Newsworthy

Every quarter Cardz for Kidz! promises each hospital/shelter we partner with that we’ll send them a certain amount of cards. For some hospitals, based on our room to room requirement and their size, they’ve requested that we send them less than their overall hospital capacity. Some smaller hospitals updated us that they often don’t have many long term patients and have high turnover. Based on that they asked if once every 3 months, we could send more cards than they have beds.

In addition, to those preset hospital destinations we often make multiple special deliveries. This is highlighted in our mission statement.

Cardz for Kidz! is an organization dedicated to uplifting the spirits of hospitalized and/or traumatized children across the globe by delivering inspiring homemade cards.

Here are some examples of the some traumatized children we reached out to:

• 235 cards in  Q4 2012 to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut after the school shooting
• 15 cards in Q2 2013 to Neighborhood Charter House School in Boston, MA after the Boston marathon bombing
• 50 cards in  Q1 2014 to Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, New Mexico after the school shooting
•  Colin in Michigan, Addie in Utah, Daniel in Massachusetts all with their own disheartening conditions.

Thanks to you we even received some documented gratitude from a couple of those places.

Here are two things in common between all of those delivery locations:

1. Children were put in HORRIBLE conditions that they could not control
2. They all had at least one newspaper article or webpage explaining the tragedy

We are going to continue to keep our ears open for those type of situations, but we will continue to make sure that kids, who may not be going through a situation that’s on the front page of multiple newspapers, are still positively impacted by your cards. 

Although it may not be discussed on CNN, USA Today or other news stations, we feel that each disheartened child is NEWSWORTHY and we’d love to send independent homemade cards.

Please reach out to info@cardzforkidz.org if you know a child you’d like for us to make a special delivery for.

#Newsworthy #UpliftingSpirits

To see more pictures and stories please check out our website www.cardzforkidz.org, like us on Facebook page, follow us on Twitter , visit our Google+ page, or visit our LinkedIn page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!

We Remember You!

“Hmmm….I don’t know! What should we say?!?!?” That’s a quote from one of the “staff” members at Cardz for Kidz!  during a recent brainstorming session on how we can get more cards.

We’re not sure if you saw one of our last Facebook post, but Q4 2014 was our lowest production in cards in over a year. Actually if you check the date and time on the screenshot below you can see that we’ve been embarrassed to update our card per quarter count.

• Q3 2014: 1,105 cards :(
• Q4 2014: 989 cards :(

While talking to some of the board members they provided some ideas on how we could continue growing. Here were some of their ideas:

• Pre-packaging supplies. Make it EASIER for people to participate. With that people could simply go on our website, click a link and we’d send them all the art supplies. Only problem is we’d have to purchase the supplies, box them up, then ship them out. Since all “staff” at Cardz for Kidz!  are volunteers, having people dedicate that much time to our organization isn’t an option.
• Work with More Renown Hospitals. Someone suggested that we should work to partner with the major hospitals in each of the big cities. By partnering with the primary hospitals people have heard of then more groups will be interested in giving back.

Actually, if you look at this ranking, http://www.parents.com/health/doctors/best-childrens-hospitals/, we’re partnering with TWO of the Top TEN (Lurie & Mott). In addition, one hospital we work with got 70,000 cards at once.  As long as a hospital or shelter reaches out and promises to deliver cards room to room, we’ll partner with ANY hospital ANY size. Thanks to our partnership with some of the larger hospitals, we’ve been reaching out to universities in those areas; part of the strategy to expand. The only thing is the second option, to work with renowned hospitals, may misalign with one of our main hash tags, #EveryCardCounts. But we want to make it clear, we never discriminate.

Although, yes, a lot of those large hospitals would appreciate the cards, as touched on in a prior post, we believe it’s more important to focus on small hospitals who don’t get as much attention. We know we won’t be able to provide a DVD or new toy to each child at the small hospitals we work with, but at the very least we can provide a card!

We’re going to continue to focus on hospitals that may not get as much attention and/or donations. So here’s a special reminder to smaller hospitals. Although some groups may not talk of you or large companies may have never heard of you, OR you have a small number of pediatric patients, don’t worry, WE REMEMBER YOU and won’t forget!

