Random Acts of Kindness Week

Kindness is contagious! We found this out first hand when we worked with the Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) Foundation to promote #RAKWeek and #RandomActsofKindnessDay 2016… which ended up the #1 top trending hashtag on twitter with almost 170,000 tweets in one day! Influencers, celebrities, and heroic everyday folks performed acts of kindness and shared their stories on social media including: Sesame Street, Ellen Degeneres, Paula Abdul, Disney, Amy Poehler, Dr. Phil, Whole Foods, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Starbucks, AirBnb, GoPro, AT&T, Red Bull, Today Show and many sports teams including the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and the New England Patriots. Even the U.S. National Guard, ESPN Sports Center, and the Guinness Book of World Records helped the get the word out! Verizon was giving away free lunches; the Pittsburgh Steelers had a random drawing for a player’s helmet; and Columbia Records gave away Hozier, Bruce Springsteen, One Direction and Bob Dylan CD’s… the list goes on.

Some other campaign highlights include: over 11,000 people signed the #Pledge2BeKind, RAK crossed the 800,000 like threshold on Facebook, overall there were nearly 900,000,000 impressions with a reach of over 500,000,000.

Traditional media got involved as well, with Reader’s Digest highlighting a different act of kindness each day of the week, plus BuzzFeed, New York Magazine (with a humorous take), Glamour, People, USA Today, Mashable, BlogHER, Good News Network and Parade. We also placed this blog in Healthy Living Magazine about how kindness decreases anxiety, lowers blood pressure and helps with depression.

Here are some ideas for random acts of kindness for yourself or with your kids, in case you don’t want to wait until next RAKWeek (February) to participate. With all of the negativity out there, there is no such thing as too much kindness.