We recently received a glowing note from one of our featured guests. In it, he detailed the various dimensions of value from these Awakin Calls. Below is a contextualized version of what he shared.
Invitation: The call invite focuses on your personal journey and includes relevant links. You'll be embedded in a diverse and distinguished community of past speakers, ranging from the former head of Amnesty International to Wharton's youngest full professor, millionaire studying compassion to three buddies in Maryland, soccer-playing celebrity champion of Survivor to a prize-winning journalist, and a socially conscious hip-hop rapper. Each invitation is emailed to 11,000 people on the Awakin Call list and is also featured across the ServiceSpace ecosystem for many more thousands. Even though everyone won't be able to RSVP, an incredible number do get a significant glimpse of your story.
Context: Because the Awakin context centers on values that trigger inner transformation, the interview questions (and responses) end up being very different from traditional Q&A sessions. The call evokes turning point stories and holds space for everyone to open their hearts a bit more. Traditional boundaries often dissolve in unexpected ways. When Moin Khan shared his journey for instance, callers from all the world spontaneously invited each other to their homes and began sharing contact information. :)
Callers: Typically, 40-90 callers join each call. However, there are exceptions when more than 250 people have joined. Several callers are community leaders themselves, so it really increases the potential of ideas spreading to different parts of the world.
Social Media: There is a team that dynamically identifies 140-character "haikus" from the speaker and shares them live on Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes quotes even get turned into graphical art. Given that there are 712 thousand followers across the ecosystem, one never knows what catches viral attention!
Call Archive: Almost everything connected with the calls is made available. Audio is archived and shared on iTunes, interview content is published as a search-engine friendly transcript and a blog entry, which often have long after-lives -- like in the case of John Fullerton, former Managing Director at JP Morgan, whose blog entry was read 41 thousand times. If the speaker is comfortable, his/her contact info is shared with callers allowing for more direct follow-up.
Community: Ultimately, this space creates and deepens kindred ties. Being woven into the ServiceSpace collective of 500 thousand members, all kinds of things are possible. Sometimes the transcript of the conversation may get featured in a magazine, sometimes DailyGood will do a pre/post feature, sometimes the audio gets highlighted on KarmaTube, or the dialogue turns into a KindSpring Challege. And ServiceSpace coordinators often help connect the dots with other ecosystems too where lots of new possibilities can end up emerging.
Ultimately it's impossible to capture or quantify the full impact of these calls. The most significant ripples always happen below the radar, deep in the hearts of the listeners, hosts and guests. We're immensely grateful for the opportunity to be able to hold space for each other in this way.