Cardz for Kidz! Uplifting Spirits, One Card at a Time

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Best Nightmare

via GIPHY

http://gph.is/1gEXIfC

OK, since it’s basketball season too, we decided to use that “video” clip. We’ve been touching base on all the positives about Q4 2016 and how it was record setting and how we’re not sure if it will ever happen again, but with this post we want to quickly touch base on how it was the best nightmare ever.

Yeah, we know that sounds kind of odd, but while we were thinking about it, there’s NO way we can say in any way shape or form that receiving cards is bad or “the worst”. Therefore, although this situation had us a bit startled at night and parts of it weren’t a dream come true, it was the BEST quarter ever. Here’s what happened:

As you can see in a lot of our different charts and what we’ve mentioned, the fourth quarter of 2016 went WAY beyond anything we had ever experienced before. We had a feeling something was coming, so we consistently tried to post something across ALL of our social sites asking people to send us their holiday cards at least two weeks prior to the holidays so we could have enough time to get them to the different locations on time. In addition, we have a special PowerPoint that we often send to people who are hosting the events that provides some “insider information”. One of the slides encourages people to use Card Stock rather than construction paper since those types of cards last longer.

Here’s where the “nightmare” comes into play. Turns out that unfortunately, the majority of those requests were not listened to by some groups. L We started to get a bunch of holiday cards that wouldn’t last till the next year since they were on thin construction paper just a couple days before Christmas. In addition, the cards didn’t say ‘Happy Holidays’, but directly said ‘Merry Christmas’.

In order to stick to our promise and do our best to make sure that #EveryCardCounts, we drove around the Atlanta area and dropped off nearly 800 cards to different senior shelters, homeless shelters, and places for abused women and children on 12/23 and on Christmas Day. Another reason we used the word “BEST” rather than “worst” was how excited our “helpers” were to contribute down at one of the homeless shelters. The security guards at the door let us in and a young boy and girl volunteered to help us deliver them to everyone in the room. They kept coming back insisting for more cards to give out, but we kept our eye on the room and saw that everyone in the shelter already had multiple cards. In the end, one of the little girls asked, “what about them upstairs? They need some!” After checking with the staff, we learned those ladies and families were strictly off limits since they had been physically abused; only certified men who were employees were allowed to go up there. We decided to give our helper an extra bag of 30 cards to take to those women. She was excited.

Now, we have Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and several other large holidays coming up. Although it turned out pretty well and we were able to still hand out most of the construction paper cards on time, that was a bit startling and we’d love to avoid more of those BEST NIGHTMARE ever situations.*

*saying “most” because we’re still receiving some Christmas cards.

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 page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Dream Come True

“OUCH” While rubbing my arm, “Okay, I guess I’m not dreaming.”

What sparked this - we were thinking this whole situation with the southwest region of UBS is really too good to be true. We must be dreaming. We had to pinch ourselves to see if we were dreaming. Nope, everyone’s awake.

Here’s why they’re so special –

Cards

As touched on previously (Heating Up & Nothing Needed), they were willing to join in and start making cards even before we had a location in their area. As of November 17, 2016, we’ve received a total of 530 cards, specifically from their offices in Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. And so far, we’ve only been able to send 215 cards to those three states. When they joined in, we had only sent a total of 80 cards to any of those states. When we promised our contact that we’d try to get more spots out West, her reply was “We trust you to send the cards wherever needed. We do have a children's hospital in Nevada – Sunrise – but it's totally up to you. Our NM co-workers also agree that you can send them wherever you want.” (Unlike a lot of groups.) Amazing!

Cash

Then, we really thought we were dreaming. They also chose to support us with a recent monetary donation. The first email from UBS was them asking for our Federal ID number, but we weren’t sure that was for a donation! In mid-November we just received a donation that covered the cost to ship over 4,000 cards!

Now, if we had more groups like UBS who made our DREAMS COME TRUE we’d be able to efficiently reach kids across the country, as well as do some of the extras we’ve been trying to do – DVD Players and Art Supplies.

