Hi, everyone, I hope you are all well!! It was a very busy and productive September. Our top priority has been preparing for our end-of-year fundraiser. Here is a quick summary of everything.
1. END OF YEAR FUNDRAISER
This is the board’s top priority right now. Our fundraiser is scheduled to soft launch on Oct 25 and then officially launch on Nov 1.
During the fundraiser, we’d love if 100% of the board of directors and board of advisors could make a donation. Whatever you can afford — every dollar helps.
- Official Fundraiser Video: huge thanks to Jim Walters for donating his video production services
- Indiegogo Campaign: still undergoing final revisions, but you can preview it here.
- Member Videos: we are coordinating to record a series of videos of members sharing how our communities has made a difference AND patients sharing how they don’t have a community yet so please donate so we can build them one.
- Pitch Deck: here is the current draft of the pitch deck that we discussed for any conversations you may have with possible partners or sponsors. Now that the video and campaign are ready, this is the next priority. It should be ready by the end of October.
- Corporate Matching: this is definitely where you can make a huge impact. We’re looking for companies to pledge to match individual donations. Companies can set the amount and time period during which they will match any donations.
- Adopt a Community: we are offering companies with an interest in one specific disease to sponsor that community for one year for a $5,000 donation to the campaign. We have one company so far.
- Match a Friend: small-scale matching of individuals who pledge to match a smaller amount, either for a specific friend, or for the next X hours (for example)
- Marketing Plan: we talked to some experts about spreading the word. 1) Weekly updates via email, 2) weekly updates via Indiegogo, 3) Twitter outreach to influencers, 4) community message broadcasts to members.
2. COMMUNITY UPDATE
It has always been our moderators that have made us a special place for patients to find the connection they need. Amazing communities require amazing moderators. And amazing moderators require amazing moderator support.
Led by Tom, the mod support team have done a great job (especially lately) recruiting and supporting new moderators. Here is screenshot of the (private) portal for moderators only.
The mods community.
The platform migration is scheduled to start right after the fundraiser concludes. The plan is still to migrate the discussions from Ning to (open source) Discourse, the company that runs the very popular Stack Overflow, and then combine that discussion engine with a WordPress site for each community. Thoughtbot is ready to consult with the development and migration.
3. WEB SITE
The old web site was looking very dated, so we did a quick redesign which is now live. Once we get past the fundraiser and have more time, we’d love to discuss with advisor Kevin Kearny of Hard Candy Shell to help with a more professional branding and site design.
4. STAFF UPDATES
Interim ED Gretchen Flatau is no longer with Ben’s Friends. We are very grateful to her for the work she did organizing our accounts and paperwork. After a successful fundraiser, the next top priority will be recruiting a permanent executive director. Feel free to send us any names of executive director rockstars you think would be a good fit, location does not matter since we all work remotely.
5. BEN TRAVELING TO CALIFORNIA
I’m (Ben) traveling on business to LA on Nov 10 and then to SF Nov 15 (tentative). Would love to meet each of you for a quick coffee, if you are available. I’ll reach out individually.
6. NEXT BOARD MEETING
We normally have our monthly board meetings on the 3rd Wednesday but next month is our quarterly advisors call, so we’ll want to do it perhaps the day before, date/time TBD.