Food for Points

It is a super proud moment for us in SDN and BPX land. Triggered by the Three little words – ‘Change the world’ post from SAP Mentor Nigel James we revamped our points recognition system and announced today at TechEd that we will feed school children in third world countries in part from the money we save by changing our model.

Well we have a press release, but unfortunately we missed the opportunity to announce it during the keynote at TechEd Bangalore this morning. Only later in the day during Demo Jam my boss Mark Yolton mentioned it.

As there is already a discussion going on in the Changes to recognition program regarding it, I thought I quickly share some details, that didn’t come accross in the press release.

No points recognition t-shirts anymore. To send them around the world was a lot of trouble and they often didn’t arrive and some countries put exorbitant tariffs on them, it was just not worth it, or they didn’t even arrive: “Well, I have over 2000 points, but I haven’t seen a single T-Shirt yet”. I can live happily for the rest of my life without ever hearing that sentence again 😉

Instead there are Community Badges:

Every year once you collected over 250 points, you are a Top Contributor and we will send you one of these community badges. There are no other levels.

For every role that you play: Blogger, Moderator or SAP Mentor you will get one lifetime community badge too.

That is it regarding personal recognition and shipping stuff around.

Now to the element that excites us all. By changing our approach, we save money and we were able to round up that money to a garantied 100K Euro (which lately has hold it’s vallue better than the other world currency).

The whole community collected around 2.5 million points last year.

If we reach the same amount of points next year, we will have 100K Euro. (If we don’t, we will walk in shame.)

If we reach 3.0 million points, SAP will donate 150K Euro.

Now if we even reach 3.5 million points, the amount will rise to the maximum of 200K Euro.

With that money we are supporting School Feeding from the World Food Programme. From their page:

WFP school meals encourage hungry children to attend school and help them concentrate on their studies

The food that these children are getting through this program are often their only meals of the day.

An empty stomach doesn’t study well and I love that this brings the kids to school to enable them a better life through education.

Well done Nigel and community to nudge us in the right direction to improve not only our own community, but to go beyond it and with your help Change the World.

P.S. There is already a discussion in the Changes to recognition program welcoming the change. Someone also voiced the hope, to be able to select the charity that the points are going to. Unfortunately there are legal as well as governance, risk and compliance issues that are tricky and we didn’t want to create overhead and rather have more money to give away to one this worthy cause.

P.P.S. Now I am back on the road to the Bay Area. Bangalore TechEd was great. Loved to meet all these people that I only knew online so far. Great stories too. Sorry I had to leave already.