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!!