One Spark Recap

As many of you know, All Things New recently participated in One Spark here in Jacksonville last week and it was a huge success for our organization.  We want to thank each of you who came out to volunteer, vote, or donate to our cause.  Most of you saw our repeated communications on social media, but if you missed them, I will start by telling you what One Spark is.  It is a “crowdfunding festival” held in downtown Jacksonville where startup organizations or people with ideas compete to earn the most votes.  Votes are cast by the “crowd” or the people who come to the festival and sign up to vote through One Spark.  The idea is that people, like us, have the opportunity to present their ideas to thousands of people who could potentially team up and help make our idea a reality.  We built a small replica of the orphanage where our kids stay now and called our project “Buildings for Orphans in Haiti.”  Here are the results:

• All Things New came in 15th out of over 600 projects!
• We earned about $2,000 in crowdfunding + event donations.
• We spoke with thousands of people about what we are doing and passed out a lot of information about All Things New.
• We got on the 5:30 and 11:00 news here in Jacksonville and got the word out to even more people.

We also learned a lot about One Spark and we plan on taking part in the event again next year.  We did some wonderful things this year and there are some things that we can change for next year to try to improve our standing.  If we come in first place, we earn an extra $10,000 plus some added notoriety for winning.  

One Spark can and did help All Things New in many ways, and we will take part in it again next year, so go ahead and start making plans to come and support us again in 2015.  We need a lot more help next year.  The people who helped us this year were amazing, and did such a wonderful job of letting people in Jacksonville know about All Things New.