Leveraging the viral power of the Web, Yahoo! is harnessing social media to support our year-end generosity campaign called “How Good Grows.” We are inspiring millions of people within the global Yahoo! community to change the world together through random acts of kindness. One small act of kindness can create a ripple of generosity - that’s How Good Grows on Yahoo!

Right now, Yahoo! is encouraging people to do a random act of kindness and update their online status to get others to join in. The kindness.yahoo.com site enables people to post status messages that can be shared across social networks (Yahoo! Updates, Facebook, Twitter). People will be able to watch their ripple of kindness (i.e. donating clothes, paying taxi fares for strangers, giving food, etc.) grow on the site, as they inspire others to also do kind acts.

To help kick-start the generosity, the Yahoo! for Good team went up to San Francisco, and paid for groceries at Foods Co on Nov. 24th – one of the busiest food shopping days before Thanksgiving.  The team spent a few hours at the store and paid for people’s groceries, all of whom were eager to pass along the kindness.   Customers were amazed by the generosity and delighted about their good fortune.   In fact one customer, who works with the Dept. of Parking and Transportation, said she was not going to give out any tickets for the rest of the day!

We will continue to conduct these acts of kindness, which are inspired by Yahoo! users’ good deeds, throughout the month in various cities across the country.  For instance, on one of the busiest postal days of the year, Dec. 13th, we will be at designated post offices paying for customers’ postal fees.

We encourage you to participate in this program.  All it takes to participate is the following:

• Do something nice for someone! From buying someone’s groceries, to donating time at your local food bank, to handing out umbrellas on a rainy day.  It’s up to you!
• Inspire others. Update your status on Yahoo! with what you’ve done at http://kindness.yahoo.com.  Share your update on other social networks – the more people who click on your update or do their own kind acts, the bigger your ripple of kindness will be.  You will be able to watch the ripple you create at kindness.yahoo.com.

For more information on the Ripples of Kindness campaign, please visit kindness.yahoo.com.

How big will your ripple of kindness be?

-Erin Carlson, Sr. Director, Yahoo! for Good