My brother Zach (age 12) sent out emails recently to 4 newspapers telling them about how my brother and I (age 9) are raising money to provide long-lasting water filters to hundreds of poor families in Indian villages. We’re currently running a fundraising contest between the basketball fans of Duke University and the University of North Carolina.
A. OUR EXPECTATIONS – PEOPLE WOULD BE GOOD
This is what we were hoping would happen when Zach sent out his 4 emails to newspapers:
We hoped 1 out of the 4 newspapers would take the time to write an article about this effort:
From there, we hoped a couple people reading the story would take time out of their busy days to donate some money to our project.
B. WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED – PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AWESOME!
Instead, because people are awesome, this is what happened…
3 out of the 4 newspapers we sent an email to responded to us within 48 hours. Two of them, the Duke Chronicle (the Duke student newspaper) and the Herald Sun (from Durham), already published their articles:
So, clearly, newspaper people are awesome. They’re helping us spread the word about a good cause.
And then awesomeness from “normal people” kicked in.
People started sharing the news on Facebook (71 shares!), Twitter (17 Tweets plus more than 50 retweets!), and on Google Plus.
People on Twitter said some really supportive things about the fund-raising contest we’re running right now between fans of Duke basketball and University of North Carolina basketball (which is running until the second game is over on March 9th). Some noteworthy tweets included these:
Jason deBruyn is awesome…
Mark Richard Gannott is both awesome and amazingly supportive (even if his words of encouragement are probably an exaggeration here)…
My brother Zach is a big UNC fan. It was fun for me to see this tweet from @DukeBasketball which proves fans of Duke as classy as Coach K.
When Zach saw how many Twitter followers @dukebasketball has, even Zach had to reluctantly admit that @dukebasketball is awesome. And I mentioned that he’s a UNC fan? Yeah. That’s how awesome you people are. You’re making my brother realize that “the enemy” is awesome.
All this attention led more people than we thought to open up their wallets and donate. A lot of people. $700 raised within a couple days! I’ll say it again: people are AAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!
C. MIND-BLOWINGLY-AWESOME AWESOMENESS
As if all of that awesomeness described above wasn’t enough, we got this email from Matt, a student at Duke three days ago. He’s volunteered to help raise money from Duke students!
Matt, you, sir, are the awesomest of the awesome.
D. THANK YOU!!!!!
Zach and I at Aztech Labs thank all of you for your awesomeness!
These kids (living in a town that is about to receive 100 water filters) thank you for your awesomeness!
These guys (from the same town) thank you for your awesomeness!
And these guys (from the same town) thank you for your awesomeness!
Also from the same town, these school kids from a school that manages to have the highest test scores within 100 miles even though 3 out of 4 kids there go to school barefoot, thank you for your awesomeness!
Thank you for your overwhelming support!
One final time… Thank you! You people are AWESOME!!!
Aidan Hunter, age 9 (with some help from my dad)
February 17, 2013
From our temporary home for a few months: Bangalore, India