Last week!

I send out a follow up email to all of our sponsors, and I received some great replies (although not entirely constructive ones).

By following up I was able to get another donation from Barnie's (which they could not give online because their company card was an AMEX). Many commented on the person they talked to, and all the feedback was positive (besides the lack of replies from some).

I was also able to secure free mailing from the post office in trade for underwriting for the Rollins post office, and that spot is in the works currently. 

I am also working with a music company called Highway Ent Management that want to underwrite a month. Things are definitely not as dull as I thought they would be, even after the concert has ended! 

Finally, I am taking the E-Commerce account we used for vendor fees into a site that will allow underwriters to pay online (even though I will have to confirm they pay the correct amount). This is hopefully make it easier to get payments from advertisers that are not local and do not want to have to mail a check. 

Donation and Pledge Mail

It took much longer to get out the pledge and donation mail than I had previously expected. To all donors, we sent out an official thank you letter, along with a pair of WPRK sunglasses and a bumper sticker to thank them for their contribution. It felt especially good to send these out to people who had donated from other states and farther away, such as Miami and even Illinois. It took at least four hours to write out all of the addresses, return stamp the mail, and manually fill all of the envelopes. It took even longer to organize all the pledge mail, which included a thank you letter, a pledge card for them to fill out, stamped letter address to the Rollins College Gift Lock Box, and sunglasses or a bumper sticker or another item (like CD or gift card) that they may have been promised when they pledged. It was important to send the promised item to the correct person; however, this made the process even more time consuming. All of the mail was finally put together by the end of this weekend, and will be out by Monday tomorrow.
While it was a lot of work, it was worth it to actually go through with something that may have been left behind or not followed through with in the past. That being said, it was a ton of work that I ended up doing by myself, so other things that I had planned to get done this week were neglected... I wanted to send out a follow up email with the fund-a-thon interview recordings; however, somehow the fund-a-thon was not fully recorded and I could find none of the interviews. This is will be an important aspect of a future fundraiser that I will make sure to pay more attention to. I can still send out the follow-up e-mails, but it is unfortunate that by this time, the e-mails are three weeks after the end of the fundraiser. These are things that are neglected because it is simply too much work for a full-time student to do all of these things in time; I wish that there was some way to give incentives to staff to go beyond the simple necessities of the station. The concert showed that we can do amazing things when we put our minds to it, however, we could do even more with more resources and incentives for students to put an effort into working at the station.

Post-Concert

After our big event, there were still many loose ends to tie up in the business department. Personally, I was responsible for turning in all of the donations collected throughout the week and during the festival to the Rollins Donation Office. I worked with Leslie, Tairi, and Amanda Ward to make sure everything was in the right place. I also coordinated with Rob to make sure that all the sales money was put together and given over to OSIL, including t-shirt sales and vendor fee checks.
I also worked with Charlotte, our Donor Relations Coordinator position, to create "thank you for donating" letters and "thank you for pledging, here is how to pledge" letters. I printed out the list of online donors from the E-Commerce website, and we compared it to the pledge list, marking off those who had pledged and then already donated online (which was about 5 people). We coordinated with print services to print these letters nicely, as well as the post office to be able to pay for shipping of sunglasses and other items promised to donors and pledgers. This is still an on-going process, and we are looking to have this all out by next week.

Fund-a-Thon Week and 60th Concert!

Monday
WPRK kicked off the fundraiser nice and early at 7 a.m. We received our first donation at 8:49 a.m. for $544, and then gained more pledges after that. Our next online donation came at noon for $25, along with our free lunch from Wrap Planet. These were the only online donations for the day, but it was a good start for the first day of getting the url www.helpwprk.org out there and repeated.
Total in pledges: $466.50
Total in donations: $569.00

Tuesday
Tuesday was good food day! We had some great food contributers come in this day, including Jason from Barnie's CoffeeKitchen, Craif from NYPD pizza (who brought us ten pizzas for lunch and dinner!), Jeff from Blue Bird Bake Shop, and Mari from Heavenly Flan. It was a day of great food and entertainment. Even though we raised less than Monday's two donors put together, this $ amount was a combination of 14 donors - so the donation url was definitely getting out there.
Total in pledges: $615.00
Total in donations: $431.50

Wednesday
Wednesday also had some great entertainment and food. We began having donations of $91.50... A number we had not even thought to promote! Eat More Produce and Park Plaza both contributed meals. We continued to have a consistent number of pledges and donations throughout the day.
Total in pledges: $530.00
Total in donations: $525.50

Thursday
The Thursday Fund-a-thon continued as usual, with the exception of a $850 donation from one person! Tijuana Flats and SoNapa both contributed food for us. That night, Club WPRK was all the rage! (Most) all director staff showed up, and we collected donations at the door. The online stream worked perfectly and all of our DJs rocked. We collected $300 in donations at the door alone, as well as $250 more from drink sales donated by the Peacock Room. I talked to DJ Mo about possibly doing a monthly Peacock Room fundraiser; we shall see.
Total in pledges: $470.00
Total in donations: $2,118.00