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+ page, or visit our LinkedIn page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Nothing Needed

“What if?"……“No never. That’d be too good to be true.”

That’s what crossed our mind when we were thinking about where we ship our cards and about some groups’ requests or requirements when they ask to join in. But before we explain why that crossed our mind, let’s provide a bit more detailed background information then what you can find on our About Us page. When things first started, our founder took the cards that were made and delivered them during his volunteer shifts at Lurie Children’s Hospital. Then as more groups started participating, he reached out to classmates who worked at Sinai Children’s Hospital and Advocate Kids to see if he could send cards there too. After creating a Facebook page, he started contacting more hospitals in the Chicago area as more cards were coming in.

Now here we go with some of our honesty, “100% open and honest”. After we started to grow a bit, we realized that we should expand our coverage and get hospitals outside of just the Chicagoland area. The first cities we picked were Atlanta, Cleveland, Brooklyn, and Ann Arbor. Then as mentioned in a prior post, we’ve drastically been working on expanding across North America and making sure that we have an even delivery across the United States.

Now the reason for providing all that background is that we want to highlight why we’re so thankful for groups such as UBS, Kforce and Minnesota State University. Recently, the word’s been starting to spread and a couple new groups have been hearing about our organization. Several of these groups have said they only want to join in if we guarantee to send cards to the hospitals in their immediate communities.

In comparison, with Kforce, their Tampa, FL office simply started sending us cards even though we weren’t sending cards to any hospitals in the state of FL. As we decided we could grow a bit, we immediately reached out to St Joseph’s in Tampa, FL. It’s been less than a year, but we’ve already sent those children 320 cards and that will consistently keep growing no matter where we receive cards. In addition, and the reason Kforce is currently our #2 participant with 1200 cards, what started with Tampa, has now sparked to multiple offices. For example, the Chicago office made 62 cards in Q3 2016 and although we don’t have a hospital in that city, their Dallas office made cards this quarter! And you can bet where we will look when we are able to expand again.

Then, with UBS, their SW region pitched in and in one quarter made over 500 cards. They shipped all of those cards to us even though we didn’t have any hospitals in their area. If you check out our Donate page, you’ll see the participation has been growing, so when we had enough cards and were able to spread west a bit more we decided to reach out to the Maricopa Integrated Health System in Phoenix, AZ. We confirmed we’ll send them a total of 200 cards (a combination of English and Spanish) a quarter and those will all be delivered room to room.

Now, as you can see in the map above we’ve contacted a hospital in Minnesota before, but have yet to set up a connection. If Minnesota State University wins the next MarchGladness tournament, then we’ll definitely have to reward that group who was willing to impact kids across the globe, rather than strictly the kids next door. We can’t even imagine how much more impressive we’d be able to be if there were more groups who were willing to join in and felt that there was NOTHING NEEDED from us in order for them to start. Kids, no matter where they’re located, deserve to smile.

Wow….what if everyone felt that way?!?!

#NothingNeeded #UpliftingSpirits

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Three Generations

Thankfully Cardz for Kidz! has had a variety of families who have contributed in multiple ways. For example, we previously wrote about how a mother and daughter are both creative, #RunsintheFamily. In addition, we touched on how a husband and wife helped out in a variety of ways, #BestofBothWorlds. One similar factor with both of those families is that they both had TWO contributors.

We always appreciate the time and effort each individual and/or family makes to Cardz for Kidz!, but today, we want to take the time to recognize Sally Anderson and Norma Hornick. Now here’s the background….

We were first connected to Sally through a contact at Google. Google has generously been able to donate cash and cards, as well as helping to improve our overall credibility. In addition to helping us expand our presence with Google’s Chicago office, Sally also helped set us up with the Benevity donation system. Cardz for Kidz! is set up on their site which allows multiple companies to make donations (e.g. recently received $50 donation from Hewlett Packard and they may potentially host an event). More important than the financial contributions, Sally has worked with different Google offices to make a total of 396 cards – including 5 different times with the Chicago office!

