. All we are doing is spamming. Is this of any use?

More connected = More disturbed

On the flip side we are hyper productive to being disturbed. Every single beep on the phone means we run and reach out to check who has messaged us. As if some dear one has had an accident and your act of checking the message will save their life.

Emails can be left unread but not sms? Till the time you don’t check them you just feel so much disconnected. There are hardly any important messages that you receive but you won’t realize this till the time you face a situation where you have forgot your mobile back home.

Is this what we really want to achieve

We as social animals understood connection. The power of collaboration and the awesomeness of working in a team. However the technology that made it all simple; is making it so simple that it can easily be a dumb decision.

If you want to collaborate.
Do so by engaging the person.
Don’t message, Call.
Don’t Call, Meet.
Don’t just meet, Care.

That’s how relationships were made. Technology can’t change the DNA of our being.

This year think about connecting to more people not in quantity but in quality. Connect and impact deeply. You don’t need the whole world to make yourself a huge success; just a few crazy ones are enough to become early adopters. Meet them, greet them and nurture them.

And by the way …. Happy new year …. to all…