YearCompass is a global movement that mobilises people to sort out their last year and plan their next one in order to have a greater awareness of their lives. New Year's resolutions don't work. Planning your year does. The main tool of the movement is the free to download YearCompass booklet that is available in many languages.
We wanted to have a worthwhile New Year's Eve with our friends, made a booklet with a few questions that help reflection and it went viral in 2013. Since then it became an international movement with more than a hundred volunteers from 25 countries. Today the YearCompass booklet is available in 22 different languages. The self-printed version is free to download from the YearCompass website and had 700 000 downloads last year.
YearCompass is a non-profit organisation that relies on volunteering resources, the backbone of which are the volunteers of Invisible University (a Hungarian non-profit organisation that promotes self development for higher education).
Besides them the international volunteer community is growing steadily making YearCompass able to reach more and more countries and people every year.
What's YearCompass in one sentence?
It was 2012 and we wanted to have a worthwhile New Year's Eve with our friends, so we've put together a few questions that would help us focus. The event was an absolute success, our idea resonated really well with others. We thought that this could be something useful and decided to make a booklet. Next year we made it public on the internet. We thought maybe we would have a couple hundred downloads and make a few people happy. Next thing we know – it went viral.
The second is from the Women's Club of Ulanbator. Two years ago we've found out by accident that there is a women's club in Asia where the members learn English together. They use the English version of our booklet as a fun exercise. They posted a picture of the first event – we still have it, it's one of our best reminders why we do this whole thing.
This is not a business for us. We don't want to make the core experience into a product, that would defeat the purpose of the whole endeavor. We want the YearCompass movement to spread rapidly, to reach a massive audience, making them more self-aware, so in turn they could make a world a better place to live on.
Although the booklet is free to download we definitely need some kind of funding to keep running the servers, pay our staff, etc. Currently, we are testing a more Elegant Edition of the booklet that you can give as a gift on Christmas or buy it for yourself. Compared to the self-printed pdf version this is a fancier product with a few surprises. But the questions are the same as in the core booklet that you can download for free. And this will remain the same in the future – you will always be able to download the core booklet for free.