Polly Productive

Well, Polly Productive was back at it in full force today. Once again, sifting through thousands of Istock images, this time searching for the perfect teddy bear image for the Anniversary Celebration. This only too 25 pages before I found the right one. It is a multiple bear image, rather similar to last year's image. I need Lisa to add a 10th Anniversary banner to the image and we need to play around with the background colors and see what works best. I've usually gone with a red background, but I want to see what else would look good.  It takes time to find the right image- the image has to be aligned with our work obviously and it needs to be fun, elegant, appealing and not childish. There were a lot of cute stuffed animal images, but they were too juvenile for the image we want to project for our event. I spoke with Dick Ferrucci who has always hosted our event and he is back on board to host our 10th Anniversary. I'm really happy about that because he does a fabulous job, especially with the live auction. My goal is to really increase our attendance for this event- it is a milestone for us and I want to have an awesome turnout.

For the first time in a while, I got our monthly newsletter done ahead of time! It was on my task list for today, but I wasn't really in the mood to work on it. However, I decided that I didn't want to put it on my list for Friday, so I might as well get it done today. I'm using the Constant Contact newsletter template that I started using for our newsletters in November. I used to just type the newsletter in Word and then Lisa would format it for me and then I'd send it to our web host and he would send it out through Constant Contact for me. It takes more time for me to do it all myself, but I'm copying the same template from November, so it is less work this time around. It takes time to write the copy as well. I scheduled it to go out next Tuesday morning to our database. I don't like to send emails on Friday or Monday- those aren't the best days to get your email read.

In other news, a company in Illinois sent us a large box filled entirely with brand new small Build-a-Bear teddy bears. We've had a lot of stuffed animals come in the mail over the last few months- even more than usual. This afternoon, I was sorting through some of the most recent donations and opened this box. We don't usually get a box of brand new stuffed animals like this, so that was really great.

Well, that's the latest for tonight. I'm off to organize a few things in my office and then watch one of my favorite shoes- "What Not to Wear." I'm home tonight, so I've been blogging a lot earlier than I usually do! Until next time friends...