Dear Blog, Sorry for not posting for a while. I’ve been a wee bit busy! When I was explaining to Elijah about the campaign, talking about the launch, he said, “What, you’re going to put it in a cannon and fire it?” and laughed at his own joke – I love how he makes connections with words.

Well, it’s been quite a week, to say the least! After a weekend of preparation for the launch, including finishing off the video and tweaking the Kickstarter story page, we launched on Monday. Everything went as planned – except for only getting 4 hours of sleep. Then after dropping the kids off at school, I hit the ‘Launch Campaign’ button with a mixture of excitement and nervousness.

Before telling you how it went, 2 things: firstly, please follow our blog if you want to receive notifications about when a new blog appears; secondly, please sign up for our Email News-e-Letter at the top (benefits include entry into free book draws, communication tips, ideas, plans, secret stuff, the works!) We keep your email private, but you can always make up a new Gmail email just for this.

The lucky winner of the Launch prize draw was Instagramer @lonleavittbarker – congratulations! After our random draw (which I put on IG stories) we announced ‘lonl’ had won. I received permission to give the account name and it made my day to hear that her son’s school ‘can’t wait to have these books to share with and teach the children.’ Perfect! Well done! We now have a second draw for 25 books to go to a school when we hit $5,000. More about that on our email News-e-Letter.

Friends and family came to the party and soon the backer numbers and the amounts were rising. It was very exciting to see the funding go past 50% and I think we got to just over 60% by bedtime.

The next day saw us reach 100%, with a BIRTHDAY BANANA backer ($300) securing our initial goal of $1000. We had become a successful Kickstarter campaign. A little bit strategic as I set the initial goal low, but a win nonetheless for two reasons:

Firstly, we are now on record as having had a successful fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. That’s newsworthy – a positive news story – which I was quick to share with media organisations and social media. Anyone browsing Kickstarter will see the green funding bar, showing that we are fully funded, so that is like a tick of approval which may lead to more backers getting on board.

Secondly, once you hit your target, the money is secure. Had I put $10,000 on it and we had pledges worth $9,500, we would receive nothing and we would waste all that effort. Doing it this way we have the guarantee of receiving every dollar raised past $1,000. This was always a mission-based campaign, with the funds being used to accelerate the rollout of the planned book series. Otherwise we would just have to wait until we had sufficient online sales to do the next book.

As I write this we are sitting $3 shy of $1,500 – so that’s an average of $500 a day. Cost of books and postage comes to around $1000 for those pledges, so we have $500 contribution towards our illustration costs and stickers. At this stage, that makes me very happy, but I’m not resting on any banana leaf laurels, that’s for sure.

I distributed an A4 flyer with Elijah’s cards to his school, dentist, doctor, occupational therapist and Scouts. I had them printed on quality card, so they look the part. I think I will take it to some local libraries as well.

I am still waiting to hear about TV – staying positive that something will come through! Otherwise, if you know an organisation which could help promote, please let me know. I can email the above flyer (I will add one to the next News-e-Letter) so you can distribute if you wish to.

Well, that’s the blog task ticked off for today! On with the next 30 tasks! Luckily I have taken a week off work to concentrate on this campaign, as there has been such a lot to do. It’s just too hard to do it all in the spare time a normal week gives me at night.

If you think you would like to pledge an amount, either as a donation amount or to receive a reward of some sort (the first book pledge is $20, or 2 for $30, 5 for $50 and 15 for $100) please click here now so you don’t have another thing to remember to do! Have a great day and enjoy the weekend! Best wishes and thanks for your support! Rob