Red Cross Donation
For everyone that’s been following the auction, we’ve finally assembled all of the pieces and made our donation to the Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund! Through the bidding wars, we were able to raise $381.00. We rounded it up to $400.00 and made the donation on February 10th.
First of all, thanks to everyone for participating. Several bloggers helped spread the word via their websites, twitter, and word of mouth. Also, thanks to Deschutes Brewery, who not only helped spread the word, but got founder Gary Fish on board to sign the auctioned Deschutes prints as well, adding to the uniqueness of the items we had to auction. With all of this help, I’m not surprised that the auction reached one of the winning bidders all the way in Denmark!
Finally, thanks to everyone who submitted bids! Obviously we couldn’t have done this without you. Even if you didn’t end up winning, your participation was essential to the whole process of starting us off quickly and getting to our total amount. The five day auction was surprisingly exciting as the bids rolled along at a fast pace and continued up to the last minute.
While I’m extremely happy with the final outcome, I think we could have made some improvements. The whole idea was to get this started and finished quickly so that the money would be donated as soon as possible. This limited the amount of time to do the programming for the bidding engine, organize the participants, and get the word out. Without this limit, we probably would have involved more breweries, added more items to the auction, and let the auction run a little longer.
And to the winning bidders: thanks for your patience! I’ve been trying to figure out this shipping fiasco for awhile and finally have a grasp on what I’m doing! The items are going out soon, all across the world. But, first they’re going to Deschutes for the signing. So, I’ve had to figure out how to:
- ship a box of pre-shipped domestic and international boxes to Deschutes Brewery
- within a FedEx designated time limit so that
- Deschutes could drop the boxes off on my predesignated ship date
Sound confusing? It was to me. Now I’ve got it all straightened out and I’m finally getting the winning items out!
So, thanks again everyone–I’m glad we pulled this off!
