Phil801 – Geek Blog

The Serenity Foundation’s first National Bloggers Blood Drive was a big, fun success!  We collected 23 units of blood which, by the numbers from ARUP, calculates to saving 69 lives – not bad for a quickly organized event! 

 I’ve uploaded the photos I took of several donors, they’re available on my Flickr Feed here.

Twelve Horses hosted the event for us and provided food and drinks (unfortunately we found out that RockStars are a no-no after you’ve donated blood – they bought a bunch of them for us and we couldn’t drink them!) they also let us have Rock Band setup so everyone could play during the 5 hours the blood drive was going on.  HUGE thanks to Twelve Horses!  If you need internet marketing done, drop them a line!

We had The Serenity Foundation’s mascot on hand for the whole blood drive, she had a lot of fun meeting everyone!

I’m feeling particularly drained from donating, so instead of reporting on the whole day, I’m going to just tell my story.  Check out the link to my Flickr feed for more pictures of donors.

This was the first time I’ve donated blood since I was a teenager.  I decided to organize the blood drive after my daughter, Serenity, received multiple life-saving blood transfusions while being treated for Leukemia.  As much as I hated doing it, I’m really glad that I was able to and I’m extremely grateful for all those that donate blood – both those that did today (many for the first time) and those that have donated in the past. 

I was really freaked out today about the whole donating thing, literally scared senseless about getting poked with a needle.  It’s amazing how such a tiny thing can cause such discomfort before it’s even inserted!  I put off donating until pretty much the last minute and it was with great trepidation that I filled out the forms and sat down.  Fortunately, Brad Baldwin came in to donate for his first time and I used his bravery to motivate me to get on with it.  Charlie Oliver also came in and became my “blood brother” as we were stuck and drained at pretty much the same time.  Here’s how freaked out I was (click the picture for a bigger image):

(and yes, I’m wearing a Captain Hammer shirt from Dr. Horrible!) Even once the needle was in, it was still a pretty intense time for me. 

So, for all those of you who thought I was tough or whatever, there’s proof that I’m a big sissy!  And for those of you who have told me that you’re too squemmish for needles/donating – hey, I did it and so can you!

Our next Blood Drive will be in early October (I’ll be announcing a date at the end of this week).  This time we only had Salt Lake going on, next time in Utah we’re planning on having Ogden, Salt Lake and Provo all going at the same time and hopefully Seattle, Phoenix, San Francisco, New York and many other cities all going at the same time.  If we managed to save 69 lives this time, just think how many lives we’ll be able to save if you help us spread the word!  If you have already installed the widget on your blog, please leave it there, the banner will update with the next date as soon as we have it set – if you don’t have it installed yet, please consider installing it!

Blogging for good and saving lives, quite a concept!

#TSFBlood

I’m really excited about this and I think it’s going to be REALLY cool! 

July 30th will be the first quarterly National Bloggers Blood Drive, this is a new project we’re organizing at The Serenity Foundation. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working on organizing a new twist on blood drives and blogger/twitter meetups.  It turns out that someone else recently did something similar in Austin, TX.  Michelle Greer just hosted a blood drive Tweetup in honor of her sister who has ALL (the same Leukemia that Serenity has).  They had a great response and turnout and I hope that we will as well! 

The big idea here is to make this a national, or even global, effort.  Bloggers around the world unite to save lives!  We’ve already had people volunteer to host local blood drives in 2 other locations: KirstenP wants to host one in Seattle and Michele is working to put one together in Chandler, AZ!  If you’re in either of those locations and want to help out, I’ll connect you with Kirsten and Michele.  If you would like to put one together in your location, let me know and we’ll help you with organization as much as we can. 

The goal is to use social networking, web 2.0 and all these new shiny things to really make a difference!  We’ll post stats about how much blood we collectively donated in one afternoon – and how many lives that blood will be able to save.  During the blood drive people will hopefully be blogging and tweeting the experience, sharing photos of the different locations, registering with Takes All Types, etc.  We should be able to make donating blood into a fun, cool, social experience.

Here’s the key to making this all work – every tweet, blog post, digg entry, stumble review, etc needs to be tagged with a common id.  I’ll be setting up aggregators that will scour the social web looking for entries that are tagged exactly like this: #tsfblood 

TSF is for The Serenity Foundation which is the new legacy project for Serenity.  The aggregators will be set up on the Serenity foundation’s website which is still being built but is at: http://www.TheSerenityFoundation.org once the site is finished all the updates and info about the blood drive and other projects will come from there. 