#WeRememberYou #EveryCardCounts #UpliftingSpirits

To see more pictures and stories please check out our website www.cardzforkidz.org, like us on Facebook page, follow us on Twitter , visit our Google+ page, or visit our LinkedIn page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!

No Thanks Needed

Here we go again….starting another blog post with more 100% honesty. Here’s an explanation of why the folks behind the scenes of Cardz for Kidz! put the work in…..return on investment. We work to make sure it’s VERY EASY for anyone and everyone to participate. We guarantee the hospitals we’ll double check EACH AND EVERY card we receive (11,089 as of 3/4/14) so all they’ll have to do is open the package and hand it to a child. Then we make sure the participants know it’s 100% FREE to participate. And, if they make cards, they can get their logo up on our site for some free PR and recognition. To try and ease the process, when we designed the website we worked with the developers to make sure potential participants could download everything they’d need, http://cardzforkidz.org/how-to. We had a discussion about how it’s okay if they make it so the Helpful Info, Supplies and Reminders were all PDFs, but it’s a must that the Slideshow can be downloaded into a PowerPoint with one click! Although we’ve put in a bunch of work to ease the process, we’re always looking for ways to make it easy and effective for people to make AND receive cards.

We’re perfectly satisfied with doing all that work and remaining behind the scenes based on the “return on investment”…..seeing hundreds of smiles! Although it’s tricky to notice because we’re always the ones holding the camera in all the pics on Facebook, thankfully we’ve been there to experience each and every smile by each child and every “artist”. We feel seeing those hundreds of smiles, receiving pics from global destinations, and receiving the thank you cards makes it clear we’re appreciated and our investments are worth it!

So, now does it make sense why we’re willing to travel and put in a BUNCH of time??? Hope so. Now, we’ll need you to help us understand why these guys were NOT disappointed. Here’s an introduction to the last three “artists” who came to make cards at Lurie:

Moving from left to right:

• Steve Thompson- from the beginning he expressed a high interest in Cardz for Kidz!. His most recent donation covered our shipping costs to 9 different hospitals this quarter!
• Barry Weinberg- Not sure if you can see it in the picture, but yes, he’s wearing a Cardz for Kidz! t-shirt. That’s because he’s been helpful behind the scenes throughout the entire process. He’s made impacts ranging from sponsoring large corporate events to making a cards in his free time.
• Arron Davis- Do you notice the logo on Barry’s shirt, our website, business cards and everywhere else? In his free time, Arron designed some options for us then after we selected our favorite, he made the official digital copy of our logo. Now it’s officially ours.

Okay so their background is pretty impressive, but what we love the most is how they were still passionate about “investing” more, even though there was no immediate “return”. Since its flu season families are not allowed to bring patients’ siblings to Lurie at all. Based on that restriction the playroom is often a bit slower on the weekends when parents will likely have to be with other siblings. On top of that several pediatric patients have potentially contagious ailments so they cannot leave their rooms.

During their trip to Lurie last Sunday only a couple kids entered the playroom at all. The kids were so young and were draped with family members so our guys were not able to interact with them much. Instead of complaining about traveling all the way to downtown Chicago ranging from out in the suburbs of Chicago to Toledo, OH these guys got to work. We worked with the Child Life staff and received a list of ALL the patients in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). These guys worked with a couple volunteers, stayed past our original 2:30-4pm time frame, and made a custom card – addressed to the individual patient – for each child in the PICU. 

Although those guys cannot provide details or describe the smiles of the recipients, we can. The children AND the nurses were VERY excited they got a card that was actually made just for them.

The kids were excited to receive the cards, and the simple thought of kids being happy to receive them, inspired our artists to put in the extra time.

Now we need you to keep your fingers crossed that we don’t burn any bridges with this post! Throughout the event we were trying to apologize that they weren’t able to interact with more kids and remind them how grateful we were, but they made it clear that there was NO THANKS NEEDED and they were happy to help. Sorry. We broke the rules. We had to officially thank you!

#NoThanksNeeded #UpliftingSpirits

To see more pictures and stories please check out our website www.cardzforkidz.org, like us on Facebook page, follow us on Twitter , visit our Google+ page, or visit our LinkedIn page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!