Short URL

I have created the short URL for our team. It is:
http://main.acsevents.org/goto/CancerAvengers_HP.

First Meeting

Our first books/journals/content Relay for Life meeting took place from 11-12 on Thursday, March 19th.

CAPTAINS: The first order of business was to select team captains. Carissa Gilman (Journals) is the captain, and Rebecca Snowden (Content) will serve as co-captain.

TEAM NAME: Cancer Avengers

The theme this year is movies, and we have decided to take a superheroes approach to Relay. The meeting attendees selected Cancer Avengers as the team name. The concept is that we are avenging those who have had to struggle with cancer (also ties in nicely with the superheroes theme). We also liked that our team name would have the abbreviation C.A. -- as in the journal CA.

FUNDRAISING: Initial ideas for fundraisers were a bake sale, a t-shirt sale, and a raffle for a jewelry set to be created by Esmeralda Buchanan (Journals).

Jessica Hoback (Journals) has volunteered to bake brownies and cookies for the bake sale (Angela Cochran [Journals] has offered to purchase the ingredients). These will be packaged in cellophane and ribbon and will be sold for a price TBD.

At the same time as the bake sale, we will be taking orders for t-shirts. If someone places a t-shirt order, they will get the brownies/cookies for free. This is our hook to get people to place orders for shirts. The t-shirts will say "I FIGHT CANCER" on the front and "WHAT'S YOUR SUPERPOWER?" on the back. The shirts will be printed by Danger Press, a screenprinting company owned by Carissa's husband Jhaysin. The t-shirts will come in two colors--eggplant and charcoal. The shirts will be a 100% cotton jersey men's style, but because they are more fitted and not boxy, they fit women as well (women should order one size smaller than they would wear in a women's style). The selected shirt style and color swatches can be seen at http://www.article1.net/111ABasicT.html. The shirts will be printed with a dye replacement process that yields a shirt with a very soft hand, as opposed to some of the stiff plastisol-printed shirts that are more commonly seen. The result should be a very soft, comfortable, fitted (but not tight) shirt that has a hipper, more fashionable look.

Meeting attendees reviewed five design specs created by Jhaysin and selected one of them as the direction for future specs. Jhaysin will work up more specs in that style, and we will distribute them for feedback via email or set up another meeting to discuss. The price point for the shirts is TBD, but will probably be around $20. Ideally, we can have shirts printed for the team members in advance to promote the shirts and encourage sales.

Additional fundraising ideas include:
Putting the t-shirt slogan on other promo items, like mugs, thermal cups, plastic cups, tins, etc. Vanika Jordan (Books) has a catalog and will look into this for us. We could possibly put the baked items in the mugs and sell the combo at a higher price point.

Making buttons with the t-shirt slogan. We would need to get a button maker at someplace like Michael's. This would be good for people who only have a dollar or so to spend, and we could make buttons during the actual event and sell them. Everyone needs more flair.

Getting donations (gift certificates, coupons, etc.) from local businesses, creating baskets from the donations, and raffling off the baskets (The Recession Raffle).

Having a used book/CD/DVD/video game sale.

Getting people to make a wishlist of 10 songs, and then downloading and burning them onto a CD for a $20 charge. At 99 cents a song through iTunes or Napster, the profit margin would be around $10 per CD. Chuck has offered to download the songs and burn the CDs. Since this doesn't entail an up-front charge, Chuck will proceed with making an order form. If people are interested, great. If not, we lose nothing. Kirsten Eidsmoe (Content) also mentioned the Genius feature on iTunes, where you give it your favorite song and it creates a playlist for you. Look into this idea further?

We are still taking ideas for fundraisers. Also think about contacts that you might have that would help us in our efforts. We all probably know a lot of talented people that might be willing to lend a hand for a worthy cause.

Nicki Salcedo (Journals) suggested holding the different fundraisers over consecutive weeks. So one week might be raffle week, one week might be bake sale/t-shirt week, another week might be the book/CD/DVD/game sale. Fundraisers should probably start no later than around the week of April 13th.

To avoid distributing too many annoying flyers, we will try to use email to reach everyone, but we need to know the rules on this. In addition, we decided it would be good to have an online presence where people could see what fundraiser is up next and what we will have available for sale. Rebecca has offered to set up a site on Blogspot for this purpose. Carissa will also look into having some superhero-themed posters made by an illustrator friend. Vanika and Jill Russell (Books) suggested after the meeting that people with kids could dress their kids up as superheroes and have a photo shoot. Resulting photos could be used on posters as well.

MAY 15th:
This year's Relay will take place at Adams Stadium on N. Druids Hills Road on Friday, May 15th. We have yet to get a schedule of event's festivities (luminaria lighting, survivor's lap, etc), but expect to have more details soon. We hope everyone will be able to participate in Relay, but if you can't be there because of another commitment, you can definitely still help out the team in other ways. See Carissa or Rebecca for more information. As stated in her email, Roshini has said we can use the main HP tent, so we don't need to worry about that.

Next steps:
Find out email blast restrictions (Carissa to ask Amy Hadsock).
Find out the building rules about solicitations (Rebecca will do this.)
Find out how we get the tables set up for the sales. (Any volunteers to do this?)
Buy raffle tickets (Esmeralda will do this).
Get new design proofs for the t-shirts (Carissa will do this).
Create the team page on the Relay site (Carissa and Rebecca will do).
Add badges to individual Facebook pages (anyone who has a Facebook page and wants to).
Set up site on Blogspot (Rebecca will do this).

Although the official monetary fundraising goal is an average of $100 per person, our main goals are to have fun and participate in whatever way each of us is able. Thanks for your interest and let us know if you have any questions.