Amateur's Impact

Here’s a common response we get when we ask people to make cards: “No, I really can’t. I’m not artistic at all.” We immediately respond with the shortened story about how the patient at Lurie Children’s Hospital interrupted us trying to explain why the card we gave him looked so bad and said, “I can tell he tried really hard.” Even with those explanations, some people still decline. Let’s try this way…. again. Let’s make fun of ourselves.

We’ve said this before, but when describing the history of this non-profit we always say, “We accidentally started it on purpose.”

• On Purpose – meant to reach as many kids as possible by delivering personally valuable handmade cards.
• Accidentally – did not plan to start a 501(c)3 certified non-profit that would have several of the largest corporations joining in and helping send packages to kids in 20+ different countries.

A lot of the work for Cardz for Kidz! is done relatively late at night. That ranges from scheduling social posts to responding to emails. Because of this late-night work, there are often mistakes in what’s written, whether it’s using the same hashtag twice or some sentences simply not making sense. To give you proof, here’s a post a friend saw and alerted us about:

It was supposed to be “It’s official we’re NOW…” instead of “Not”. Thankfully a friend noticed that.

Even with all those mishaps there are still positive results from the recipients, groups, and hospitals.

When it comes to our social posts, we often make mistakes, but still we’re getting fans and likes. People still enjoy seeing their cards on social media and kids still love receiving those cards. Therefore, if you try your best to make a card and sign your name and city the kids who receive it will LOVE it.

Is our encouragement still not working? Ok, we’ll keep making fun of ourselves!

So recently we’ve been driving more people to our website. It used to be all the attention and participation was coming from social media, but now based on connections via other sites, we’re starting to get more people coming to www.cardzforkidz.org – thanks Goods Giving Back! Since visitation is increasing, we do our best to keep our site as updated as possible, but we learned our lesson and here’s proof…

That’s a screenshot from a few weeks ago. We tried to update the text on the About Us page independently. As you can see, everything got messed up and even after trying VERY hard to fix things, we still couldn’t get things to line up. The takeaway was yeah, we can check a box that shows if a group is Silver, Gold or Platinum on the Participants tab, but no, we can’t even try to modify that text anymore. We’re not qualified enough. How it worked out is there was an URGENT email sent to three people who volunteer to help with the site and thankfully one of them was able to fix it.

So, over here you have a team learning about nonprofit leadership on the fly and are simply doing our best to keep the website and social sites up to date to make kids smile. As you can see in the picture above, we’re not qualified to make changes to the website. As mentioned before, there was no experience nor preparation in setting up this certified non-profit. Now, please just read the messages below and you can get an idea of what an AMATEUR’S IMPACT can be. That ranges from starting a small nonprofit to trying your best while making your next card! #everycardcounts 

#upliftingspirits #amateursimpact

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