Harry’s Appeal is the first appeal we’ve ever had that hasn’t been completed within 6 weeks.

We’ve always had a policy for what would happen if we had a large, long-running appeal but we’ve never had to put it to work until now.

So here’s how it works:

In the first 6 weeks of any appeal (what we call Phase 1) we really get to work. We feature the appeal as far and wide as possible. It’s in our newsletter every week, it’s talked about on our Facebook Page all the time and we issue press releases about the story to all the local papers and major dailies too. In addition to that we contact business and service clubs and schools in the local child’s area and ask for their assistance in running a fundraiser or hosting a collection tin etc.

Now, we are a small charity – in fact up here in QLD there’s just me (Barb) and my husband Peter. And in VIC there’s just Liat for 20 hours a week.  Yep, three of us. That’s it. Between us we do everything. So to keep up the Phase 1 activities for every appeal would be pretty hard. That’s where Phase 2 comes in.

In Phase 2 the appeal stays open – we’ll never close an appeal until it’s finished – and the appeal page stays on our web site so that online donations can still be received for that child.  And we still work behind the scenes looking for every opportunity there is to raise the shortfall. We also keep updating everyone once a week or so on our Facebook page as a reminder that help is still needed.

The biggest difference between the two phases is feature spots in our weekly e-newsletter. During Phase 1, every appeal gets a feature spot in the newsletter but during Phase 2 they don’t.This is for a couple of reasons:

• everyone on the newsletter mailing list that was going to donate to any particular appeal would have done so within that 6 week period if they were going to
• we know from experience that most of our members donate to a given appeal just once and then they wait for the next child to help
• we know from experience that we get the best results when we give people just one or two stories at a time

What this means for Harry is that he’ll no longer have a feature spot in the newsletter, but everything else will stay the same.   We’re going to get Harry back on the road again. We won’t stop until we do.