With this being the last week of Genius Hour, we decided that we were going to wrap up with fundraising. We have not added up all of the money we made quite yet, but we can estimate around $300. Of course, our goal was $500, so we did not meet what we wanted to make. We were hoping that we would somehow meet our goal by the time this project was over, but we are still proud that we have made this much.
We have had a jar set up at Petsense in Clemmons for a few weeks. We only made a few dollars when we went to check the first time, but we were shocked when we went back yesterday (5/15). There was a $100 bill this week! The person who was working said that the lady had just come in and donated the money, so we were glad we waited to pick up the jar! On Friday after school, we deposited all of the money and wrote a check to the Humane Society. Our total was… $317.04! This was not our goal, but we think this is still an amazing accomplishment!! We are sad that we did not meet our goal, but overall this is something we should be very proud of. We are planning on mailing the check to the Humane Society, we think this will be easier than finding a time to meet up with an employee. We finished up our presentation this weekend and are going to present sometime this coming week. We are hoping that we can still do things to help the Humane Society this summer, in some way. We are very grateful for all of the locations that allowed us to sell treats at their locations. For everyone who helped us think of locations or ideas, thank you! And thanks everyone for following along with us!
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As the end of Genius Hour is approaching rapidly, we are starting to realize how far from our goal we truly are, which is why we decided to do another fundraiser at the Hillsdale Animal Hospital for the second time. We froze the treats from our previous fundraiser so they would be good for the future, and used them at this fundraiser. We were a bit worried that they would not keep well, but we didn’t seem to have any problems with the freshness of the dog treats. We used the same table, same tablecloth, same sign, and one new sign this time. We wrote the word “fundraiser” very large on the front of this poster so people would be aware that we are selling dog treats for a good reason, and not just some random teenage girls trying to make a few extra bucks.
We also attempted a more aggressive way of making sales, by asking anyone who came by our table if they wanted to buy some dog treats to support the local Humane Society. Most said yes, and those who didn’t either said they didn’t have any cash or just completely avoided eye contact out of guilt. The day was also quite rainy, so not many people were out that day, which also affected our donation progress. We only made thirty six dollars this past fundraiser, which is a little disappointing to say the least. We are hoping that perhaps we can squeeze another fundraiser in the last week of Genius Hour, but we are all pretty busy and do not have much time to work with. Since we only made $57 at our last two fundraisers, we are most likely not going to meet our goal. We are unsure why we are doing so bad recently, but we think that we have made out pretty well! We are going to present the Humane Society with a check and we know they will be grateful for anything that we have! This past weekend, we did a fundraiser at The Station in Mocksville. Unfortunately, we only made $21 and we were there for around 3 hours. We thought that we picked a good, sunny day to sell on, but for some reason nobody was in downtown Mocksville. We were severely over-prepared for this weekend and made over 100 treats. It took around 4 hours to mix, cut out, and bake the treats. We had to go to the store for ingredients as well which took around 30 minutes. We spent a lot of time on these treats and decided that we would try to freeze the treats and use them at our next fundraiser. If for some reason this didn't work, we will need to make more before our next fundraiser. We have made around 12 dollars with our money box at Petsense and are continuing to hope for more donations. Katelyn is going to go to Petsense on Friday to collect the money!
Due to our extreme failure at our previous fundraiser, we are now going to attempt our next fundraiser at the Hillsdale Animal Hospital. We are planning to do this on the eleventh of May. On May 11, we will hopefully make a large profit. We are not expecting to meet our $500 goal, since right now we have only made around $200. Of course, we are still hoping that we meet this goal but are not sure if it will be reachable. As soon as we complete our fundraiser on May 11, we are going to start making our presentation and deposit all of our money. We are hoping to present the managers of the Humane Society a check before our project is over. As mentioned above, we are still doing fundraisers. There is not going to be another Saturday before the due date (May 23) That we are all going to be available. So, the last day we are going to be able to raise money is going to be the 11th. Since the box will be at Petsense in Clemmons, we will collect the money on the Friday before May 23. As a group, we have had a lot of fun working together in a new way and raising money for a great cause. This week, we reached out to the owner of The Station and asked if we could do a fundraiser there this Saturday, April 30th. Unfortunately, Katelyn is not able to stay for the entire fundraiser, but we needed to get in another fundraiser before our deadline. We are also going to attempt to sell somewhere on May 14th. As of right now, the person we contacted has not replied yet, but Katelyn is going to still make dog treats for us to sell, assuming that we will be able to sell here! If for some reason we can’t, we are going to contact more locations and local businesses.
