Revisiting Green Dimes

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 petition. 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.