Guest Griller night canceled

Uh, oh. I'm in trouble, aren't I? I haven't been good about updating this blog for the past few weeks so I'll try to provide some worthy updates over the course of the next few posts.

When I left you last, I was planning on having a guest griller night at a nearby BD's Mongolian 

Grill. The plan was to sell tickets to friends and family with a certain number of dollars over the cost of what BD's charged for the meals. This was a new fund raising method from previous years, whereby the group doing the fund raising instead would get the tips from the tip jar at the grill counter. This year's method proved to be a hard sell. I was able to get a decent commitment from friends and family who hadn't donated yet (approximately 13-15), but the other team mates of mine who were doing it with me could not for the life of them sell tickets for various reasons.

Firstly, BD's prices are not cheap to begin with, so adding extra cost on top of their base prices makes it harder for people to justify the expense, even if it's for a good meal and the extra money goes to a good cause. As a contrast, several other restaurants in the area simply have you give away vouchers whereby a certain percent of that night's profits (usually 20%) go to the cause (i.e. it comes out of the normal price, not added to the price, of the meals). 

Secondly, most of the people they were approaching would prefer to give a direct donation so as to be able to include it with their itemized deductions in their taxes. 

Thirdly, many of the people they had approached had already donated in that manner. 

And lastly, my team mates participating in the event are pretty well spread out and didn't know many people near the actual restaurant who might be interested in buying tickets.

In the end, because of the poor overall ticket sales, we decided it was going to be too much work to justify the effort so we canceled the event to focus our efforts on other fund raising opportunities.

In retrospect, I think the guest griller night would be appropriate for a local group near the restaurant (e.g. church, campus group, parents of school groups, etc.) who's sole fund raising efforts were targeted at others in the area and no other methods were planned (such as direct letters asking for donations). But for our situation, BD's new fund raising model just didn't work out well.

Thank you to all of you who said they'd make it out to support me. I'm truly fortunate to have friends and family as generous as you.