Lauren and Hannah are going to Petsense on Friday of this week to pick up donations made so far. Katelyn called Petsense today to make sure that our jar is still there & check on our progress, and the manager said that we made a little bit of money! The manager ath Petsense told us that they were not able to put out glass containers on the counter. She was so kind and ordered a donation box for us! We had no idea that she would do this for us and we are very thankful for her kindness. We will most likely leave the donation box at this location for the extent of our project and pick it up before our project ends. Although we might not have made a huge profit, any profit is better than nothing. We are approaching the deadline of our project and need to make sure we raise enough money by the end of Genius Hour. We are going to bring the Humane Society a check when this project is completed. We have been talking about it and we do not want to stop raising money once this project is over. We are not sure exactly what we want to do in the summer but we definitely want to do something! The weeks before and after spring break were somewhat unproductive, although we did make plans. Our goal for the Friday before spring break was to put a donation jar at Petsense in Clemmons. We were ready to bring a jar to Petsense, but then realized that we did not have a set date to pick up the jar the next week. Everyone in our group was going to be on vacation during spring break, so there would not be anyone able to pick up the jar in the following week. We decided that it would be best to wait until everyone was back to bring the jar.
We decided that we would bring the jar to Petsense the week after spring break. Katelyn dropped the jar off with a man who said that he would talk to the manager about it. We are not sure how much profit will be made from the jar, but anything is better than nothing! We have noticed so far that, as a group, we have not been as on top of things as we wanted to be. We have been procrastinating doing fundraisers, as well as staying on task during group discussions. We are going to work the next few weeks to make a lot more progress on fundraising and finding times and locations to sell our treats at. Our goals at the next meeting are to call Petsense, just to check up on things, as well as make decisions regarding new fundraisers. We are most likely going to do a fundraiser on May, 14th. Hopefully, we will be able to raise money at The Station or another local location. We are still excited to make more progress and hopefully meet our goal of $500. Our group believes that if we use our time wisely and figure out a good schedule to do different fundraisers, meeting our goal of 500 dollars will be simple and completely attainable. We are hoping to carry out the process of doing two more fundraisers by the end of the Genius Hour period. As long as we can do around two more fundraisers, we think that reaching our maximum goal for this Genius Hour project, which is $500. Not much progress was made this week. We have been working on finding more locations that would allow us to sell our homemade dog treats, but not many businesses have been okay with us doing so. This week, Katelyn called the Animal Hospital of East Davie. She asked for their permission to sell our dog treats, informed them of the ingredients in our dog treats, and told them about what we are raising money for. Unfortunately, they were not comfortable with us selling our treats due to the ingredients. Our group is not quite sure as to what ingredients they were having doubts about, since whole wheat, peanut butter, and water are the only ingredients used in the treats.
