Pepsi Refresh Final Update
Well, there’s one more day left in this round of the Pepsi Refresh grant project, where the most popular ideas get funded with sizable grants. The way it works is, you post an idea for people to vote on. They only allow 1000 ideas to be posted per month. If at the end of the month that idea is in the top 10 (for our category), then it gets funded with $50,000. If it’s in the top 100, then it rolls over into the following month to keep trying for top 10 status.
As you may know, we started working on this project several months ago. April and I made a video on afternoon. We got the word out via Facebook, Twitter, and emails to our friends, families, and business contacts. We Tweeted to over 100,000 people in just the first few days. We sent about 13,000 emails during the month. We had dozens of conversations. We passed out about 500 voting “business cards.” And we replied to nearly 200 reply emails. We had people around the world passionate and voting for our idea to change the way the world gives. All this … in our “spare time.”
We had several major setbacks, like people who had really committed to massive exposure becoming unavailable, a large contingent of voters having issues with the site, and Pepsi mangling our voting page and refusing — after contacting them more than 7 times — to fix their error and make it look the way we had completed it.
We estimate that overall we had around 15,000 votes for our ideas — although there’s no way to actually know. We started with only a handful of people who knew or cared about what we were doing: 5 people on the board, and maybe another 5-10 friends & family that really knew what was going on. We ended with the sprouting seeds of a community.
But even with all that, before we asked people to direct their energy elsewhere, we were in about 140th place — still within about the top 12% or so. Not bad for a few people … but nevertheless, tomorrow, our journey on this path is over. We gave it 110%, but we simply didn’t start out with a large enough community, nor enough free time on my hands to dedicate 50 hours a week on it.
I’m amazed at the passionate people that I’ve found, and how much time, energy, and social capital they expended getting the word out. So to any of you who voted or spread the word — THANK YOU. What you’ve done is really get the ball rolling on Creative Offering, and now it’s our job — with your help — to get more creative offerings to charity onto the site so that we can reach critical mass.
So again, thank you to everyone who participated in our drive! We didn’t get the funding from this source, but we learned several things about the site, we discovered who is passionate about us (and who isn’t!), and we started our community, practically overnight.
Thank you!
Jason
