216 JUST GIVE IT A SHOT...

I received a phone call yesterday from a lovely gentleman called Steve Fowler at New Start, the charity we will be raising money for on the trip. He apologised for no one ringing back after I left a message recently. It turns out that the Fundraising Manager has left, and their replacement doesn't start until early May.

Not a problem, really, as we haven't started our push for donations, but it was good to know they are still operating and want us to back them.

I explained what we were doing, the daft idea of driving 2,200 miles in cars designed to complete the school run and pop to the local retail park and he was impressed and bemused in equal measure! That is kind of the reaction we are going for, I think!

He mentioned that the new fundraiser would be in touch to help promote our trip on their socials to see if they can boost the total. He also suggested that once we complete the rally, he can come over and take a picture with a big cheque. I assume he is hoping we will raise thousands...to be fair, so are we.

He confirmed that they use JustGiving as their collection mechanism, and the new member of staff will ping over the correct details - we don't want our hard-earned cash being misdirected to some other charity.

This got me thinking about adding a dedicated donation page to the site, but I was struggling for space.

I made the executive decision to swap the DRIVERS page for a JUSTGIVING one. I'm not sure anyone ever really wanted their face plastered all over the internet anyway - I realise 'all over' is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence by the way.  

It took me a while to remember how the hell I had added sections to the website, but I got there in the end. DRIVERS changed to JUSTGIVING and moved to the end of the section list. I then spent an hour or so writing the blurb on the page, which was a challenge to be honest, as it is a really important page on the site and I was slightly hungover doing it!

I drafted something and sent the link to the others so they could review and offer suggestions. Rachel got back and confirmed that she knew it would be good, but she hadn't actually read it (she had a good excuse, she was sitting in a sun-drenched piazza in Rome, eating seafood and quaffing drinks - I'm not jealous, you're jealous!!!)

I'll wait for feedback from the guys and continue to tinker with the site. I'm content now that there is some really good content in each section and that it is meaningful (even if half of the BLOG is me going off on one about how inefficient DHL is, the search for the perfect phone case and the great petrol naming conundrum across Europe).