All right, y’all! Welcome to the conclusion of fundraising week. (Thanks for sticking with me.)
So whatever happened to the $13.10 Challenge?
1) Did we reach the fundraising goal of that challenge?
As is pretty evident on my fundraising page, we didn’t reach the money goal I was hoping for.
But, we raised over $1,000 in the first week of the challenge, which I thought was pretty rad.
And the challenge led to my first internet encounter with Cory Booker. And as much as I never shut up about that on this blog, we all know how much that meant to me!
Not only did it lead to my first encounter with Mr. Cory Booker himself, but also my first interaction with a few new friends on twitter who’ve proven to be enthusiastic lovely supporters. I’m super grateful for them!
2) Did everybody get their care packages?
As far as I know, yes. Most people got them back in December when I was trying to wrap things up. Unfortunately, one person is just now getting her’s (in 2 parts, at that!).
(I had ordered what I thought was a cool 2013 calendar for her, but there was some problem with it and it never came. Then I just kept pushing back giving her other stuff. So, sorry Carissa! But I hope you enjoyed what you did get/are getting.)
I tried to pick things that people liked. Some people got some sweet stuff (in my opinion, at least). I kind of even wanted to keep one of the books for myself (Stephen Colbert’s America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t)!
I got some lovely thank you messages (and even a thank you video!) from people after they got their packages. So, hopefully you all liked them.
Some people declined the offer of a care package. To those people, you know I’m still sending you gobs of love strongly radiating from my heart in California to wherever you are.
If you were someone who gave $13.10 or more during that two-week period in October, and you’re a blog follower, and somehow I missed you in the offer of care packages – please, please contact me. I don’t want anyone to be left out. And I want to follow through with what I said I’d do.
3) What made you decide to issue this challenge?
I felt that people would be more likely to give if I asked for a specific amount of money (and one that many could afford), and put a specific deadline on it. I bounced the idea around for a while. People seemed to think it was a pretty good idea. A lot of people (including many strangers) said, “I’d definitely give $13.10!”
Well, when the challenge was actually issued, some of them did. Some of them didn’t. There’s definitely a difference in how easy it is to say something vs actually do the thing.
But a lot of people gave. As I said, we raised over $1,000 in the first week, which was awesome and amazingly helpful. And I’m so thankful for that.
4) What do you think went wrong?
Mmmm, I’m not totally sure… I did make people jump through two hoops if they wanted a care package (donate and subscribe to the blog). (I didn’t think I could really afford to give to everyone who gave if I didn’t get something else out of it.) Maybe people didn’t want a care package.
And a care package – that’s so vague. Maybe people wanted to be entered for an iPad or something cool like that. Maybe we needed more than just 13 days. I dunno.
The challenge got tweeted and Facebooked to close to 2 million people (that I know of – maybe even more). I thought that’d do it. Less than 0.1% of people who saw it (or conceivably saw it – not everyone sees every tweet and/or Facebook post) needed to give for us to successfully carry out the challenge. But, we couldn’t get less than 1/10 of a percent.
In the end, I think no matter what kind of idea you have, sometimes things catch, and something they don’t. This just didn’t catch on the way it needed to.
I still don’t think it was a bad idea. Maybe it just needed more tweaks…