Due to multiple businesses turning us down, we are now thinking of other ways that we could raise money. Lauren suggested asking different businesses about setting up donation boxes that customers can donate to, but we have not begun asking places if we can do so. Katelyn is going to ask Ketchie Creek and PetSmart and Lauren already asked the Davie Community Foundation, but they declined. Hannah is still figuring out which businesses she is going to talk to. However, she hopes to find some businesses on Main Street, such as Scoops or The Station, that would allow for donation boxes to be set up for customers to contribute to. If businesses do end up allowing us to set up donation boxes, then we need to figure out how we want to assemble the boxes. We need to figure out how we want them to look and how to draw attention to them in the different stores. Everyone in our Genius Hour group has been rather busy lately, which explains why not much has gotten done over the course of this week. Another reason that not much has gotten done this week, is that not everyone was in class on Wednesday, which is when we have time to discuss ideas about our project. This made it harder for us to spring ideas off one another and make plans for the coming weeks. Next week, we are going to have to step it up if we want to reach our goal of five hundred dollars by the end of the Genius Hour period. This week we focused on fixing up our website and trying to find new locations to raise money. Lauren put a bunch of pictures on the website of our past fundraiser. We put some pictures of the treats and our setup, as well as a picture of one of the dogs who tried our treats. One of our friends, Sophia Brady, brought her dog Hudson to try out our treats! He loved them!! We tried to format and fix up some of the kinks of the website, and we think that it is very easy to read now! Before, the information was scattered, but it is organized now.
During our meeting on Wednesday, Katelyn called the Animal Hospital of East Davie. They told her they would call back later, but she has not gotten a call back yet. We are hoping that we will get a call from them sometime soon. We are really looking forward to having more opportunities to raise money soon, and are hoping that more and more locations will allow us to sell! So far, we think that we are making great progress on our project! We are about one-third to our goal of $500. We think that if we can do a few more fundraisers we will definitely meet that goal!! If we continue to call places and be very active in finding new locations, we will meet the goal soon! We are continuing to make progress in meeting our goal. As mentioned above, our goal should be reached after a few more fundraisers. Recently, we have talked about putting jars around various local places that people can donate. This will be talked about at our meeting this coming Wednesday. We are hoping to finalize another time for a fundraiser and decide on more important details this week! The major goal for this week was to prepare ourselves to sell dog treats at a public location on Friday. On Wednesday, our group thought of prices for our treats, created rough drafts for the poster, and figured out how we wanted to set up the table we were selling the treats at. Once we had everything figured out, people were assigned different jobs. Katelyn made the dog treats and labels for them, Lauren brought all the supplies we needed and printed out the Money 4 Mutts logo for the baggies of treats, and Hannah made a poster.
For the fundraiser on Friday, we were selling dog treats at Hillsdale Animal Hospital in Advance. The staff at the Animal Hospital let us set up our table outside, and were extremely nice to us. Some of them even bought a few bags of treats! By the end of the day, we had sold out of the big dog treats, and only had a few small dog treat bags left. We sold twelve bags of big dog treats and thirteen small bags of dog treats. The fundraiser was pretty successful, and we ended up making $158! People were curious about what we were doing and came up to ask us about our dog treats. On occasion, we would forget to mention that all the money that we made would be going to the Davie County Humane Society, which resulted in some people wanting change back. The people that were told where the money was going usually either gave us extra money, or at least told us we could keep their change. We need to make sure people are aware that we aren’t just selling dog treats to profit ourselves, but to give it all to the Humane Society. When our group sets up and sells our treats again, there are a few things we would do differently. One thing we needed to do was pre-package the treats, because we were packaging the treats on the way to the Animal Hospital and once we got there. We should also sell at a more public location. While this was a good start, there were only really people there during a certain time slot. We should also bake a larger number of large dog treats, since they were a larger success than we had guessed. We are so excited to continue to make progress on our project. We plan on going to different locations as much as possible, and raising as much money as possible while at those locations. So far, we have $158 out of the $500 we want to raise. We believe that with enough locations to sell at, it is highly possible that we can meet that goal. The group is ready to get back out there and sell some more dog treats, so hopefully we can find more locations to do so! Our main goal this week was to reach out to various locations and hopefully find somewhere to sell our dog treats! First, we called the Country Vet. At first, we thought that we were going to be able to sell there, but they told us that we were not allowed to sell in front of the building. We knew that they already sell homemade dog treats inside, so this was a conflict of interest. We were losing hope, because two of the main places we wanted to sell said no, until we got the idea to call Hillsdale Animal Hospital. We called them and they said that we could sell at their location!
