Last month I wrote about junk-mail reduction company Green
Dimes, calling
it a VC-backed for-profit philanthropy. I met with the CEO, Pankaj
Shah, on Saturday, and he was hesitant to go that far: his company
was "socially responsible," he said, but he wouldn’t necessarily call
it a philanthropy.
One clarification he did make, which hasn’t been well reported: the $20 million
in venture capital he received went not to Green Dimes per se, but
rather to Tonic, the parent company. Shah has revamped the Green Dimes business
model, and says that he doesn’t see it making much money: in fact, he’d love
the company to go out of business, if it succeeds in establishing a do-not-junk
list analagous to the wildly successful do-not-call list. Tonic, meanwhile,
is more profit-focused; Shah wouldn’t divulge much in the way of its business
ideas, but did say it was going to sell limited-edition t-shirts, some proceeds
from which would go to good causes.
A large part of the Green Dimes business is now spent pushing its do-not-junk
If the petition is successful, then indeed Green Dimes will no longer be a viable
business. But whether it’s successful or not, everybody who signs the petition
gets automatically added to Tonic’s mailing list. There’s no way of signing
the petition while at the same time saying that you don’t want to be contacted
in relation to Tonic’s other business ventures, and in fact there’s no indication
when you sign the petition that your details will be used for any other purpose.
It’s all a little bit sneaky: Tonic seems to be cutting other people’s unsolicited
snail mail, while adding to the world’s stock of unsolicited email.
In any case, the main thing I wanted to clear up with Shah is what has happened
to Green Dimes. When I last wrote about it, customers paid $3 a month to reduce
their junk mail. "We’ve researched dozens of direct mailers and literally
thousands of catalog publishers. We contact them on your behalf and make sure
that you STAY off of their mailing lists," said the FAQ
at the time. "We have a team of dedicated people working around the
clock to make sure that you receive the best possible service." It continued:
Are there other companies that do this?
Yes. The only similarity is that we’re all for-profit companies (some have
a .org domain name but are not non-profits) that reduce junk mail. The difference
is how much we do for you. Most one-time fee services are part time operations
that charge $20-$41 to send some postcards for you to fill out and mail and
that’s it. We have a complete full-time staff, contact dozens of direct mailers
and know how to unsubscribe you from thousands of catalogs. And if we don’t
know how to stop something, our team will find out.
Now, Green Dimes has become a one-time-fee service itself, with a cost of $15.
The FAQ
is much shorter, and says nothing about a full-time staff; the How
it Works page is even less enlightening, and mentions only the things that
the customer does, like regsitering with the Direct Marketing Association and
sending off postcards. Has Green Dimes become exactly the kind of company it
was so rude about so recently?
Shah says it hasn’t, and that the company has invested a lot of money in automated
systems which successfully replicate the work which used to be done by humans.
Although it’s now a one-time fee service, he says, that one-time fee buys you
a lifetime membership, and Green Dimes will continue to work to eradicate your
junk mail even as and when it reappears in the future.
We’ll see. I’m not completely convinced, if only because the Green Dimes website
doesn’t seem to be trumpeting the changes very loudly (or, indeed, at all).
If the new business model is better and cheaper than the old one, you’d think
that Green Dimes would make the effort to tell us that; instead, the change
happened very quietly indeed, without so much as a mention on the official
blog.
Still, I’ve signed up. There’s nothing more depressing than coming back from
holiday to find an enormous pile of mail, the overwhelming majority of which
is wasteful junk. I’ll happily pay $15 to see that pile get seriously reduced.