Im a cynic from way back and not one to jump haphazardly on any passing bandwagon. This habit has served me well in the past and is ingrained. So when I saw this ice bucket challenge thing for ALS, I sat back and watched. My question was - What is the result of all this gonna be? Regardless of the input, the results are clear - upwards of $30 million in increased contributions to ALS. the cost to the ALS foundation? Probably a pissed off mailman and a buncha volunteers with paper cuts opening evelopes full of money. If I had to devise a P&L statement on this, I aint no accountant, but I think I could show a lot more black ink than red. This dealio goes back to a prevailing statement of mine - on average, people are good. They do good stuff for one another. Little stuff, maybe, but good stuff. When I read there had been over $30 million raised, it struck me funny and it took me a minute to figure out why, but I figured it out - March Of Dimes. By my recollection, the March Of Dimes was an effort to get school kids to donate a dime for birth defects. They figured if they could get school kids to raise and donate a dime from everyone, theyd get a lot of money and they set up a whole charity to do that. So, I get to thinking, there are something over 300 million people in the US and ALS has picked up a cool $30 million plus in the last month or so, thats about a dime a person. And it aint over yet. ALS done went and had a march of dimes! Cool for them. Good job! Hope you can make it to the quarter level. Now, lets get back to doing silly stuff for a good cause. Because I have some managerial experience in that. A few years ago, my oldest daughters best friend came down with some medical difficulties. It was going to require a liver transplant and that kinda stuff gets expensive, even with insurance. A local fire station decided to have a pancake and sausage breakfast to raise money for her and they were pushing it on FaceBook and the newspapers and all that. So I got to thinking about how cool the idea was. Not like it was a novel concept, but Id never thought about the mechanics of fundraising like that. Basically, you get 75 cents worth of pancake and sausage and juice and sell it for $5 or $10 and donate the whole stash to the beneficiary. So you can spend $100 on marginal breakfast food and with volunteer labor and donated accommodations, come up with over $1000 or more. I got to wondering if I could do something on a smaller scale like that. I could come up with a couple hundred bucks, but could I make it into more? The questions were; What could I sell?, and Why would people buy it? Tee shirts and ball hats are over done and size specific and seemed clumsy to me because, frankly, I was half lit when I came up with the idea and I dont like anything TOO complicated when Ive been in the dranky-drank. Something a lot of people would want....? Coffee mugs! Everybody likes coffee! But, its gotta have some type of appeal factor... I know! Ill put my face on a muscular dudes body who is throwing up deuces or a thumbs up or something and put a princess crown on that and make it a Lazy D mug! Ill put something silly that Lazy D would say and then something about Team Princess (kind of a branding thing since her parents called her Princess and it kinda stuck on the fundraising stuff) and Id sell them for more than they cost me to have them made. I swear this is true - About 30 minutes after I had come up with the idea, I had made the picture, done the lettering and background graphics, signed on to Cafe Press and uploaded the artwork and ordered 15 mugs at about $9.50 a piece. 15 minutes later, I had posted on Facebook a picture of the mug and offered them for $15 each. That would be $225 I could give by spending $142. 50 plus tax and shipping and all. Not bad. I went to bed. I woke up and checked and had orders for 21 mugs. Ooops! So, Im all up on the phone with Cafe Press and I get this lady on the phone and I tell her what the deal is. Im running time vs. order frequency calcs in my head the whole time and figure Ill get around 30 or so orders before this dies out. I tell her I need to change the order to 35 from 15. She cancels my first order and re-enters it for 35 and now the mugs are gonna cost me around $7/each. $245 spent, with about $250 potential. But considering some of the orders came in saying theyd pay $25 or $30 for a mug, Im thinking I might get over $500 and hopefully buy one for myself. Turns out, we sold 32 mugs and got about $600 which I gave to my daughters friend. I had three left. I bought one for me and had a couple left over. A year or two later, I sold the other two for well over $1000 (a whole other story) which I gave to her. So, let me re-cap this. I made some ridiculous coffee mugs while half drunk, put my face on them with a wrestlers body and a princess crown, and raised close to $2000 on about a $260 investment, not to mention another $5000 donation loosely related to it. How in the hell am I gonna sit here and stick my nose in the air about people pouring water over their heads for $30 million? And how in the EVER LOVING hell is someone who has never actually organized an even half drunk fundraising campaign gonna sit in righteous indignation and profess this all to be stupid? Good people are doing silly things to do good for other people. Where is the down side? Even if some folks dont write a check but they post a video, there are a couple of people who WILL write a check who are challenged or who are challenged by a challenger. This thing works. If youre tired of seeing it, I get that, but just skip over them and let people do good stuff, k?
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 05:17:43 +0000
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