Are companies not allowed to do good?

The key objective of yesterday’s post was to explain the background & motives of Meeting Half Way in a totally honest manner, but this is how it was met:

As was origninally suspected, this whole campaign is centered in making the services you offer through your company more marketable,thus increasing your profit margin. Your “social conern” is related only to how it will benefit you, not altruistic at all. The skepticism was indeed justified. Your efforts were nothing more than a thinly veiled marketing ploy, and an attempt to use the deaf community an cheaply obtained advertising.

Followed by:

The simple fact is, you have a product to sell. And the method you have chosen to advertise that product borders on unethical through misrepresentation to the deaf community of your intended goal.

I didn’t have to post the above comments, but I feel its important to address the incorrect accusations/assumptions just in case anyone else might also have them.

We are doing this project simply because we think that we have the ability to bring about change that can significantly benefit people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Our selflessness in that respect is proved by the facts that (a) we’ll be supporting the use of our competitor’s services and the use of competing technologies and (b) we’ll be donating any profits that come about through this project back to deaf charities, thereby providing them with a much needed ongoing revenue stream.

The only benefit which we might get is the pure good will of people and its on that basis that we’re willing to spend our company’s time, money & other resources. Companies (or doctors, dentists, teachers or emergency rescue teams) can’t ever claim to be altruistic (which we, too, are not), but does that mean that they can’t do good and that people shouldn’t support them.

We hope that our project will bring a lot of good into the lives of people who are deaf or hard of hearing and, whilst we can fully understand the skepticism which anyone might feel towards a business claiming to do good, I want people to know that Meeting Half Way is based on sincerity & honesty.

Through Meeting Half Way we have benevolent goals which we’re focussed on achieving and we’re treating whatever goodwill we might receive as nothing more than a byproduct that justifies the spending of company resources.

We are honest people with sincere intentions who need the support of everyone who can help (and everyone can help).

But why do it at all?

Having spent some time interacting with an online Deaf community and trying to rally initial support for Meeting Half Way, it seems that the project’s motives need to be clarified to avoid unnecessary suspicion.

Simply put, Meeting Half Way is a form of corporate social responsibility which allows me (the individual) to serve a good cause.

What we do?

Our company (TM4B) provides Business-to-Person SMS services which, for those who don’t know, lets organisations use SMS to communicate with the people who they serve (e.g. students, clients, patients etc.)

How this all started?

Several months back, we started thinking about how important SMS must be to Deaf people and, to do good with what was available to us, we decided to offer our services free (where possible) or at cost price (where not so possible) to companies & charities who wanted to use our service to work with Deaf people.

We contacted many Deaf charities, but did not get much of a response and that was that.

How we got here?

More recently, we started to think about things again having seen our services get used to offer Deaf people with equal access to emergency services and taxi booking facilities.

Looking into the topic a bit further, we came to realise that the mid-point between Deaf and hearing people was textual communications… whilst Deaf people might have issues hearing, both Deaf and hearing people both know how to read and write.

Whilst it was only natural for us to start thinking that SMS was the key to making voice based services equally accessible to Deaf people, our thoughts broadened up to realise that other technologies (like bluetooth, IM or captioning etc) could be more suitable in different circumstances.

So we decided to engage in a project through which we could partner with other companies providing textual communication technologies to advocate text-based communication, thereby reducing the unacceptable levels of inaccessibility which by most of today’s services suffer from.

So where did the social change on an individual level come from?

Up to this point, our company’s goal was agreed to at the managerial level, but as the Managing Director, I decided to take this further and utilise the long sought-after opportunity to do good.

Asking myself questions like “Would I employ a Deaf person?” & “How do I communicate with a Deaf person?”, I came to realise how little I knew and, with a bit of research, also came to find out that Deaf people face a lot of challenges created by ignorant people like me.

And so, I decided to expand the broadness of the campaign to include social change as well as organisational change as both seemed to cross over quite well. After all, organisations and societies are both made up of individuals.

Ta-daaaa!

So that’s where we are now. A project which aims to reduce the challenges faced by Deaf people by rectifying the ignorance of hearing people like me, encouraging us to be more accommodating, campaigning for equal accessibility to services in a realistic manner and, along the way, supporting organisations looking to achieve similar goals.

I hope this post has done well to clear out any potential suspicions that anyone might have.

Why ‘Meeting Half Way’?

As you would have learned from yesterday’s introduction to Meeting Half Way, we (as hearing people) know very little about the challenges faced by Deaf people and, more importantly, do very little to accommodate for them.

Meeting Half Way, therefore, is a name which best describes the goals which the campaign is trying to achieve. Those goals are to help us recognise how much Deaf people do to meet our needs, learn about their needs and Meet Half Way by accommodating for them in whatever way we can.

(For reference, the name was inspired by the statement of a Deaf person who, in defending his/her right to be disheartened by the attitudes of hearing people, stated the efforts made by Deaf people and asking ‘why they can’t meet us half way?’)

I hope we can change this and meet them half way.

Meeting Half Way: What its all about!

Being the Managing Director of a company with several thousand customers doesn’t leave me with much opportunity to get involved in good causes. So, Meeting Half Way is a dream come true – an opportunity for the company itself to lead a great cause.

In brief, its a campaign directed towards hearing people and is best understood through its goals…

The first goal is to give hearing people a glimpse into the lives of Deaf people. Through these glimpses, we should recognise what kind of challenges Deaf people face on a day-to-day basis and help us realise that most of these challenges are created by us.

The second goal is to bring about change by appealing to the inner good within us all. The idea is to acknowledge our neglect, learn how to communicate with Deaf people, teach to others what we’ve learned and encourage them to pass it on in a viral fashion all with the help that we’ll provide.

In addition to encouraging individual change, we’ll also encourage organisational change and, at some point, escalate the campaign to approach governments with practical solutions that make services equally accessible to Deaf people as they are to hearing people without hindering the hearing experience.

Although legislation is not the greatest of solutions (as things done forcefully are usually done grudgingly), at that stage we would have hoped for change to have come willingly and legislation would be reserved for those who simply don’t care.

There’s a lot to do, but I have a lot of faith in this campaign and the change it will bring. Its up to you whether you want to take part. I promise, supporting the campaign is going to be easy, and you should think of it as an MLM of good in which the higher up you are, the more good you’ve introduced.

Welcome to the Meeting Half Way Blog

Hello and welcome to the Half Way Blog.

My name is Fahed (aka TheHalfWayMan) and I’m the founder of a UK company which provides business-to-person communication services.

This blog, however, has very little to do with me or my company.

Its the official blog of the Meeting Half Way campaign and its purpose is to provide news on the campaign and the effects I hope it will have on society. It will also be an opportunity to create dialogue, through which people can interact with the campaign and provide feedback, criticisms, compliments, ideas and anything else that my be relevant to the different stages of campaign.

I’m still not sure how frequent posts are going to be or if there will be any themes, so you’ll have to be patient whilst these come together.

Before I tell you how you can subscribe to the blog, you’ll obviously want to know what the campaign is all about. The only thing though, is that the introduction deserves its own post and that’s something I’m going to do in the next couple of days.

BUT… if you subscribe via rss or subscribe via email , you’ll be notified when the introduction has been announced.

At the moment, I’ll just be using the default template provided by WordPress (which I must say is exceedingly easy to use). Once we’ve decided on a basic brand identity for the campaign, I’ll try to find a theme to match.

That’s it for now and, once again, welcome to the Meeting Half Way Blog.