Since 2013, Amazon customers have been able to make purchases through Amazon Smile and designate a charity to receive .5% of their eligible purchases. It doesn’t sound like much, but worldwide Amazon has donated over $449 million to charities through this process.
Ten years into it, Amazon has done something too few companies do — review the program and decide to end it. “The program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped,” they shared in an email to Smile participants. Over 1 million charities have received donations, making the amount contributed to each too small to make a noticeable difference. Instead, Amazon has designated a short list of causes and is giving significant amounts to them, including $2 billion to housing equity, funding computer science curriculum, helping food banks, and deploying its massive logistical capacity to aid disaster relief.
Several takeaways from Amazon’s decision: 1) Little efforts do add up. My personal $23.68 in Smile donations doesn’t seem like much, but when multiplied by the millions of Amazon customers it created a half-billion dollars’ worth of contributions. Don’t discount the cumulative impact of small. 2) Yet, spreading yourself too thin can diminish any impact that you may have. Going deep may sometimes be better than going broad. 3) Create a process to evaluate where you stand with 1 or 2 — are you making big progress one small step at a time or are you so diffused that the ultimate impact is lost? Don’t just let programs and processes run on autopilot without a scheduled critical review.
It was probably a difficult decision to end something that on many measures is working, but the key is whether it is achieving what you set out to do long term. Be able to smile about that.