What really distinguishes Sally from other is that she spreads the word “both” ways. She had her children make cards, teaching them to start young; then she told her mom, Norma Hornick, about our organization; Norma later made a total of 10 cards. Here are some of the impressive/distinctive factors about Norma:

Sally simply told Norma about the organization, without providing her with any direct point-of-contacts. Norma took it upon herself to visit the Cardz for Kidz! website and contact us on her own
When we were looking for new locations in PA, she provided ideas of potential hospitals and/or shelters in the area
She’s spread the word by telling her sorority, Alpha Delta Kappa, about our organization and they already hosted their first event

On another hand, there’s a sister who was touched on in the Runs in the Family post who just made a couple cards. Therefore, that could be three family members making it into the Top 10, that’ll definitely be blog post worthy, but as of right now, we think THREE GENERATIONS making cards and making a difference in many ways is very impressive!

#ThreeGenerations #UpliftingSpirits

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Heating Up

“Across the country” is a common phrase almost everyone knows or has at least heard. We’re working to establish partnerships in all 50 states. Thanks to the contributions of several key groups, Cardz for Kidz! presses onward, closer and closer, to that goal—specifically through a our new partnership with the Arizona Burn Center in Phoenix, AZ. But, before we touch on delivering cards to AZ or NM, we’ll provide some background on what it’s been like sending cards out west.

If you visit our website, www.cardzforkidz.org/about-us, you’ll find the history of our organization. One thing you’ll see is that we originally started in Chicago and several of our original hospitals are in the Midwest. Based on that, when you take a look behind the scenes – “100% Open and Honest” - you’ll see that dating back to 2010, the majority of the cards have been sent to children in the Midwest.

Now, the main difference is recently, we’ve been working on evening out our delivery and consistently reaching kids across North America. We’ve been focused on making some changes and have clearly seen some results this year:

Thankfully, we’ve continued to increase our presence out West. If you check out the map on our homepage, you’ll see several more smiles in California and Nevada. One of the main reasons is the production of the UBS Financial Services Inc. offices in Albuquerque & Santa Fe, NM and Phoenix & Tucson, AZ. Their offices made a total of 530 cards within two months—almost the amount made the entire third quarter of 2015 (Q3 2015).

Additionally, they more than returned the favor since there offices in New Mexico alone produced three times as many cards as we were able to send the kids impacted by the school shooting in Roswell, NM.

Due to UBS Financial Services Inc.’s dedication, especially during our non-peak time, we contacted the Arizona Burn Center, part of the Maricopa Integrated Health System in Phoenix, AZ, and sent them 100 homemade cards. Thankfully, they enjoyed these cards and now we will send them 200 cards each quarter!

Thankfully, we’ll continue to work to even out our delivery across North America. We know thanks to some steady partnerships, we’ll continue to work on our presence out West. We’ve sent some test packages and we feel the likelihood of even more partnerships are definitely HEATING UP.

#HeatingUp #UpliftingSpirits

Delivery by Quarter, 2011 to 2016.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Still Enough

Once again, we’re going to be 100% open and honest. We’ve got it documented that we’ve delivered well over 20,000 cards to disheartened children or solemn seniors across the globe. With that said, we doubt that we’ve changed 20,000 lives. In fact, we can’t even 100% guarantee we’ve uplifted 20,000 spirits…..with that it’s more or of a 99.9%. If you think about it, even if some kids don’t enjoy their cards, some cards excite much more than one person.

An Elsa card excited an entire family at Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor.

With that in mind, some may question why we make such a big deal about our other main hash tag, #EveryCardCounts. Why do we spend the time to calculate how many cards each group makes and remind the group how many smiles they create? The first reason: its all first person!

We work with each hospital and shelter we partner with to let them know we understand all about HIPAA, patient and child protection/privacy laws. We tell them that our goal is to make it as EASY as possible for them to receive cards. It’d be a dream come true, if more hospitals were like Franciscan Hospital in MA and tweeted or sent pictures, but we won’t put any pressure on them. With that in mind, the majority of the pictures you see of patients in their rooms with their cards are all taken by “staff” at Cardz for Kidz!. So, when we highlight that your cards are helping kids and their families, it’s not simply hearsay. It’s not simply an estimate. It’s something we’ve experienced.

