Giving Thanks
Jeff and I met tonight to fine tune the excel spreadsheet containing our finances. Our main agenda though was to write thank you notes to four individuals who were crucial to the success of our event. We wrote thank you notes to Kristen Kuliga, who is my boss, Kelly’s contact, and the donator of the Doug Flutie signed photographs. We also wrote a thank you to Dean Gemma, for all of his insight, his charitable donation, and for attending our event. Our next thank you went to Joann Suletenfuss, Executive Direction of the Room to Dream Foundation. Joann was more than willing to help us, and ultimately got us all of our printing materials for free. The last one went out to Bob Rothenberg, our contact at the Ronald McDonald house. As Jeff and I were writing his thank you, we realized all over again, what an amazing person Bob really is. Bob didn’t know Jeff and I from a hole in the wall, but volunteered his time to meet two complete strangers at Starbucks to discuss a fundraiser. Jeff and I discussed that we rarely cross paths with generous people like Bob. It was refreshing and admirable to know that there are people like him who are willing to share their wisdom. Bob was resourceful, and a breath of fresh air compared to what we had dealt with throughout this project, and we wanted Bob to know how much we appreciated everything he had done for us.
We still have one last thank you write. We need to write a thank you to our guest speaker, but after writing four thank yous, we were pretty burnt out. Although we realized after the fact that we should have written Kris’ thank you first, it’s okay that we didn’t, because we want Shaun to be apart of this one. Shaun didn’t have direct contact with the other four individuals, so it wasn’t a huge deal that he couldn’t make tonight’s meeting. We also have not yet written a formal thank you to Stefan or Bill Hughes, because we want to wait until our debrief to present them with some sort of token of our appreciation. I think Jeff mentioned in a previous post that him and I met after the event to write a quick thank you email to both Stefan and Bill, where we expressed our gratitude, and explained that we were excited to extend a more formal thank you at our debrief.
Reflecting back on the event, overall, we were extremely fortunate in the help and guidance we received. Jeff and I realized that we made some amazing contacts throughout this project. After coming to this realization, we not only wanted these individuals to know how much they impacted us, but we wanted to ensure that we kept in touch with them by keeping the communication channels open. As we mentioned very early on, one of our main goals of this project was to create relationships that would extend beyond the scope of this project, and we feel as though we will be able to genuinely accomplish this.
As I was writing this I decided to take a quick peek at some of my past posts and I naturally ended up reading four of them in their entirety. I hadn’t realized what a tremendous amount of information was contained in them. It’s funny to read those posts, and only now realize that we had no idea how resourceful the information in those early posts are. If I wasn’t so exhausted I would apply some of the materials now, however I can barely keep my eyes open. I will surely be on soon to correlate that information to our fundraiser. I just thought it would be important to keep everyone updated. Jeff, Shaun and I will be meeting early next week to plan out our presentation. In the meantime, Jeff is going to speak to his father about ways to appropriately thank our guest speaker. Also, prior to our next meeting, we must convert our camcorder cassette to DVD. We are still waiting for Stefan to contact us, so that we can schedule our debrief dinner. I know he has a Gala coming up, so I can only imagine how busy he has been, but we look forward to hearing from him, and will keep everyone updated as soon as we know when we will be meeting.