So that’s all the background info, here’s the info about the Utah drive. 

 July 30th, 2008 from 3pm to 8pm MST at Twelve Horses, 13961 Minuteman Dr. Suite 125.  We’re very grateful to 12 Horses for allowing us to use their offices and their wifi.

ARUP has some pretty cool stuff going on!  Everyone who donates blood at the Utah location (twelve horses) will be entered into two raffles – one is a raffle to win a car (2 year lease free) from Ken Garff Mitsubishi, this raffle goes on all summer and the winner will be drawn after September 12th.  The other raffle is for a $50 gas card at Maverick and will be just for our event – one of the people who donate with us will win the card!  In addition to that we’ll be serving food and watching movies during the event.  If you or your company are interested in sponsoring food purchases, please let me know and we’ll make sure you get plenty of coverage at the drive. 

And here’s the call to action:

Help spread the word!  Please Digg, Stumble, ReTweet and Reddit this post, invite all your friends to the Facebook event page, blog about it, post the plug-in or banner ad where-ever you can, install the soon to come facebook app or just mark your calendar and be a participant!  We should be able to get a great turnout and make a huge dent in the current blood shortage - and make a big difference in a lot of people’s lives!

Click here for all the info including the WordPress Plugin and banner ads for the event.

#TSFBlood

This is Day 39 of my baby, Serenity, being diagnosed with and treated for Leukemia.  Day 37 is here. 

Serenity’s life was saved because people donated blood.  I have a lot of guilt about that – I have MAJOR needle-phobia and have always avoided blood donation.  But as I watched Serenity bravely face getting poked by needles over and over and over again (at one point, before she got her port, she had bandages on both her hands and arms and they were going to access her through her foot) I knew that was going to change forever.  As the next week went by and she received several life-saving bags of blood and platelets, I knew that I was going to become a blood donor for life – and that I would advocate and encourage others to do so as well.

And so it begins – the quarterly Serenity Foundation Blood Drive.  My good friend, Rachel Strate, is one of my heroes – she is an avid platelet and blood donor – and I’m counting on her and others to help put all this together.  I’ve talked to ARUP (our local blood center) and there are some rules to doing a blood drive, one of them is that I have to get 35 people to commit to donating blood at the drive.  Another is getting a location, but I can take care of that one.  I’m thinking somewhere around Draper or Thanksgiving Point.  We’ll do it towards the end of July and I’ll be announcing a date in the next couple days.  I’d like to make this a Geek Dinner/Tweetup type of event with blood donating, blogging, tweeting and eating going on.

I’d also really like to make this more than a local thing.  If you’re reading this and you would like to help out and organize a local blood drive to coincide with ours, PLEASE DO!  Let me know and I’ll try to help publicize it.  I think it would be a LOT of fun to have multiple blood drives going on all over the country at the same time and for us to all be blogging and tweeting pictures and updates at the same time! 

This post is really a notification and call for volunteers.  If you are willing to donate blood with us, please let me know.  If you’re willing to organize a local drive, please let me know.  We’ll get customized banners like the one above made for your drive and have ones that everyone can put on their blog if they want. 

Blood is absolutely critical to saving little lives like that of my daughter and so many others.  Every one of you have blood and thus the capacity to help save those lives.  Please, Please join us in providing the elixir of life!

As a side note, I know that blood drives are nothing new and that many of you may already give blood regularly.  I also know that according to ARUP, only 4% of those who are able to actually donate blood.  This is a call to action for the other 96% – join me in becoming a willing donor!

The story of Serenity’s battle with Leukemia begins here.

This is Day 37 of my baby, Serenity being diagnosed with and treated for Leukemia.  Day 36 is here.

K, I admit that I’m probably, maybe a teeny little bit biased here – but I think these are super cute pictures of Serenity (probably not quite as cute as your kid though ).  I’m calling this photo shoot (we took about 300 pictures) a “Celebration in Baldness” and these are my favorite shots.  We’re trying to select one to be her new banner glamour shot on her website, we’ve narrowed it down to these and want to know – what do YOU think?  Please let us know in the comments which of the pictures you think are the best “poster child” shot!  Thanks! (each photo is linked to a larger version)  You can view all the photos on Serenity’s new flickr feed here.

Picture 1:

Picture 2:

Picture 3:

Picture 4:

Picture 5:

Don’t forget to vote in the comments, and please share this post if you’re so inclined, we’d love to get tons of feedback!

The story of Serenity’s battle with Leukemia begins here.

UPDATE: Day 39 is here.