On Sunday 1 April 2012, Lauren, Jo and Clare Mahoney took on a leisurely 40km bike ride near Woodend.

To make things more interesting they decided to raise some awareness for Harry’s Appeal. Harry’s story is similar to that of their late cousin Jarrod and the girls wanted to share some love with Harry and also pay tribute to their memories of Jarrod.

The girls were even brave enough to invite donors to make suggestions for a costume theme for them! They were happy to “essentially trade some public humiliation for $$”. You’ve just gotta love that!

In the end, Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf in Granny’s clothing and the Woodcutter took to the streets, had some fun, no doubt got some blisters here and there and raised just over $1,000 for Harry!

Great job girls! We all think you’re fab and wish the world was sprinkled with so many more sister acts just like yours – it would truly be a better place.

We recently received a very welcome $500 towards Harry’s Appeal from a couple who would prefer to remain anonymous but who would like to share this thought with you…

We just sold our house and it went for a bit more than we expected, so we decided to pass on some money to an IGAB appeal for a family that needs the money much more than we do. I’d encourage anyone out there to give something if possible. I can guarantee it will make you feel good.

They’d read about Harry’s Appeal in the local paper and had kept the article until their home sold in the hope that they could then do something special for him – and they sure did – nice huh?

Last week Harry’s Appeal moved into Phase 2 and one of our regular supporters came up with a great idea to keep the funds rolling in for Harry until his appeal is finished – and it’s something we could do for any children in the future who have an appeal that takes longer than 6 weeks to complete.

Basically, the idea is:

What if Harry had a team of supporters amidst the IGAB community? A group of people continuing to contribute to his appeal until the target is reached. Harry’s Team.

The team would continue to support Harry’s Appeal in any way that they could – donating a few bucks each week, encouraging friends to support Harry, hosting one of our collection boxes in their business, perhaps even holding a simple fundraising event like a morning tea – all in support of Harry.

We really loved this idea (thank you Claire) and if you do too please drop me a line. Claire can’t be Harry’s Team all on her own so we need a few others to hop on board too.

Harry lives in Torquay VIC so perhaps some members from that area might like to take up the challenge?

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.