For those of you that don't know, I'm the Vice Chair of my county party, which is the Manistee County Democratic Party, and last week my party found ourselves in a bit of a quandary.
We wanted to get some slate cards printed up, add to our phonebanking operation, rent was due... and we didn't have the money in treasury to accomplish all three, and keeping our earlier commitment to helping our local candidate's campaigns financially was completely out of the question. We could either pay the rent, get some slates printed, or get some more phones... but we didn't have the money to do all of the above, and I really wanted to do "all of the above".
When you're worrying about how you're going to pay rent and get a measly 2,000 slatecards printed up; you're definitely not in any kind of position to be writing checks to anyone else. So we had thought the only way we'd be able to help our local candidates was by knocking doors with them, making some phone calls, and giving them our best wishes... Not at all what we'd wanted, but it was looking like that was the best we were going to be able to do...
That is until the fantastic members of Daily Kos came to our rescue!
I had all these things I wanted to do, but we're a county that has been hit pretty badly during Michigan's economic downturn, and our well of regular donors had pretty much run dry... Simply put, a lot of us are broke, and those us that aren't need to save whatever we can for the upcoming winter's high heating costs. Northern Michigan winters are pretty damned cold and being able to pay the heating bill is a necessity.
So I kind of panicked, and figured I'd try posting a diary on Daily Kos to see if we could raise the $1,000 we needed to get our slatecards printed, and get a few more phones to expand our phonebanking operation; thinking I'd be really, REALLY pleased if we managed to get even the couple of hundred dollars we needed to get the slatecards printed...
Well as it turns out, thanks to some very generous Kossacks my fundraiser for the Manistee County Democratic Party raised $1,745.57!!!
With that money we were able to pay our rent, get 5,000 slatecards printed by a Union printer (YAY!) to send out with our volunteers, get some more phones for our phonebanking operations, AND we even had enough left over to run some radio and print ads for our local candidates!!! (Thankfully advertising is cheap here!)
If you want to see what our slatecard looks like that you helped purchase, I've uploaded the original file here on our party website. Let me know what you think?
I'd just like to thank all of you who helped us out in our time of need, and I'd like to send an extra special thanks to BlueInKansas and Kevvboy for giving up their diaries for the day to help a tiny little county party in Northern Michigan.
Once again....
Here's a thank you from our Register of Deeds candidate Kendra Rohdy, and our County Clerk candidate Mindy Sedelmaier...
And here is some bonus eye candy...
My newest supercool pumpkin:
Our boy Fergus' newest t-shirt:
And this one is of Fergus protecting the Halloween candy we'll pass out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween night:
(If you're ever wondered what 225 full sized candy bars in a great big Halloween bucket looked like, well now you know!)
I just can't thank all of you who helped us meet and exceed our fundraising goal enough, so I guess I'll just repeat myself again...
THANK YOU DAILY KOS!!!