If you feel that you can galvanize others to join your 21-day challenge and have time to build connections within your small group, you'd make a good host. Otherwise, you will enjoy joining an existing challenge as a participant. To explore more about hosting, view our Host FAQ below.

Every participant can post stories about their actions, view idea archive for the particular challenge and most importantly, connect with other participants -- by reading stories, adding smiles, writing comments and sending personal notes. As you join a challenge, you'll see a private group feed that looks like this:

Yes, absolutely. Workplaces and schools are great space to experiment in, and we have designed our ideas with them in mind. For educators, we have also setup the school host and reflection guides.

We often get asked this question. Below is a sample response that you may like to use:

Dear _________,

I wanted to share something with you that I'm very excited about. I recently came across the KindSpring website and its 21-Day Challenge portal -- which could help strengthen our team's core values. The site is a 100% volunteer-run, commercial-free project.

We can collectively take on a uniquely-themed "21-day challenge" -- like mindfulness, kindness, gratitude -- using the online tools provided. The portal facilitates groups (companies, schools, friends, families, etc) to deepen in values based on the latest research. All participants receive a daily email with inspiration and ideas, as well as the opportunity to share our experiences with one another, and support each other along the way. The total amount of time needed to engage could be as little as 2-5 minutes/day (or more, if you'd like!), plus a short weekly conversation offline.

I'm intrigued because there is more and more science out there today that talks about the benefits of this sort of group practice, from personal to organizational, and I see how others are trying and benefiting from it.

If you are interested, here's some science and further resources, as well as their Frequently Asked Questions page.

I'd love to have your support in trying this out with our group! I'll be sending out invitations to join soon -- would appreciate any feedback and, of course, your participation. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

[Your Name]

Each day, you will receive an email with an idea of the day and inspiration. From there, it is up to you how long you spend on the daily act. This could be as brief as a 2 minute reflection of gratitude or as lengthy as an hour-long phone conversation with an old friend. For example, in the Kindness Challenge, your act one day could be as brief as taking one minute to smile at strangers on the street or as long as writing a thoughtful thank-you note to a former teacher who really impacted you. In addition, depending on how your host structures your challenge, you may have a weekly 30-45 min in-person or video reflection session to share and hear insights, stories, lessons, and ideas from your fellow challenge-takers’ experiences. In addition, all throughout the challenge, we strongly encourage you to take a few minutes on a regular basis to share stories, reflections, and/or photos on your group feed. By doing so, you and your group build a dynamic space for collective inspiration and learnings.

In most cases, challenge allow participants to join late. No matter when you join, you can always access the archived ideas for the challenge:

1) Go to your Challenge Dashboard
2) Find your challenge in the 'My Challenges (Participant)' section
3) Click on the link under the 'Status' column (The status link indicates the day of the challenge. It will read, 'Day __' or 'Completed'.)
4) This takes you to the 'Idea Archive' page. All the completed days of the challenge are listed at the top of the page. Click on the day(s) you missed to access the idea for that day.

By default, your posts are only shown to others in your challenge. However, you can edit your story so it is only visible to you -- in which case, it would be more like a private journal.

Contemporary science says 21 days is the shortest amount of time to change a habit, if it is done in a group or community with shared reflection. In general, 21 days is long enough to commit, but short enough not to intimidate. It’s an ideal length of time to begin engaging in and strengthening a particular habit or value, and a fun way to collectively grow in goodness!

You've probably heard of the 21-Day Kindness challenge. But technically, you could host a challenge around any value from simplicity to forgiveness. For a few themes like kindness, gratitude, mindfulness, and eco-footprint, we already have a default deck of ideas -- complete with prompts, graphics and descriptions -- that you can import with one click. We have a very simple interface that lets you manage the content for each day of the challenge:



For values that don't have pre-existing decks, you can create your own content (as long as it follows KindSpring code of conduct in inspiring positive change). This entails coming up with 21 prompts, graphics, and descriptions and adding them through our website:

Your audience size could vary. We've hosted challenges with just a couple people all the way to some with over 10 thousand participants. It's up to you. Some people prefer to hold small, private challenges. On the other hand, if you'd like to spread the word about your challenge, here are some recommendations:

1) Tell friends. Share your link to the challenge sign-up page via email or social media networks. It also helps to personalize your sign-up page with a photo and attractive (and short) description. If your challenge is marked as public and fits the KindSpring criteria, we will also list it publicly on our site.

2) Share articles related to your challenge. Schools may publish an article in their school newspaper, or corporate groups may send it out in the company newsletter, or church may post it on their bulletin board. If you don.t want to write your own article, check out our sites DailyGood and KarmaTube that already have a lot of content related to the challenges.

3) Create a buzz. If you have access to people with a big audience, ask them to tweet a link; or create a video through some online tools (which is more likely to spread on social media); or host a local event that identifies the need for this particular challenge; or identify a small group of ambassadors who can share stories around your value. It also helps to think out of the box -- like this movie that issued a press release to get all its audiences to engage in a collective action.

It is also important to remember that people will join even after you start the challenge, so don't feel restricted by the start date alone.

We have multiple options for you to send out your emails. It can either be automated at a specific hour, or you can send it out manually. The email will go with reply-to address of the host, like this:

From: "Your_Name @ KindSpring" <challenge@kindspring.org>
Reply-To: <your_email>

Furthermore, you can also customize the content of your welcome emails, the introductory email, and concluding email on Day 22.

The daily emails look like this and this. :)

Every challenge has its own members area and private feed. On the feed, participants can post stories, photos and videos, along with adding comments and smiles on other people's posts. This is a critical tool for cultivating the spirit of collective action, and we've found that it inspires many people to step up their daily actions.



There are lots of tools for individuals to manage their own posts and for the host to manage the group feed, all aimed to support the host in encouraging more participation. Additionally, we also encourage hosts to invite the participants in a check-in style conference call (or a physical meeting, wherever feasible) in between the challenge.

After the challenge, the host sends out a final "Day 22" email with links to follow-up information. One of those links can be to a survey where you can gather feedback. In many cases, the host invites participants to engage in another challenge together -- and that ends up being a way to work on team building and to create a community around positive values.

We are a group of volunteers who want to make this world a kinder place. We understand that kindness takes practices, and so we have launched this portal to offer various resources to cultivate that within ourselves and the world around us. Read more about us. To help out, check out some of open opportunities on ServiceSpace.