We’ve seen the smiles. We’ve seen the tears of joy.

Although we’re only 99.9% sure we’ve uplifted over 20,000 spirits due to your work, based on these smiles, we think that’s STILL ENOUGH….for now!

#StillEnough #UpliftingSpirits

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Our Hashtag is Calling

Based on the amount of followers we have on Instagram, we understand not everyone’s seen our hashtags, so we want to provide you some of our must have hashtags for that social site-

Hashtag: “A hashtag is a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content.” (Wikipedia)

One of the things that we like about Instagram is that we’re able to use a lot more hashtags compared to Twitter. If you look at some of our original posts, we simply had a couple hashtags and weren’t getting many likes or comments. We thought of some on our own, but also asked others for some insight on what we could use (e.g. @thefarwoods & @exit21nemesis575). Since we use so many, we wanted to briefly explain why we use some of them for the majority of the posts:

#UpliftingSpirits- need we say more? That’s part of our mission statement* and it will always be our main goal. We’re trying to uplift the spirits of the disheartened children, but also encourage the people who are making the cards. This hashtag isn’t necessarily for trying to get more followers or likes, but simply trying to convey what we believe.
#EveryCardCounts – another key theme we’ve touched on. As discussed in a couple prior posts, there’s a double meaning. First, all the cards are delivered room to room so each card is important. Then we track where all the cards are coming from, so we tally how many cards each group has made. This is another hashtag that’s nearly exclusive to us.
#CardsforKids – this hashtag is something that we primarily use on Instagram. As mentioned in the Last Letter blog post, we understand that a lot of people who participate in our events may not know they’re participating in Cardz for Kidz! events. With that in mind, we’re using this to help connect with people who are simply interested in making cards for children.
#VolunteeringIsFun – a win-win situation. That’s one of our goals. We want to make sure that participating in Cardz for Kidz! is something people look forward to. We’re using this so people who enjoy volunteering and are looking for other fun volunteering events can easily find us.
#MakingADifference & #MakingSmiles – we grouped the two of these together since they’re a bit similar. We feel that based on taking the time to make these encouraging cards you’re making a difference in the lives of families by helping them smile during some of their most difficult times!
#DoGoodFeelGood – we align with both parts of the hashtag. By participating and making these cards for disheartened children we know you’re definitely “doing good” and the benefit of joining in and participating in Cardz for Kidz! is something you can “feel good” about!
#HomemadeCards & #HandmadeCards – both of these are pretty simple. We’re all about trying to find people who are passionate about making cards from scratch!!
#EncourageOneAnother – since we’re primarily encouraging groups to work together we feel that participating in Cardz for Kidz! helps everyone. Not only are you uplifting kids, but you’re encouraging your friends, coworkers, classmates, and/or family to do something positive!
#HelpingKids – that’s #1. Although some folks say we may be forgetting the fact that we’re sending cards to ‘solemn seniors’, #CardzFROMKidz, but still we feel that whether kids are making cards or receiving cards we’re helping kids either learn to give back or uplifting their spirits if they’re in the hospital.
#ArtsAndCrafts – with this one we’re working to find people and groups who are interested in making homemade artwork and crafty projects.
#SpecialNeedsKids – this was more recently added and it’s used to include that we’re reaching out to kids who have any kind of special need. We’re not going to refer to them as disabled, handicapped, but just referring to them as special.

Hopefully, when people start to look through Instagram or if we have enough room, on Twitter or Facebook, they’ll start to see we’re talking about or posting pictures of things others care about. If you look at each Instagram post, you’ll see they’re all pretty long, but you’ll never see some of the standard hashtags of #like4like or #follow4follow. We’re not simply trying to get fans, but we’re trying to get cards!

We’ve learned that people aren’t necessarily going to start following us based on our hashtags (still less than 350), but hopefully they’ll realize that we’re thinking about similar things and understand that OUR HASHTAG is CALLING - we have similar passion points!

#OurHashtagIsCalling #UpliftingSpirits

*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.