At about this point during the New Year’s holiday many are relaxing with their friends and family, recovering from hangovers after a night of partying, making resolutions and setting goals that will guide them, hopefully, for the rest of the year.  While I’m not hanging out with family or friends and therefore not having to recover from a hangover, I am focused, immediately, on a single goal.  That goal is to make January 2nd the best day possible for my beautiful wife, Laura.

This time last year I was busy typing away a similar post where I explain why this is such a hard goal to accomplish:

Every year Laura hates her birthday because it falls on the day AFTER one of the biggest party days of the year.  That sucks.  She turned 21 the day AFTER New Years.  Our friends are always still hung over and/or tired the day after. No one ever wants to do anything and it usually ends up making her sad.

This year saw a lot of change for us and tons of memorable experiences.  At the end of January we relocated to Boston so that I could launch New Marketing Labs along with Chris Brogan and Colin Browning.  This was hard on Laura because it meant that she had to move the farthest away she has ever been from family and friends.  She had to find a new job and get settled in a big city.  While she was trying to get settled in Boston, she was also right in the middle of planning our wedding which required weekend field trips all over the place including many visits to New York and Connecticut.  Either one of those events would be stressful enough to make someone lose their mind.

Usually through change like that, you would have your significant other to help you get through it.  But, unfortunately, Laura spent a lot of that time, and throughout the rest of 2009, having to deal with all of this by herself.  Sure, I was there for her but 2009 saw a sharp spike in my travel which caused me to be away from her a lot.  In previous years I’ve only had to travel a few times throughout the year, even though during those times they were generally long trips to the Philippines.  This year, though, had me traveling a few times per month adding up to around 50 times for the year.  When I was home, I was extremely focused on making New Marketing Labs and my steakhouse, Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, successes.  In a forever mode of playing catch up, we didn’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time together.  Don’t get me wrong, we have many lifelong memories from 2009 like sailing around the British Virgin Islands, honeymooning in St. Maarten, celebrating the 4th of July in Boston, and going to both Red Sox and Celtics games.

All in all, 2009 was a year of a lot of adjustments for us, most of them amazing changes.  For those changes that weren’t so much fun, I’m forever indebted to Laura.

I am so fortunate to be married to such a wonderful person.  She is incredibly beautiful, smart, loving, understanding and everything I ever dreamed of.  Every day I think I’m going to wake up from that dream.  That is why, last year I asked YOU for a favor:

My goal today is to get as many people as possible to wish her a Happy Birthday in the comments below.  Do you think we think we can get 25 people to wish her Happy Birthday? 50? 100 or more?

Since I had published last year’s post right at midnight, by the time I wished her Happy Birthday, she had about 25 people joining me.  In total, there were 167 comments left last year and she was floored by the response.

So, I want to run this experiment again this year but I want to add a twist to it.  Not only do I want to see if we can beat the 167 wonderful birthday wishes that Laura received last year, I want to see if we can do a little good on her behalf as well.  One of Laura’s favorite charities is the Jimmy Fund.  The Jimmy Fund supports “the fight against cancer in children and adults at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, helping to raise the chances of survival for cancer patients around the world.”

Do you think we could raise $1,000 to help the Jimmy Fund?  I think we can.  In fact, I think we can raise more than that but let’s shoot for $1,000.

If you could spare the cost of a coffee or two for Laura’s birthday to help these children, I would be extremely grateful and I know Laura will be too.

Thanks for all that you do…

A little over a week ago I convinced Chris Brogan to shave his head for charity.  We decided that we wanted to donate laptops to kids (not OLPC because Chris donated to them last year).  To date we have raised $6,400 from nearly 150 contributors (thank you!).  But, we’re still under our goal of $10,000 by May 24th.  So, I’m asking that you give up just a couple lattes to help some kids that need these laptops way more than any of us need to visit a coffee shop a couple days this week.

So far we’ve had corporate donations from:

Citrix Online (disclosure: client)

Radian6 (disclosure: conference sponsor)

AMD

Crocs (with 200+ pairs of shoes)

…if you’re interested a corporate donation, please let me know and I’ll be in touch.

As Chris recently asked: Can you help us prove that social media can help causes like this?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

[viddler id=5a27de2d&w=437&h=370]

You can follow some of the fun from Twitter using the hashtag #baldbrogan and check out what Chris Brogan had to say over about shaving his head for charity here.

Video of the head shaving and photos to follow soon…

Current Corporate Sponsors

Citrix Online (also a client)

Radian6 (also a conference sponsor)

AMD

Crocs (donating 200+ pairs of shoes)

….this will stay updated as we get more corporate sponsors

Can you spare the price of value meal from McDonald’s to help out underprivileged families?

Thank you to all of you who have already contributed and continue to contribute.  Chris Brogan and I both truly appreciate and we know that the families in need will as well.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Yesterday I was contacted by Lee Dryburgh, organizer of the eComms Conference.  eComms is a conference about emerging communications focusing on the telecom industry.  Lee told me that he was running a social media experiment of donating $0.50 to Shelter Network, a Bay Area-based charitable organization, for every email subscriber he received for the eComms mailing list.

He explains on a post about this experiment that he wanted to grow his email subscriber list.  Instead of purchasing a list and then trying to get opt-in subscribers from that list, Lee thought he would try to raise money for a charitable organization at the same time.  He has tried enlisting the help of people he calls “social media gurus” to help him spread the word.  The sign-up page states that are approximately 4 updates per month so if you can deal with that, then it’s worth it to sign up and let Lee contribute to Shelter Network on your behalf.  Never heard of Shelter Network?  Check out this video that I found (I can’t embed the video as the feature has been disabled).

I think this is an interesting model of increasing your email subscriber list.  Instead of paying for a list or growing it organically which can take a long time, offer to donate to a charitable organization in exchange for every subscriber you get.

I think there are definitely some flaws to this model though.  When you’re growing your list you want people to sign up who are interested in receiving the updates that you send.  The sheer number of subscribers doesn’t help if you can’t leverage that group to do more in the future.  Even if you aren’t trying to leverage your subscribers, it does no good if they sign up then immediately unsubscribe or mark the email as junk/spam.

But, I do appreciate what Lee is trying to do and think it is a great idea.  I am fascinated at these micro-funding concepts and will be exploring them more throughout 2009.

What are your thoughts on this model of growing your subscriber list?  If you think it’s interesting and you want to do a little bit of good for free, head over the to the sign-up page.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo by: korafotomorgana