Getting to the Next Level

Posted by Gabe on October 31, 2010 under Kids are Heroes | 2 Comments to Read

Well now that things are starting to settle down after our biggest and best event ever, it’s given us time to think about our next steps. Clearly there will be things we have to change.  First and foremost, we have personally financed the last two receptions following our big events.  After we did it the first time, we said we’d never do it again.  But when no sponsors came forth for the event we held last week, not holding the reception at all was simply not an option.  We feel that getting the kids and parents together in a social setting is so important for future networking that it goes part and parcel with the event itself.  The reception ended up costing us more than double the one we did in the summer.  So much for “we’ll never do that again”.  But what we realized we must do is before we agree to hold these types of events we must make sure that sponsorship is already in place.  We can’t change the mall’s budget, so how we must handle next year is by starting the planning of it much earlier, which means now.  We hope to attract a relatively high profile personality to our next event so that sponsors would be much more willing to chip in.  We will not ask just any celebrity, however.   It must be one who aligns with our mission and supports what we are doing.  We have already chosen one, now we’ll just have to see if she can and will choose to come.

Another thing we have realized is that we can no longer do everything ourselves.  My wife Michelle had to miss half of Kids Are Heroes Day because she was decorating the room to prepare for the evening’s festivities.  We both had been running ragged for months in preparation and especially the week prior.  Next year we hope to use local high school volunteers and/or local citizens to help us with preparations.

It was great having Diana and Levar speak at schools the week prior to help publicize the event.  We hope to be able to expand on that next year and coordinate something similar where we can get out to many more local schools during the week.

So the future looks very bright for us. We must simply adjust our sails accordingly.  MaryMargaret (thus Kids Are Heroes) is scheduled to be featured in Discovery Girls Magazine in early 2011.  Another brand new “tween” magazine to be distributed in the US and Canada is coming on the market in Q1 of 2011 called “Luella Girl”.  MaryMargaret is also featured in their premiere edition.  We will be speaking to many schools through live video conferencing equipment on February 2.  If all goes well this will be a quarterly thing for us.  Looking back on where we were just a year ago, I expect other unforeseen things to come our way — this time they should be even more significant as awareness of us around the world elevates.

We gave a presentation to a local chapter of the Kiwanis club this past week.  I started out by telling the stories of some of the children from our web site.  Then I simply stated, “That feeling you now have of hope, inspiration, wonder and awe is something I have with me all the time and is what we are trying to share with the rest of the world.”  It’s as simple as that.  What a ride this has been so far and I can’t wait to see what happens next.