“The worst were punctuated with lost iPhones and crumpled dignity,” wrote Alice.
But things have taken a turn since then. “Some 263,000 Sundays hangover free and counting? That’s simply staggering,” she wrote. She added: “To say Hello Sunday Morning has transformed my life is to understate its impact.”
Alice is one of thousands of former boozers who have given up the juice with the help of a non-profit healthcare start-up. The organization – Hello Sunday Morning, a clever play on the world’s designated hangover day – has seen more than 20,000 people sign up for its service. Users, who desire to change their pattern of drinking or alcohol abuse, sign up for a free online platform, and pledge to go sober for three months.
“The core of it is a sense of community; people that want to make a change in their lives get support from each other to achieve that,” says Chris Raine, the Oxford MBA who set-up the community five years ago.
He was working in night club promotion in Australia, and was sick of waking up bed-bound with a splitting headache, only able to console himself with takeaway fried chicken.
Chris, then 22, felt the need for change. “I wanted some perspective of what life’s like without a hangover,” he laughs. “Towards the end I realized that, in terms of drinking, there are not many services out there.”
He launched Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) in January 2009. The non-profit is funded by contracts with different health departments in Australia and New Zealand. They provide capital in return for Chris putting a certain number of people through his program.
“We provide a service that’s cost effective – because it’s online, and peer-to-peer support is cheaper than being put through the traditional GP service,” he says. The organization is based in Australia, Chris’s home, but 48% of his users are from other nations. The remaining 52% are from Australia’s six states.
Chris employs three full-time staff, and has another part-time employee who manages the organization’s finances. The rest of his operation is run on a contract basis, from the site’s tech-development, employee payroll, and PR and advertising campaigns.
His dream was to one day study at centuries-old Oxford University, situated in a historic old-English setting – whatever the degree. “It was just my goal,” enthuses Chris, who enrolled on Oxford Said’s MBA program last year.
He landed a Skoll Scholarship, reserved for MBA students who pursue entrepreneurial solutions for social or environmental challenges. It provides tuition to help offset the cost of Oxford’s £46,000 MBA program, ranked among the best in the world.
Chris has had to take a “much reduced” salary. But he’s clearly not in in for the profit. “I’ve got nothing against people earning high salaries, but the most important thing is to find something that you care about,” he says.
“My goal is at end of this year to have a system of measurement and a process to value the change we create, down to the dollar,” he adds. “If a person changes from a drinking zone 4 down to zone 1, what is the value of that to society – and how do we finance organizations like mine for them to achieve that goal?”
Chris’s ambitious target is to double the size of his community – currently about 25,000 users – every year for the next five years. It will bring his total user base to a million by 2020 – if he can secure enough capital to grow.
Chris admits it’s a tall order, but is seemingly undeterred – “considering there are two-billion drinkers in the word, 200 million of which have some issue with alcohol in their lives”.
But there are obvious questions raised about how many of his users successfully give up the drink. How many of his 25,000 pledges manage to stay on the rails for three months, and how many stay on thereafter?
Chris pauses before replying. “The challenge with measurement is, how do you know who is being honest?” he says. His team use a ten-question audit, the accuracy scale of which is “pretty high”. They administer the test at the beginning of a user joining HSM, a month after they complete the three-month program, and then six months after that.
“We’ve seen a significant drop in average consumption,” Chris says, proudly, “however, my assumption with people that don’t succeed is… I don’t know if I’d do it [respond to the survey] if I didn’t succeed.” He adds: “The data say what we’re doing is working, so there’s a value. But how do we work out what works for different people?”
It’s a question he is seemingly still trying to answer. But Chris is convinced people flock to his website instead of traditional services such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) because of the strong sense of community.
The problem with organizations like AA, he says, is that they focus on absence-based recovery. “Our focus is to help people make better choices with how they drink, which might mean drinking moderately… rather than a binary approach.”
His users use a blog to write, read and reflect on their journeys. By sharing their paths with others, people are empowered to make better choices about drinking.
His own blog posts shed light on Chris as a youngster Down Under. But he’s long past those binge-drinking days. Going 12-months sober, he says, was the best thing he’s ever done.
He says: “It’s an experience that perhaps few men in Australia or the UK ever experience. They never get to go up and speak to someone [while in a bar] without a beer in their hand.”
Part of the HSM challenge is confronting that stigma. “There’s sensitivity about drinking less. You can go to a restaurant and eat a salad. But if you go to a bar and say I’m going to not drink, or have a lighter drink?”
After attending Brisbane Grammar School, Chris studied at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he earned a marketing and communication degree. His early career was in advertising in Brisbane, but he soon realized he didn't like the corporate life: “I knew this what I needed to do, and the opportunity was there for me to pursue it.”
He fly’s back to Australia in October after completing his MBA, and looks forward to taking on a whole new suite of challenges. “Everything will be tough, but worth it,” he says.
Above all, he has no regrets. “For me, taking that step [launching HSM] was just necessary. It would’ve been dumb if I didn’t; I would’ve regretted it. But that’s life, right? When you see opportunities, you have to take them.”
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