Welcome 2014!

Greetings friends! It is the first blog post of 2014! I always feel excited at the start of a new year. There is lots of potential for more growth and development and I'm excited to get started. One of things that I want to work on is getting Project Smile started with receiving donations via text message. Everyone is on their phone and we're missing out on potential financial donations by not having that capability. I spent a good portion of the afternoon researching text donations options. Charities that raised under $500K per year were not eligible to participate originally, but it looks like that rule which was put into place by cell phone companies, no longer applies. There is one foundation that processes all applications, but you can sign up with a variety of different companies that offer mobile donation services. I reached out to a couple of companies today that are listed on the Foundation's website. I'm going to have a phone call tomorrow with one of them to discuss their services in detail. I want to find the option that has the best price and service for what we need.

I was also working on our January email newsletter. Constant Contact- our email marketing service- was having a glitch with images, so I needed to keep logging in and out to get the images for the newsletter to load properly- that made the whole task much longer than it should have taken. I also haven't done a newsletter in a few months, so I was a little rusty with my newsletter writing skills. I need to get back to writing a newsletter every month. There is always stuff to write about, so it's not like I don't have anything to share. I used to do a monthly newsletter, but fell out of the habit.

Tomorrow, I'm going to update our profile on Volunteer Match. I also need to update our Help Us? page on our website. It hasn't had much changes over the year and it could do with a revamp. I tried working on that today as well, but I got stuck with figuring out exactly how I would reorganize it.

The start of the new year is a good time to work on all these things- we're getting everything organized so we can have a productive year. On that note, I'm off to eat some more delicious Toblerone chocolate and read for a bit. Until tomorrow friends...