Since the Animal Hospital said that we were allowed to sell there, we knew that we needed to think and act fast. We all decided that we were free on Friday, March 18th. We will be selling on Friday from around 3 until they close at 6. We are going to be making dog treats and posters, as well as contacting the Hillsdale Animal Hospital with more information. We are going to sell peanut butter treats, using a recipe we found online. Katelyn is going to be making most of the dog treats for this fundraiser. We are planning on making around 70. We originally were going to sell each treat individually, but we think that making bags of 2 would be better. We are unsure of the price, and that will be talked about at our next meeting. Lauren has been in contact with the manager. She has generously said that, when we send information, she will make a post on Facebook. This will be great publicity, and hopefully get us a lot of customers! Hannah is going to make a poster that we can put on the table, so the customers can know about the ingredients, prices, and other important information. We are very excited that our project is finally in action! We are looking forward to this fundraiser, and hope to have a lot of success in raising money! Again, we are not sure on the price, but we will decide on this at our next meeting! Originally, our group had a plan to sell the dog treats at Tanglewood Dog Park this weekend (March 5). Unfortunately, that plan did not come to fruition. We called Tanglewood Park in hopes of being able to use the Dog Park as a location to sell the dog treats, but we were transferred to marketing who said they would call us back, but never did. We were not sure if they just forgot, or if they weren't taking us seriously. We are disappointed that we were not able to do this fundraiser, but hopefully we will be able to do one soon! Since they did not call us back, we are trying to come up with an alternative location to sell dog treats. One idea we had was to sell the dog treats at the old Davie. We realized that there are way more potential customers at the Tanglewood Dog Park, so we are very hopeful that we get a call back. Another idea we have is to sell dog treats at the Country Vet. We are going to call them very soon to see if they are willing to let us sell the dog treats to customers there. This would be one of the best options. We could also ask them if they know any recipes and/or foods to avoid when making the dog treats. Again, we are hoping that Tanglewood will allow us to sell at their location, but we do have some back up plans. We are still messaging with an employee of the Humane Society, and she is giving us great ideas of where to sell the dog treats! There are many obstacles that have already come up during this project. One being the communication issues; since the Dog Park never called back, we were not able to make any real progress this week. Another problem that has arisen is that we all have very different schedules, so it is hard to find a weekend that will work for all of us. Our plan for our next meeting is to regroup and discuss what our best options are for selling the dog treats, and distributing roles. Hannah has already volunteered to make a poster. Lauren is contacting various locations, hoping to get a response saying that we can sell our treats there! Katelyn is going to make the dog treats. We are really excited to be able to start the fundraising process! BLOG POST TWOWhen our class was first assigned this project, we immediately thought of doing something that would benefit the Humane Society. With them having to close recently, we decided that having some sort of fundraiser would be the best thing to do. After talking it over with the group, we decided that we wanted to sell homemade dog treats. I have been contacting an employee of the Humane Society, and she is being a huge help in getting started.
After deciding on what our project would be, we knew there would be some kinks to work out. We need to find a recipe for dog treats that is both inexpensive and easy. Since the ingredients will be paid for out of pocket, we will need to consider what recipe we make. Finding a location to sell the treats will also be a challenge. At our next meeting, we will hopefully contact local businesses and locations to see if we can sell there. As mentioned above, the materials needed will be paid for out of pocket. We are hoping that we can make enough money to pay for the ingredients and be able to make a large donation to the Humane Society. We are not sure exactly how successful we will be with our goal of $500, but we know this will be a learning experience for all of us! Our group is really looking forward to working together and doing something that will help the community. Our goal is to raise $500. We understand that $500 will not save the Humane Society, but it will feel good knowing that we can do our best to help! |
AuthorsLauren O'Connor, Hannah Beale, & Katelyn Linkous will work together to construct blog posts. Stay tuned!. |