Friday
Friday wrapped up the week with a bunch of online as well as in person donations. We had some great food from Dandelion Cafe and Aroma Italian Grill. Friday night we had a screen printing party, where we raised some donations for original, printed by Taylor WPRK t-shirts. It was a very popular event, and Taylor could hardly keep up with the number of people who wanted shirts. This would be a great event to do again in the future.
Total in pledges: $1,502.00
Total in donations: $1,001.50

Saturday
The final event! Besides having a great time, we raised over $500 in donations at the door, and sold 12 of the t-shirts left over from the screen printing party ($120). The whole concert went well. We should be receiving checks from Shipyard and Enemy Ink for a cut of their drink and t-shirt sales. The beer and the shirts were both very popular, so we should be getting a good amount from those businesses.
Total in donations: $600.00
Total in sales: $120.00

While there were was room for improvement in many areas of the concert, for the first huge concert event on Rollins campus, I think everything went really well. We did not reach our goal of $30,000... but I will take the ~$5,500 in donations and ~$8,500 in pledges we did raise any day! I am so proud of the team we had this semester!!

March 20-26

This week has been pretty slow. I am glad that Charlotte Davis is finally back working with us. She has created a constant contact list for us to contact those who pledge a donation during the Fund-a-Thon. Rob and Justin also got our donation site to be redirected to helpwprk.org, to make it easier to direct people to donate to us.
There is a lot planning to do for the week of the Fund-a-thon, and I am a little worried about how smoothly it is going to run. At this point in time we had hoped to have all the food contributors, bands, and community members scheduled, however, there are definitely holes in the scheduling. The concert looks like it will be a blast, however, I am a little worried about how effective the fundraiser will be in raising donations (especially when our goal is $30,000+).
Right now an important goal is to promote the 60th Anniversary and Fund-a-thon in all ways possible, which means helping the promotions team. Another important event coming up is Club WPRK night with DJ Mo on April 5. There I am going to collect donations at the door, as well as afterwords collect proceeds from the Peacock Room. I am very excited to make this happen, and I hope that we will see a lot of people come out and support WPRK, as well as enjoy their Thursday night.

March 12- 19

The donation account for WPRK is officially set up at:
https://bannerweb.rollins.edu/prod/owa/pkg_ecomm.p_basic_send?orderType=WPRKDonation 
The next steps will be to get this link set up on the website in a way that is clearly visible and available. I am a little worried, because I had hoped we would be able to put the link on wprkdj.org and the rollins.edu/wprk sites, but apparently we have no access to edit those sites. So, our only options will be to put the link on the wordpress site, as well as possible create a helpwprk.org site that takes the donor directly to this link. I am also a little disappointed that Charlotte Davis, our new donor relations coordinator, has basically come into some hard times (I believe) and not been able to do anything after the first meeting we had with Leslie to figure out the donation aspect of the 60th anniversary.
On the sponsorship side of things, I talked to Craig Lynch from NYPD Pizza in College Park, and he is set up to give us a free pizza lunch on Tuesday of the telethon. He is also interested in doing underwriting in the future. Another company of his, Adias Oils, may also do some underwriting as well. 
Going forward, the E-Commerce site for vendors to pay the vending fee to is still being set up. Since this money is going directly into our budget, we are solving the taxation problem by counting the vendors and sending that number to Teresia Williams at bursar, so that she can take the correct amount out after the concert to cover taxes. I also need to set up a business department meeting, because I feel that I have lost track of my department a little. They are all very busy and it has been difficult to get everyone together. Finally, I am just happy we are back on air after that break! I'm also very excited about the 60th Anniversary Event moving forward.

Facebook CMR Reading

This reading was difficult to do, because every other paragraph it made me think of something I wanted to do on Facebook.
From a networking standpoint, I have always like Facebook because it is in many cases literally a book of faces. For groups, organizations and networks getting to know each other, not only can you speak at a "virtual water cooler" but also "begin putting faces with names" (Neville 12-13). Unlike sites such as Myspace and blogs like Tumblr and Blogspot, Facebook users often put up actual photos of themselves. This makes the transition between virtual and reality much easier.
"Cases of financial censorship have also been well documented, especially when student government officials are given control over student media budgets" (Filak and Reinardy 16). Although in my experience WPRK has never been censored via our budget, I do feel that the lack of connection we as a Director Staff have with our own budget has and continues to be a problem. While as Business Director of going on 3 years, I have figured out many of the processes such as check request, cash transmittal, and petty cash request. The disconnect between our Rollins leadership (OSIL) and us at Director Staff has been apparent for many years, and I feel that if this is not fixed, WPRK may face things like censorship simply because of the disconnect between student staff and OSIL.