My company has one of these old-timey looking popcorn machines that they let employees use every Friday. The company buys the popcorn, all you have to do is set up shop and pop the stuff (and clean up everything after) and you can sell popcorn for $2 a bag. The only conditions are:
- You can only send one email to the office promoting your event and one email afterward thanking everyone (so as to not spam / pester everyone)
- The money has to go to a registered charity
So, in an effort to drum up donors and donations we held a Popcorn Friday in support of Canadian Blood Services today and Princess Pants and The Dude came to work with me this afternoon to help sell popcorn.
My introduction email explained a bit about Avery and how she needed so much blood for her surgery and that we were looking for six more donors to round out our list or cash from popcorn sales to donate to Canadian Blood Services.
Last night, Jodi got this awesome idea to make up t-shirts with pictures of Avery's x-rays on them promoting the blood drive. The kids wore theirs to school and I wore mine to work. They looked awesome and they were a big hit!
I took the kids out of school around 1:00 and brought them into work and we started popping popcorn a little before 2:00. Someone had already given me a $20 donation because they were out of the office for the afternoon so we were off to a great start. Once the smell of the popcorn started wafting through the office it didn't take long for the donations to start rolling in.
By 3:00 we had sold a lot of popcorn and a co-worker suggested that we take some upstairs on the rolling table and see if the office on the 3rd floor wanted any (he tipped us off that they were always in the mood for popcorn).
So we trekked upstairs with eleven bags of popcorn and visited another company and less than 10 minutes later we only had one bag left!
We sold a few more before the day came to a close for us (around 4:00) and the final tally was nothing short of amazing:
- $238 ($245) if you include the 5€ note someone gave us
- Two blood donors for the drive on May 14
- One blood donor who can't make the 14th but will donate at another point in the week
I even had people tell me they would be away on Friday but would bring in donations on Monday!
All in all, it was an amazing success. The generosity of the community is quite something. I am very fortunate to have such wonderful and caring neighbours.
In case you didn't do the math, we're still in need of 3 donors!
Please email me if you can donate on May 14th in Waterloo (6:35pm, 7:05pm, 7:10pm spots available).
If you can donate but on a different day, or if you're out of town and you'd like to donate, just book your appointment with Canadian Blood Services (http://blood.ca) and let me know and I'll add you to our list of Bent But Not Broken Supporters.
Thank you, all!
~ Andrew