It's August!

Well, August is here. I can't quite believe it. We are only 6 weeks away from the date auction and two months from our anniversary celebration and just a couple of weeks from sending our 2011 calendar to the printers. It is a little overwhelming about how much needs to be done. I like to work well ahead of time- partly because it takes a lot of the stress out of the situation and also because logistically it is impossible to run a business by yourself and leave things to the last minute. The problem is that in order for me to get things done- our ad copy finalized, event program put together, etc., I need a lot of information from other people and some of those people are not very responsive. Their slowness makes my job even more difficult. I spend so much of time simply following up with people. This morning, I was feeling really frustrated- particularly with trying to get our last load of calendar photos done. The good thing was that I did connect with a bunch of people and got three more photo shoots scheduled for this Friday. I'm going to end the calendar photos this week. There are some departments that usually participate that I haven't heard back from, but I can't keep following up anymore. It would be nice to have them involved again, but there does come a point when I need to move on. We have a lot of lovely photos for the calendar, so that isn't an issue. It is always good to have more people participate, but this is a time issue. I need to get the calendar put to bed so I can focus more time on the date auction and anniversary event and the other things that need to be done.

I've been working on getting the date auction gift bag items in hand. The 400 bottles of Skinny Water were delivered last week. I've been joking that I've been losing weight just by staring at the bottles! That was a really nice donation for the bags. We've also received 3 different gift certificates. Yelp and Princeton Review are going to be sending their items this week. I'm waiting for donations from at least 3 other businesses. I know that one of them won't be arriving until September, but it will be good to get the everything else here and ready to go.

Our quarterly check arrived from the AidMatrix foundation today- that is the organization that runs the Virtual Aid Drive on our website- where people make financial donations using our shopping cart. I found the site by accident 3 years ago when searching for relief organizations who could handle our donations for the children who were victims of the CA wildfires. As soon as I saw their site, I loved the page- it made me want to donate money. I know immediately that we had to use it on our site. It has worked perfectly. Our online financial donations increased dramatically since we launched our Virtual Aid Drive. It was one of the best online choices that I made and I'm really proud of it.

Well, that's it for tonight. Tomorrow, I have another calendar photo shoot scheduled, then I'm back at work on getting gift certificates for the date auction couples, auction items, more fire fighters and marketing work for the date auction. There are probably other things that I'm forgetting which need attention too. Until tomorrow friends...